On-track training

NFPA Journal, May/Jun 2000 by Reese, Shelly

Using props, such as passenger car windows, airbrake hoses, and passenger cars donated by Amtrak, the institute instructs students in tactics for effectively handling a passenger train emergency. Responders are put through the paces for everything from brush fires that require them to access railroad property to simulating a major passenger train catastrophe.

"It's an awareness-building program," says Kozub, whose classes cost slightly more than $300 per person and typically include 24 and 30 emergency responders and another 6 to 10 railroad employees. "They learn to respect the other groups' operation and to be sensitive to what the other group is trying to accomplish."

Firefighters learn that, although they may drive across a set of railroad tracks every day, getting to the site of an emergency with a pump or ladder may not be easy Railroad workers learn about the rescuers' approach to situation management. One rail worker who had previously interacted with firefighters at an accident site told Kozub that, while he thought at the time that rescuers were slow to grasp the situation and react, he understood in retrospect that the incident commander was assessing the entire situation before taking action.

However, the real value of programs like those held by Amtrak and Operation Respond is seen in the field. When a fire broke out on an abandoned footbridge above railroad tracks in New Brunswick, Connecticut, for example, firefighters who had attended an Operation Respond session knew how to interact with the railroad. Communication was so effective that trains were stopped, the fire was extinguished, and rail traffic resumed without delaying a single train or endangering a single firefighter.

"The effectiveness of our training is the kind of thing you wish never had to be measured or put to the test in the real world," Kozub says. "But we live in the real world, and these things happen."

Training does more than help emergency responders contend with physical and logistical challenges of a rail incident. When a New England Central Rail Road maintenance train hit an automobile at a grade crossing in Northfield, Massachusetts, Linda Shedd, a police officer and training officer for the city's rescue squad, said the Amtrak training was a godsend. It not only provided EMTs with vital information about accessing trains and communicating with the railroad, but Shedd says it also helped brace them for what they'd find when they extracted the car's passengers.

"It sounds gruesome, but the photos we'd seen in the training session helped prepare us for what we were going to see," she says. Similarly, Shedd says the EMTs had a better understanding of the psychological toll the accident might have on a train's crew, who would be powerless to avoid the collision. Learning that most railroads provide employees with counseling following a critical incident helped assure her the crew's emotional needs would be met, she says.

Northeast Corridor initiative

As extensive as Amtrak's emergency training efforts may be nationally, they pale in comparison to the training campaign it's launched in the heavily travelled Northeast Corridor, which runs from Boston to Washington D.C. In an effort to familiarize firefighters with its new equipment and prepare them for the high-speed rail service it's introducing this spring, Amtrak invited Operation Respond to help train firefighters on every shift at every department along the route.