Photos by JUSTIN COOK The Roanoke Times

Emergency crews tend to pretend injuries during a training exercise using an overturned school bus accident on Shadow Lake Road in Blacksburg.

Local children play the part of injured students during Friday's drill.

| Shawna Morrison

shawna.morrison@roanoke.com, 381-1665

BLACKSBURG -- The children screamed inside their overturned school bus, many with bruises and cuts on their faces, some with broken bones.

Their bus driver had suffered a heart attack behind the wheel and lost control, flipping the bus onto the passenger side.

The scenario was possible, but not real on this day.

The overturned bus -- a donation from Giles County -- at the intersection of Shadow Lake Road and Meadowbrook Drive on Friday afternoon was a drill for fire, rescue, police, transit and school officials.

"It tests operational readiness ... in the event we had a mass casualty bus accident," Lt. Joe Davis of the Blacksburg Police Department said. "It gives you an opportunity to review your responses."

"It's a scenario that can produce a variety of injuries," said Lt. Sarah Walker, a spokeswoman for the Blacksburg Rescue Squad. "It is something that has happened. A school bus has crashed in Blacksburg."

Walker said the drill has been in the works for at least six weeks. The rescue workers who responded, she said, only knew it was a mock bus crash; they didn't know how many children were on board, how badly they were injured or what caused the crash.

Not knowing what happened, she said, would test their skills at triage -- figuring out which patients needed to be treated first and which ones could wait.

When they arrived within five minutes of getting a 911 call, rescue crews first checked the bus to make sure it was stable enough for them to crawl inside. If it wasn't, Walker said, more injuries could result.

Through the back window, they asked anyone who could walk to come toward them, leaving only the seriously injured on board. Those children -- all middle-schoolers -- were carried out on backboards and taken to Montgomery Regional Hospital.

While helping the children, crews had to get their names and their parents' names and match them with school records. When one parent tried to walk off with a student, she was stopped immediately.

"They're on the ball," said Josh Phillips of Riner, whose two sons were among the injured.

Gabe Phillips, 8, played the part of a patient with a contusion to the brain resulting in seizures. He practiced his seizures before the drill, his dad said.

Chase Phillips, 10, had severe cuts to his leg and half of his face was badly scraped.

"Of course he's proud of the makeup on his leg," Phillips said. "They'll never forget this."

Phillips said he didn't expect the drill to appear so realistic, with a bus on its side and the deceased driver -- a dummy -- hanging partially out the driver's side window.

He said he thought it was good for officials "to get some realistic, much-needed practice with real kids."

Toward the end of the drill, Walker and Davis said they felt like it had gone well. Everyone involved planned to meet to discuss whether anything should have been done differently.

"The nice thing about a drill," Walker said, "is something can go wrong and we will learn from it and chances are we will never do it again."