By Scott D. Johnston

If your New Year’s resolutions include doing something to aid the community, along with getting out and meeting new and interesting people, the volunteer Grays Harbor County Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) has an opportunity for you coming up Saturday, Jan. 21 in Pacific Beach.

Or if you’ve ever thought it might be fun to make you or someone else look terribly injured or downright gruesome, this can lead to some unusual, enjoyable and meaningful volunteer experiences.

In the North Beach Community Center at Grays Harbor Fire District No.8, 4576 State Route 109 in Pacific Beach, two professional training classes will be held in “moulage,” which is the art of applying mock injuries for the purpose of training.

Check-in for Class 1, “Basic Moulage,” begins at 8:30 a.m. with coffee provided. The class begins at 9 a.m. Class 2, “Advanced Moulage,” check-in begins at 12:30 p.m. with the class starting at 1 p.m.

Space is limited to 20 per class. The deadline to register is January 16. To register go online to: www.GraysHarborCERT.org or email Stephanie Allestad at GHFD8ChocoFireLady@gmail.com. A $10 registration fee for each class must be paid in advance. That will cover handouts, all hygienic consumable supplies, beverages and light snacks.

As Grays Harbor County CERT facilitator and Fire District No. 8 community liaison, and a veteran of a nearly a decade of involvement with local emergency preparedness and response, Allestad sees the moulage training classes as “an opportunity to help our local first responders to be able to train at a more realistic level.”

Does that enhanced realism in training make a difference when the training is applied to real life-and-death situations?

“You bet it does,” Allestad exclaimed. “The realism of how to apply proper life-saving techniques helps our responders to practice acting quickly and efficiently,” which usually increases the chance of a positive outcome for the victim.

The issue is that severe medical trauma creates major training challenges for emergency first responders. Traditional classroom learning, while essential, is no substitute for actual experience in the field. Bridging the gap is “moulage,” from the French word meaning casting or molding. It is the art of applying mock injuries for the purpose of simulating real-world experience for emergency medical training.

In use since for 500 years or more, moulage ranges in complexity from simply applying pre-made rubber or latex “wounds” to a healthy “patient,” to using makeup and theatrical techniques along with hyper-realistic prostheses to offer enhanced elements of realism, such as blood, burns, and open fractures, to the training simulation.

The “Basic Moulage” class goes into the fundamentals of how to set up to do moulage, how to acquire supplies, and how to use them efficiently and safely. There will be hands-on demonstrations on basic wounds and effects. This is also a refresher course and is required for the advanced class. Class ends around 12:30 p.m.

The “Advanced Moulage”class starts at 1 p.m. and ends at approximately 5 p.m. Basic Moulage or an equivalent is a prerequisite. This hands-on class will go more into using prosthetics, sculpting techniques, how to build more complex wounds and using household items to create your own effects. It will also show and discuss new products on the market. Those who complete the advanced course will be invited to use their skills at other training events outside of Grays Harbor County, with other agencies.

“With these classes we are hoping to provide all our first responders with well-trained moulage artists for their live training scenarios,” Allestad wrote, in the current edition of the Grays Harbor County Emergency Management newsletter, available online at www.co.grays-harbor.wa.

The goal is to have more moulage artists available to draw from, to facilitate larger training events. More artists can also mean more time to create detailed and involved injuries for a more realistic look. Allestad said there are currently about a dozen folks in Grays Harbor County who have had some moulage training.

Instructors for the classes are Elizabeth “Buzzy” Mounce and Laurell Sprague. Both taught a similar class in Pacific Beach last spring, which was limited to professional responders. “They loved coming out here and it’s a great opportunity for us to have these ladies come down from Everett and Seattle,” Allestad said.

Mounce works with the University of Washington’s Department of Bioengineering, and teaches “The Art of Moulage” for such events like the Northwest Citizen Corp Expo. She specializes in prosthetics, makeup and blood based on victim’s symptoms and triage cards.

Sprague became involved with moulage shortly after she went through a CERT class in 2004. She has been doing small drills ever since, and has become an in-demand “Moulage Artist” and instructor, with her own Facebook page called “Moulage Mayhem.”