04/28/2026
Last week IRR students completed a large MCI training scenario in conjunction with the PA and nursing departments that included closing off Prescott Street! Lincoln Journal Star published and article about the scenario linked here:
https://journalstar.com/news/local/article_f64f2462-0a84-4394-9c42-5f92853c36e5.html
If you don't subscribe to the LJS here's the copy from the article written by Alyssa Johnson and LJS:
A fake crash with real lessons
“Where’s my mommy?”
“Where’s my arm?”
“I can’t afford an ambulance ride!”
If you drove down 48th Street past Prescott Avenue on the afternoon of Thursday, April 23, there’s a good chance you would have called 911. And some people did. It looked like the university’s bus, a van and an SUV had collided. It looked like injured people were laying on the road. Some shouted for help while others wandered aimlessly in shock, covered in blood. It looked gruesome.
Fortunately, it was not an actual emergency but rather a training simulation; the International Rescue and Relief Program had cleared the event with Lincoln’s police, fire and rescue services and got permission to close down a block of Prescott Avenue. There was no accident. The three vehicles were merely parked inches from each other. The blood was corn syrup and food coloring. The broken bones were latex prosthetics. The shouts and cries were just acting, and the 24 actors were very committed to their roles.
The accident may have been fake, but the lessons were real. The simulation was part of this semester’s Emergency Medical Technician class, a requirement for first-year international rescue and relief students.
Sophia Jaquez, an alumna taking the course, was among the first EMTs-in-training to arrive at the scene and begin assessing the situation. “We aren’t doing this right,” she told Joe Quinn, the teaching assistant. “I don’t know what we’re doing wrong, but there’s got to be a better way.”
“That’s why we train,” Quinn responded.
Simulations and scenarios are integral to the emergency response training in Union's International Rescue and Relief Program. In March, the EMT class participated in training exercises held on campus alongside Lincoln and Lancaster County SWAT teams. In January, the Wilderness EMT class saw juniors and seniors in the program transporting classmates long distances in freezing weather and conducting drills on the ice at Holmes Lake. Even as this car crash simulation was happening in Lincoln on Thursday afternoon, other faculty and students from the program were in the Omaha area training the Sarpy County Sheriff's office in swift water rescue. There's a reason the program is popular with students seeking an out-of-the-classroom experience.
As more teams of students arrived on Prescott Avenue and the ratio of EMTs to patients evened out, the chaos settled into procedure. Even when a rainstorm swept across Lincoln, the students continued to treat wounds, secured the patients on backboards for transport, and accompanied them to an emergency room set up in the PA Program’s skills lab. Once the patients were in the "hospital," PA and nursing students took over, assessing and treating the actors and noting next steps and referrals that would be made in a real emergency before releasing the actors from the simulation. Though they did not apply any casts or hand out medications, they did simulate chest compressions on a patient as well as translate when one young actor who was brought in spoke only Spanish.
The course is taught by Makinsey Lonergan who has eight years of experience as an EMT. She and her teaching assistant, Quinn, wanted the situation to mirror real life as much as possible. As both of them are from Nebraska, they were able to enlist family members and friends to play victims, instructing them to not hold back.
“Everyone did great,” Lonergan said. “They didn’t let the rain slow them down and just kept working. There’s a lot to talk about when we debrief, but the students did really well.”
The fake blood will wash out of the volunteers’ hair, but for the students, the lessons will remain. When they are called to respond to a real emergency, they will be better prepared to focus through the confusion, assess injuries, begin treatment and secure patients for transport because of the training they received one stormy afternoon on Prescott.
To passersby, the traumatic scene may have looked like a chaotic disaster, but to the students in the university’s International Rescue and Relief Program, the simulated event was as close
