COUNTYWIDE : Disaster Teams Ask: Are We Ready to Go?

Can Orange County handle a major airplane crash?

More than 100 nurses, paramedics and county emergency officials attended a daylong symposium Friday in Mission Viejo to consider that question, answering it with a qualified “yes.”

They spent much of the day studying the swift response of emergency officials in Sioux City, Iowa, last July when a United Airlines DC-10 with 296 people on board lost an engine and crash-landed in a cornfield.

All 194 survivors were taken to two nearby hospitals within 75 minutes, recounted Chuck Sunburg, executive director of Siouxland Health Services, a private ambulance firm there.

By contrast, in typical Orange County disaster drills, “we have 200 simulated victims in a well-rehearsed drill, and I’m embarrassed to say it takes three hours” to get them to hospitals, admitted Paul Russell, a county Emergency Medical Services official who helped organize the symposium.

But Sunburg advised Orange County officials not to worry. “Drills are really important,” he said, but when the adrenalin is flowing, “the real thing will go better than the drill.”

County Fire Capt. Gary Wuchner also noted that Sioux City officials met once a month to plan their emergency response, whereas Orange County hospitals and local agencies hold disaster drills about once a year.

Still, when asked if Orange County is as “well prepared” as Sioux City to handle a major crash, Wuchner responded: “I think so. We have the resources--not just fire equipment but corporations willing to provide supplies.”

Russell agreed. So far, he noted, Orange County’s most serious crash occurred in February, 1981, when an Air California jet crashed at John Wayne Airport and broke in half, injuring 36 of 119 people on board.

But he and other symposium leaders suggested there would be “more and more survivable air crashes,” some of them probably here, in one of the busiest corridors for air traffic in the country.

The symposium, held at the Mission Viejo Country Club, was sponsored by Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center.