Battalion Chief Seth Wells of the City of Santa Maria said a tri-annual disaster drill at the Santa Maria Airport simulated a vehicle striking an aircraft and involved about 40 simulated victims.

"This drill is designed to stress the capabilities of the airport's emergency operations plan," Wells said. He described the exercise as one that requires police and fire participation and an aircraft-based scenario with a set number of victims.

The exercise used the incident command system, Wells said, with an arriving battalion chief setting up an incident structure that assigns roles and coordinates responders. "Their job is to get hands on. So they're going out into the field. They're gonna triage these patients," Wells said, explaining that triage tags designate walking-wounded as green and that yellow and red indicate increasing urgency and a need for hospital transport.

Wells listed participating agencies and organizations that assisted in the drill: Santa Maria Fire Department, Santa Maria Police Department, Santa Barbara County Fire Department, Calstar, AMR and the Red Cross. He said the scale and complexity of a mass-casualty incident require multiagency cooperation and repeated practice.

Wells emphasized keeping exercises current. "If we practice for something that happened 20 years ago, we're not gonna be ready for what happens tomorrow," he said, adding that drills are kept "as current and up to date as we possibly can so that if it does happen, we're more prepared and we can better serve the public for when those incidents happen."