By KARIN CROMPTON
Day Staff Writer, Lyme/Old Lyme
Published on 10/24/2004
Lyme— The regional school district conducted massive rehearsal Friday morning, shuttling 900 students from Old Lyme north to Lyme Consolidated School in a mock evacuation.
About 300 students who attend Lyme Consolidated were shuffled to various classrooms in the building to make room for the influx.
School and town officials, as well as representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said it was one of few such drills in the country.
The drill was to practice evacuations that could be needed for a variety of reasons: natural hazards such as weather events; a loss of power; emergency situations within the building, such as a boiler failure; an incident with a hazardous materials spill; or a nuclear emergency.
The evacuation would essentially be the same regardless of the cause, said David Roberge, fire marshal in Lyme and Old Lyme.
At 8:45 a.m., Roberge and Lee Watkins, the director of emergency management in Lyme, staged a phone call about a pending emergency in which they agreed to relocate the students. They contacted Superintendent of Schools David Klein, who called for the evacuation.
Some staff headed to Lyme to set up parent pick-up stations.
Others herded students onto buses that left for Lyme in shifts, staggering their arrival at Lyme Consolidated so as not to back up traffic on Route 156.
Lyme fire police and fire department personnel, along with ambulance crews, directed traffic from the road onto a field used for a parking lot at the side of the school.
Parents went to the library, where they showed identification and then were given color-coded cards indicating their children's schools.
A corresponding map of the school highlighted the whereabouts of students.
Parents checked in and their children were sent over for the mock hand-off. They said hello and returned to their classes.
Inside the classrooms, gymnasium, cafeteria and library, students lined up for a practice run at receiving potassium iodide pills. Those whose parents had given permission for them to take the pill had their hands stamped green.
Others had their hands stamped red, indicating they had not taken the pill.
Representatives from FEMA observed the drill, not to evaluate, but rather to offer pointers.
At a debriefing at the Hamburg Fire Station after the drill, Bob Poole of FEMA commended the district and towns for their organization.
He and another FEMA representative suggested having written procedures in place and running the drill with fewer emergency personnel – who, they said, would be on the scene of an actual emergency instead of at the school.