95 bombing

? Gary Davis remembers walking through the smoke toward the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, smelling burning rubber from flaming vehicles and seeing blood-drenched victims running from the scene.

“In my mind I was thinking, âÂÂ’This is just like the news, a scene from a war,â” he said.

It wasnâÂÂt until later that Davis, then chief of Emergency Medical Services in Oklahoma City, realized officials there werenâÂÂt entirely prepared to respond to the 1995 terrorist attack.

Davis was among a group of Oklahoma City emergency leaders who spoke during a seminar Friday in Kansas City organized by Kansas University Continuing Education and the KU Medical Center Safety Office.

The Oklahomans stressed the need to think about details in advance, before tragedy strikes. There were dozens of things Oklahoma City officials hadnâÂÂt considered before the bombing. It turned out there hadnâÂÂt been enough training on how to mix disinfectant spray and how to collect evidence. The need for items including identification badges for workers and portable toilets hadnâÂÂt been anticipated before the bombing.

Oddly and unexpectedly, one of the biggest problems for emergency workers was having too many people respond to the scene.

Mike Murphy, director of the Metropolitan Area Response System, said doctors and nurses responding to the bombing set up impromptu triage areas for treating victims, instead of using the official triage areas. That made it more difficult to get a handle on how many victims there were and to transport them to hospitals, he said.

“At one point, I had to take a medical director and a U.S. marshal to tell medical personnel to leave,” Murphy said. “The perimeter was porous to medical personnel.”

When Oklahoma City was struck by a large tornado in 1999, the cityâÂÂs policy on medical personnel changed.

“We told (police) not to let them in the perimeter,” Murphy said. “I infuriated quite a few physicians and medical personnel in the community by doing that.”

Several members of the Lawrence school districtâÂÂs crisis-response team were among the approximately 125 people at the seminar.

“There arenâÂÂt a lot of training opportunities available in this area,” said Bob Franz, a social worker for the schools. “We hope we will never have to respond to a situation like this, but there are some similar principles for responding to crisis events.”

Lorna Larson, another social worker, said the need for communication was the same, no matter what crisis workers were responding to.

“WeâÂÂve experienced very effective communication in the Lawrence community” between schools and emergency agencies, she said. “There havenâÂÂt been breakdowns at all.”

She added: “I appreciate Oklahoma City taking such a terrible tragedy and turning it into a lesson for the rest of the nation.”