Am at my destination. Participated in an excellent leadership workshop (which continues today) and didn’t get enough sleep, which is par for the course for New York Hope.

In four more days, I will have done a whole year of daily blogging!

Big Audacious Goal Alert

Eight days till my Big Audacious Goal of blogging every day for a year is realized! The only problem is that, starting tomorrow, I am on the road for my annual disaster training exercise in New York State. (As a reminder, I do casualty simulation for this and another exercise in October.) This means two days in a van in each direction, and a disrupted schedule. If there was any time I could fail, it would be this week.

Photo by Nubia Navarro (nubikini) on Pexels.com

I am probably going to write short blogs those days, because I will likely be writing some of them from the van, and I am the sort who gets carsick if I do too much writing in cars. I will try to keep it interesting enough, though, and write a minimum of “contractual obligation” posts.

Maybe I’ll take pictures. I don’t take pictures often enough. I’ll try not to get gross casualty simulation pictures, though.

Hiatus

Just a heads-up. Starting on Tuesday, I will be reporting in sporadically at best for a week. I will be at my annual remote disaster exercise, New York Hope. Here, I will be doing casualty simulation (moulage) for a few days. This means that I will be applying theater makeup to volunteers to make them look like victims.

The basic injuries are lacerations, burns, impalements, bruises, and breaks. Moulage artists model lacerations and breaks with skin wax, burns and bruises with paints, and impalements with prosthetic plant-ons. There will be a lot of fake blood, which is made with liquid starch and food coloring. Illnesses are faked with cyanotic blue theater makeup, diaper rash cream, and glycerin water for sweat. Moulage is not for the faint of heart.

I will report when I can, but I will likely not be thinking about writing for the next few days. When I am in moulage mode, I am definitely in another world.

What day is it?

I’m on the road outside Erie PA, after a two-day car ride and an intense three day doing moulage. I’m moody and in need of sleep.

Must be Monday.

ENDEX (as they say at the end of a preparedness training exercise)

Another New York Hope in the books; I think the numbers go like this:

Three moulage artists

Ninety distinct moulage applications

Scenarios: Urban search and rescue, rural search and rescue, wilderness search and rescue, cityscape active shooter, swiftwater rescue

Injuries ranging from pneumothorax to head injuries minor and deadly, to impalements, open fractures, burns, intestinal evisceration, scrapes and bruises, and throw in a couple heart attacks and mentally disturbed roles.

Staff members — a surprising number I haven’t counted, but categories are coordinating staff, logistics, lane CEs (who run the scenarios), team CEs (who manage the student teams), safety staff, transportation and moulage.
******

I slept for 12 hours last night. I’m hoping to get some brain cells free to write today as I wait for the train back home — and on the train back home, as I’ll have a lot of free time.

Right back to first day of classes.

Let me know, though, if you want to see more moulage pics.

Moulage!

If you’re wondering what I’m up to …

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Pretty bad bone break, eh?

Just bruises and scrapes.

All while my colleagues back at Northwest Missouri State University are in meetings….

My weekend

Since Thursday, I have been in Oriskany (O-RIS-can-knee) New York, at the New York State Preparedness Training Center, doing moulage on willing victims for training purposes.

I’m in my usual post-event daze, made more intense by working under a professional moulage artist with twenty years experience. I learned how to make my injuries even better, how to work with plaster molds, latex and gelatin to make convincing wounds, and how to get wax wounds to stick (I work mostly in wax).

Hope exercises (Missouri Hope, New York Hope, Atlantic Hope and the new ones coming down the pike) are intense. The participants are assigned to teams, and the teams work to solve problems in search and rescue, triage and first aid, and incident command. They are placed in realistic scenarios and have to solve them on the spot. Complications thrown into the scenarios make the participants think on their feet.

There are at least as many staff members as participants — team controller/evaluators, who advise the participant teams, lane controller/evaluators, who run the scenario lanes, logistics personnel, subject matter experts, exercise director and staff, roleplayers —

And the moulage staff, who are looked at with a certain awe.

I’m bone-tired. It’s been an intense couple of days, which I wouldn’t trade for anything, because they’ve given me the opportunity to improve. I’m not sure if I’m making any sense here; I hope so. Thanks for reading.