a fictitious railway collision for a very real exercise
The scenario is as follows: it is 10:23 p.m. Thursday evening when a TER leaves Dijon station in the direction of Dôle. 30 minutes later, he hit two vehicles on a level crossing located in Beire-le-Fort. The balance sheet is 28 injured, including 7 graves and 1 death. The aim of this very realistic exercise is to prepare the emergency services for a major rail accident.
It has been ten years since the region had been the scene of a full-scale rescue exercise. Firefighters, gendarmerie, SNCF agents, crisis unit of the Prefecture of Côte-d’Or, in total, 220 people were mobilized in this disaster scenario which took place Thursday evening, in Beire-le-Fort and at the Prefecture of Cote d’Or.
The fictitious assessment of the exercise is heavy: 28 wounded, including 7 graves and one death. For the Côte-d’Or Samu, this is an unprecedented exercise which has led to a large deployment of men and equipment, as confirmed by Antoine Daisey, emergency doctor, Samu21 medical coordinator: “We deployed two high-fidelity dummies on the exercise. This is the first time that we have deployed such a device and we know that the statements in terms of training and improvement are major.”
On the fire side, it is also a broad involvement that is underlined by Lieutenant-Colonel Olivier Roy, deputy director of operational resources of SDIS 21: “The means arrived in a consistent way, which would not have been the case in reality: the engines would have arrived in a much more staggered way, which would have made for a slightly different organization.”
The SNCF must ensure protection in such a case, that is to say cut off the circulation of trains, the power supply and promote access to emergency services. And then, after the intervention, put the rail traffic back into service. An exercise that has a significant impact for the SNCF, as confirmed by Eric Cinotti, regional coordinator of the SNCF group: “We are on a level crossing, there are special conditions for the emergency services to intervene. It is to work on our interfaces between the SNCF services and the emergency services. This allows us to set up our processes, to train, because there is nothing better than an exercise on the ground to continue training and improving.”
The Prefecture hosts in its basement a crisis center allowing the coordination of operations between the various actors of the emergency services as well as the State services concerned by the crisis.
As described by Danyl Afsoud, chief of staff to the Prefect of Côte-d’Or“The objective is to ensure the care of the victims and to ensure the possibility of restarting the circulation of trains. The first objective of the Prefecture is the victims: care, assistance, identification and therefore answer to the families who are worried and call the information cell of the Prefecture which is activated all night.
A few minutes from the end of the exercise, the Chief of Staff is already drawing conclusions from this real-life simulation: “What I see is that very quickly we arrived at a stabilized victim toll, which is not always the case, so it’s more of a positive indicator. The coordination between the services was good. It’s a exercise which at this stage, but this will deserve more detailed feedback, is satisfactory.”
Simulation is essential to improve emergency response, because of the 150 level crossings in the Côte d’Or, there have been more than 50 accidents over the past ten years.