The Adams Fire Department led area emergency responders in training for a school bus crash Wednesday night.

Adams Assistant Fire Chief Curt Sheely said recent crashes involving school buses sparked a conversation between the department, EMS, law enforcement and medical services about how to handle that type of accident.

“The whole idea is so we can respond to that type of incident if it does occur,” Sheely said. “It’s not like a normal accident scene. You have kids involved, lots of injuries.”

After several crashes in the past three years, one involving a fatality and others with serious injuries, the department realized they needed to work with four basic areas including the Southland School District, EMS in Adams, law enforcement and medical services to mitigate the accident as soon as possible.

The most recent came on Feb. 1 when a driver rear-ended a bus, sending six Southland School District students to the hospital and many more back to the Adams Fire Hall to be checked as a precaution.

Using their own experiences and information from the National Incident Management System, the department came up with a plan.

The department will cover those four basic areas. They will also talk about how they developed their plan, such as setting up secondary triage sites, how and where parents can be reunited with their students, how to use triage tags, establishing scene safety and closing down the road. The school district also developed a response plan with the fire department for this type of accident, Sheely said.

“We want to kind of demonstrate that to our surrounding services before we have one with many injuries with victims and patients to be treated,” Sheely said.

He said each member of the department is trained in mass casualty incidents and their plan also stemmed from the accidents in the past three years. About 35 students were on the bus when the vehicle struck it earlier this year, causing serious injuries in that accident.

Cars also passed quickly through the scene even though warning lights were flashing. A few cars almost hit people on the scene and even caused another accident.

“If we’re all working from the same plan, it helps [us] considerably reduce the amount of time to get the students or patients treated and transported if necessary and reunited with parents,” Sheely said.

There are 25 firefighters and 20 EMS personnel in Adams. Sheely said 47 people from different fire, law enforcement and EMS departments attended the training session.

He heard good reports from people who attended and who would take that information back to their departments.