Video: Starkville Mock Disaster Drill

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STARKVILLE, Miss. – (WCBI) The Southwire Building in Starkville took a direct hit from a tornado Thursday morning. Well not really, it was just a mock drill involving Starkville and Oktibbeha County emergency responders, MSU, and other state agencies.

No one wants to be impacted by a major disaster, but if the unthinkable happens, its good to be prepared. In a mock drill scenario, Southwire employees are giving aid to victims of a devastation.

“We go through these drills, we actually have drills quarterly where our employees go through. Our alarm system go off, where they actually take shelter and or either evacuate the building according to what the situation is,” said Chris McBrayer, SGE Southwire.

In the scenario, at least four workers at the Starkville plant are seriously injured. Luckily there are 45 first responders on staff at the facility at all times.

“We had some severe head trauma, we had lacerations multiple lacerations. We had a broken leg, and we also had an arm amputee,” said McBrayer.

“Yeah, I had a beam fell on my leg. A beam, steel beam. R. H. Brown “Think you will live?” Moore I hope so,” said Larry Moore, Mock Tornado Victim.

“Being in this training is great. You know you just don’t have the responsibility here, you know you also can take this home and its a great thing to have and Southwire put a lot of effort into their employees to make sure that we are equipped with the training,” said Jamie Sharp, Southwire First responder.

A command center is set up. Sort of a brain of operations. Its at  the Oktibbeha County School District’s building on Main Street.”

“That is pretty much the local point of contact for all of the responding agencies. Its where all of the information is received and disseminated. The various agencies work out of this as far as law enforcement, medical, fire, we are also looking at damage assessment people,” said Jim Britt, EMA Director.

Just in case there is such a disaster, and from past experience we know that could happen, this staged drill is improving communication, triage, and quick transfer of the injured.

“This is actually an ongoing exercise we started back in March with a table top to kind of test some of the functionality of it and today its given us a chance to fine tune that. And be better prepared to respond,” said Britt.

Following Thursdays drill controllers, evaluators, and participants attended a briefing. They discussed improvements on future disaster responses and protocol.