Amarillo College (AC), in collaboration with Pantex, hosted a “How to respond to a Mass Fatality Incident” Conference on Friday, held in the college’s West Campus Building A.
According to a news release,a mass fatality event is described as an event when the number of deaths caused either by force of nature, accident or terror, exceeds local authorities’ ability to handle the situation, and when assistance from outside a given jurisdiction is necessitated.
AC stated the goal of this conference is to teach participants the basics of mass fatality response while providing them with opportunities to brainstorm collaborative solutions to simulated emergencies.
“In Amarillo, we are kind of a community where we aren’t exactly close to anyone, so we are very self sufficient. We are really interdependent on each other to help one another in these types of events, and it is very important that we have these moments for all these different organizations to come together and talk about these things to help further those ‘what if’ planning processes, so in the event of one of these emergencies, we aren’t playing catchup,” Jeff Wallick, Director of Safety and Environmental Technology at AC, said.