Hundreds take part in mass casualty drill in Downtown Dallas

Hundreds of volunteers helped create a realistic mass casualty drill in Downtown Dallas Sunday morning. Violence wasn’t the focus of the training, instead the exercise focused on how first responders react to injuries and death.

The scenario was a stage collapse inside the Majestic Theater downtown, with hundreds of people inside.

Makeup artists created very real looking wounds on hundreds of volunteers. Those who could walk, were escorted outside and examined.

"They have writing on their shirts that describe what kind of inures there are and what kind of triage they are so they can be transported to the appropriate facilities,” said Tiffany Reid with the Office of Emergency Management.

Based on the writing, first responders assessed wounds and tied colored ribbons on victims to visually identify those who needed medical attention first.

Red represented the most seriously injured followed by yellow and green. 15 people in the scenario wore black ribbons, meaning they were deceased.

"Dallas Fire-rescue and Cedar Hill Fire Rescue are taking those patients down to the busses that are going to transport them to one of 5 area hospitals,” said Reid.

120 victims were transported, 50 of them critical. A mass casualty “bus ambulance” responded from Cedar Hill, which was capable of providing life support measures for up to 16 people

"The main purpose of this drill is to make sure we are working on multi-agency communication, coordination EMS service and delivery as well as patient tracking,” said Jason Evans with Dallas Fire-Rescue. “There are a lot of lessons to be learned from mass casualty exercise like this one but one key point they are focusing on today is the ability to track the many patients that were treated on the scene and then transported to a number of area hospitals.”

More than 800 volunteers and 300 professionals from 25 different agencies took part in the drill.