Posted By Kristabella on October 27, 2009
Last week in an email, Metalia mentioned that her place of work was having a fire drill. And the powers that be at her work wanted to make it as “real as possible” and wanted some people to volunteer to be the victims and get carried out on a stretcher or something.
We laughed about it because 1) I had a fire drill at work last week too. It was 15 minutes later than they said it would be, just to properly make us wet our pants when hearing the alarm and 2) Hahahaha! Who is so hard core that they get real victims?
And then it hit me like a two-by-four to the face, OH MY GOD! WE DID THAT AT THE 49ERS!
So after 9/11, one of the big concerns was the security of stadiums and arenas, especially outdoor stadiums that are just a hop, skip and a jump from a major international airport, like Candlestick Park is. We had to learn the proper evacuation routes and how to make sure everyone got out safely.
But our stadium operations people, they took it to a whole other level. They wanted to know how we would react in a REAL SITUATION! So what did they do? They staged a plane crash. No, really.
On a Saturday afternoon, either on the bye week or in the offseason, we got like 1,000 volunteers to come to the stadium and be victims. We had a part of a toy plane, CRASHED, on the field. But not really on the field because then that would ruin the grass for the football playing. Because I’m sure a pilot directing a plane to crash into the stadium would have THAT much common courtesy! THINK OF THE TURF!
(I Googled it and even found an article about it. But no photos, sadly. You would all laugh at the size of this “plane”. When I emailed my friend Cindy last week, when thinking about this, she said “that plane was a joke. If it had landed on the field during the game, we could have had the cheerleaders carry it off and continue playing.”)
Anyway, in addition to having the volunteers be victims, we also had professional make-up artists there. You see, it wasn’t just training for stadium employees, it was also training for SFPD, the fire department and the EMTs. They had to go into crisis mode and treat the worst wounded and put lipstick on the foreheads of the dead people!
Oh wait, that was the movie Pearl Harbor.
Since I was in public relations, we just worked in the press box. So before taking our “positions” we toured the whole stadium to see what was going on. I knew when I saw someone who had make-up done to look like they were BLEEDING FROM THEIR EYES, that we had taken this exercise a weeeee bit far.
In hindsight, it was pretty impressive and probably served as a good training exercise for the emergency personnel. I mean, as a fireman or EMT, you don’t really get a lot of training on mass casualties, minus watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy.
My boss didn’t appreciate it, but I made sure it was clear that if this were in fact a real emergency, I was not paid enough to make sure that beat writers and columnists and other annoying media people got out safely. You know for a fact had it been a real emergency, I would be pushing past the old lady with the walker down the ramps and out to my car and zooming down the 101 freeway before anyone could even realize I was gone. This will make no sense to anyone reading, but there was no way I was going to save Ira Miller’s ass before my own.
I should change my tagline – Kristabella: Always Keeping It Klassy
Category: Forty Whiners |
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