ORANGE BEACH, Ala.  — During an exercise last week, Orange Beach firefighter Suzanne Moeller was more than just a education coordinator. She was a prop in a training exercise.

To get ready for spring break and the upcoming summer season firefighters and lifeguards in Orange Beach are going through the paces for when real emergencies pop up. Even volunteers on Ono Island got in on the refresher courses.

“It’s kind of preplanning,” Moeller said. “We’re getting everybody prepared as to how to respond to drownings, accidental drownings, everything all the way from child to adults. Boating accidents and things like that. We’re mainly focusing on the drownings this week.”

On a recent Friday crews reacted to a possible child drowning at Cotton Bayou Public Beach Access.

“That was to simulate a possible drowning and dealing with people we know,” Moeller said of the Friday beach exercise. “I was simulating that was my kid and I work for the fire department. Just simulating how they train for emergencies like that as far as crowd control, as far as transportation and how quickly their timing should go.”

They had lifeguards to initiate the work on pediatric mannequin near the water and the rescue truck came with fire personnel to take over treatment.

“It was basically kind of like a fire drill for us in means of what we would do if there was a drowning in that situation in that particular situation and at that particular time with the people we had on duty,” Moeller said. “We’ll do those sporadic type drills probably a couple of times during the year just as a guideline to see what we need to work on, what aspects we need to work on, which ones work for us, which ones don’t. Which ones we need to fix, which ones we need to keep.”

One aspect she wanted to see was crews getting the victim off the beach as quickly as possible and was pleased with the result.

“It went awesome,” she said. “We’ve been talking several years about the plan of getting down to the beach, getting the patient into the truck and moving away from the beach to actually do most of our medical assessment and medical treatment. That way we don’t have the spectators and a bunch of people seeing things they’re probably not used to seeing.”

And it gave the crews a chance to try things out in different situations.

“It kind of gives us a practice run of how well our equipment works in the back of a truck, in the back of a moving vehicle and different environments,” she said.

Earlier in the same week, crews did similar exercises with Ono Island volunteers.

“We’re just going to prepare everybody on how to respond, what equipment they are going to need, information that they need to pass on and any kind of updated medical techniques that have come into play the last couple of years that we may not be aware,” Moeller said. “Our volunteers especially since they don’t get a whole lot of exposure to the beach. They’re kind of isolated to the island, but it doesn’t make them immune to it because they are surrounded by water.

“We run a lot of calls on the beach and they every so often have those at the boat ramps and stuff like that. We’re just trying to make everybody aware of it.”

Volunteers worked on a possible victim at the Ono boat launch until actual fire crews could come and take over.

“They’re going to resuscitating or taking care of a victim that has already been brought out of the water,” Moeller said. It will be the volunteers from Ono and our A-list crew is also going to get involved and do kind of a hands-on taking over. Our on-duty crews were also out there.”

As more lifeguards return and get ready for the spring and summers seasons, Moeller said they will be more and more involved in training exercises.

“We were hoping we would have a couple of lifeguards this week,” she said. “We were hoping to maybe get some of the lifeguards that are trickling in to get started on the beach to kind of help us and go from their standpoint, simulating getting the patient out of the water and working on their level and then us taking over on an A-list level.”