Emergency unfolds on the sands off Huntington Beach — by design
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The situation mirrored one that could happen at any time.
An 11-year-old boy suffers a cervical spine injury while riding a bodyboard. First responders rush to his rescue, stabilizing him before putting him on a backboard and into an ambulance to the hospital.
It played out Wednesday morning at the beach adjacent to the Huntington Beach Marine Safety Training Center.
This time, it was just practice.
UCI Health hosted a water safety drill with the Huntington Beach Fire Department and its Marine Safety Division that featured a simulation of a pediatric trauma injury. The drill was meant to help all involved — from the lifeguards to the hospital trauma team — hone their skills and communication.
The objective was to make the simulation as realistic as possible, Huntington Beach Fire Capt. Justin Fleming said, and try to emulate the organized chaos of such a situation.
“Cervical injuries are common at the beach and they can be catastrophic, depending on the severity of it,” Fleming said. “While certainly Marine Safety trains on doing rescues and preventing drowning and those kinds of things — which is fantastic — there’s still all types of other injuries that occur at the beach, one of the most critical ones being cervical injuries. We want to make sure that all of our personnel are trained and feel confident in managing those types of injuries, especially in the environment that they’re in.”
The child portraying the injured boy was Kyle Costa, whose father, Todd Costa, is a pediatric program manager for UCI Health. The simulation continued with the injured boy arriving at the UCI Health — Orange emergency department, where the hospital trauma team was ready to care for him.
“Trauma care is a whole system,” said Dr. Jeff Nahmias, UCI Health trauma and critical care surgeon. “It starts with the EMS part, which we’re doing right here, and they’re going to bring the patient to UCI, where we’ll then do our part of the whole trauma system. Our team will do a full simulation of caring for the child who was injured here at the beach. We’ll be able to test all of the individual parts, and also the transitions that happen between them.”
Huntington Beach reported no fatal drownings at city beaches and residential pools last summer, for the first time in at least seven years, but there were still more than 4,000 rescues. All parties involved in Wednesday’s training wanted to share the message that proper supervision, CPR training and swimming lessons are some of the tools for beach safety entering the busy summer months.
Sean Angelovic, a supervising ocean lifeguard, said that mid- to late-afternoons when there is high tide can be problematic for ocean visitors. That’s specifically true from Towers 11 to 19, which are across from a series of large hotels on the other side of Pacific Coast Highway.
“A lot of hotel guests coming down here love to have fun in the shore break, and aren’t super familiar with what to do to protect yourself in the shore break,” Angelovic said. “Cervical injuries are quite common. Sometimes it’s just an abrasion to the head … and they’re able to clear them right there. But we do have the call that happens quite often of fully packaging and bringing them to the hospital, basically the same drill that we did today.
“Any training like this definitely helps. It’s cool to do it with the fire department, and then with the hospitals too.”
