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Vision | Executive Summary | Core Impacts | Community Partners | Map | Documents

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The Calamityville™ Vision

As the premier training, educational, and research entity of the human access, care, and evacuation component of the global medical readiness formula, Calamityville™ and its partner academic, military, and commercial interests and facilities, emerge as the hallmark of core experiences by which society, and its infrastructure, will be measured as it postures itself in readiness for tragic, natural and man-made disasters.

The Calamityville™ Tactical Laboratory Executive Summary

The Homeland Emergency Learning and Preparedness (HELP) Center at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, is developing the Calamityville™ Tactical Laboratory Project (Calamityville™-TL), a state-of-the-art, innovative, integrated, collaborative training and research facility to provide a one-of-a-kind training opportunity for the world's medical, public health, public safety, and civilian and military disaster response decision makers.

As a training tool and research test-bed, Calamityville™-TL will prepare the civilian and military medical communities to participate and react in an effective and meaningful manner with traditional disaster responders. This will provide the nation with a more complete approach to finding patients, offering initial care, and safely evacuating them from acute disaster-related environments. The Calamityville™-TL will blend the principles of search and rescue, field assessment, stabilization, field triage and transport to the next level of care. This is the first site in the United States to fully integrate the civilian and military relationships, and medical and non-medical responses that occur in a disaster or other complex rescue situation.

Through “concurrency”, training programs, research activities, and other Calamityville™-TL programs will occur simultaneously, such that students, researchers and other customers consistently occupy the facility and conduct their work under a common exercise scenario. This strategy simulates reality in that during times of disaster or emergent events, various first responders, government (civilian and military) and non-government agencies are compelled to work alongside one another to overcome the disaster. By training in this format, students become accustomed to this cooperative environment, and are more likely to emulate this behavior in actual conditions.

The components of Calamityville™-TL focus on preparing medical first receivers (emergency room physicians and nurses), atypical emergency/disaster medical providers (primary care physicians, specialty physicians, etc.) and hospital-based decision makers (administrators, managers) to react in a medically responsible, cost effective manner to the mental distracters, increased patient volume, and changes in the normal infrastructure which are born out of a mass casualty/disaster event. This facility will bridge the gap between medical readiness and standard disaster response through the development and delivery of high-quality training programs that offer necessary and relevant solutions to emerging and dynamic emergency medical challenges:

• Gaining access to the trapped and missing;
• Providing the highest level of medical or fatality care possible in the most austere of environments; and,
• Evacuating patients in the safest and most effective manner possible, to long term care and recovery.

Calamityville™-TL will be particularly important as the Base Re-Alignment Commission (BRAC) transfers the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine (USAFSAM) to the Wright Patterson Air Force Base in the Dayton area. A unique opportunity for defense conversion of military medical response best practices can take place whereby traditional Air Force education and training courses can be translated and transferred to the civilian medical and first responder communities. In so doing, this will offer a more frequently utilized and more widely tested skill set. As the partnership between WSU and USAFSAM matures, traditional Air Force course content and faculty members will be imbedded into the University’s education and research programs. Therefore, WSU and The HELP Center becomes an educational bridge between the civilian and military worlds and offers students a more complete learning experience. Calamityville™-TL will also provide an outlet and catalyst for military personnel to transfer to the civilian workforce in both the educational and medical employment markets.

Calamityville™-TL will also provide a large economic impact on the Dayton/Miami Valley Region of Ohio. The effects of this project are detailed on pages three through eight of the full document.

Sample Conceptual Drawings of Calamityville

Click on the image to view a larger version

Click on the image to view a larger version

Key Documents

• Ohio Research Scholars Program Application
• Economic Impact
• Fusion Center Prospectus

For more information, contact:
Jim Gruenberg, EMT-P, CPM
Assistant Director, Human Access Care and Evacuation (HACE)
The HELP Center™
3139 Research Blvd., Suite 205
Kettering, OH 45420
(937) 775-1320
Fax: (937) 775-1329
james.gruenberg@wright.edu