Grade 10 students spent the day learning about the dangers of impaired driving at the annual PARTY (Prevent Alcohol and Risk-related Trauma in Youth) Safe Program on April 28 in Olds.
Grade 10 students spent the day learning about the dangers of impaired driving at the annual PARTY (Prevent Alcohol and Risk-related Trauma in Youth) Safe Program on April 28 in Olds.
The day started outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints where they watched emergency services respond to a mock vehicle collision caused by an impaired driver. The demonstration involved the arrest of the driver, extrication of survivors and carting off a dead victim.
It takes a large, coordinated effort and exhaustive resources to clean up one person's bad choice, students heard. FortisAlberta was called because the crash knocked down a power pole. Close to a dozen firefighters, RCMP members and EMS (ambulance workers) were on-scene as well. If the incident happened in a rural area, the STARS air ambulance would have also landed nearby.
Later that morning, students visited the hospital. One of the presentations was by EMS workers Laine Schultz and Clark Cochran. They showed students some of the tools they use in the ambulance, including various needles and foot-long breathing tubes they've had to shove down patients' throats.
"These are the things I use to help you breathe when you can't breathe on your own," Schultz said, as some winced at the ghastly details.
The day also included a tour of Heartland Funeral Services. Visitors saw where embalming takes place and the different caskets on sale. While there, RCMP presented crash statistics and photos from real-life incidents.
A "disability lunch" at the Alumni Centre was last on the agenda. The exercise was to help students understand how difficult it is to function, following a debilitating injury. Doug Manderville from Spinal Cord Injury Alberta was a guest speaker.
This was the first year Bowden Grandview School was invited to watch. Two students, Nakisha Molyneux and Claire Martin, both 15 years old, found it to be an eye-opener.
The hardest-hitting part of the program for both was the funeral home visit. There, they walked through what surviving families experience as they make decisions on how they will remember the dead. Martin said she thought about her own parents going through her room, picking photographs and appropriate music for her funeral.
Of the two, Martin has her learner's permit and said she will think about the lessons that day as she works toward her driver's licence.
Click here to view more photos from the mock collision.
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