MILLINOCKET, Maine — A group of teenagers too young to drink hold a beer party at a place they call “the pit.” Intent on displaying his drinking prowess, one takes several long, hard pulls on a beer funnel. Severe alcohol poisoning ensues.
The kids sober enough to see trouble try to drive the poisoned one to the hospital, with the least-drunken teen behind the wheel, but their vehicle crashes into another carrying teens on their way to the party. Death results, and everybody gets a wake-up call about the tragedy of underage drinking.
It’s a scenario that could happen anytime, anywhere — and one that will be played out from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday by juniors and seniors at Stearns High School of Millinocket.
Titled “Wake-Up Call,” the scenario will feature teachers, students, firefighters and police — including state police Detective Brian Strout — Lamson Funeral Home workers, parents and a professional makeup artist who will paint as realistic a picture as possible of the bloody carnage of a vehicle collision.
The idea, Stearns social worker Sue Buzzell said, is to scare teenagers enough to get them to avoid the reality of the scenario, an especially pressing message given that the school’s prom is this coming weekend.
“It’s very realistic. The kids, when they witness it, get very emotional,” Buzzell said Saturday. “They seem to understand what we are trying to tell them. It seems to really have a lasting impact. The first year that we had it happen, one of our more hard-core kids went up to Detective Strout, shook his hand and said, ‘Thank you. This is the first thing they’ve done that has really got to me.’”
With proms and graduations looming, several schools around the state are running scenario programs. It’s the fifth time in 10 years that local school officials have run “Wake-Up Call” or a similar scenario. It usually goes off well, said Millinocket School Committee Chairman Thomas Malcolm, a town firefighter.
“Personally, it hits me with my ties of the school and it also affects our personnel,” Malcolm said. “In a small town, everybody knows everybody, and these things have a really powerful and widespread effect.
“When you get that call [at the fire station], you never know if it will be a family member or a next-door neighbor,” he added. “We can all sit back and say our kids are good kids, they don’t do anything, but kids are kids. Do you reach everybody with the message? No, but you reach some.”
Funeral home director Chip Lamson said local teens might be especially receptive to the message this year. They already have lost a 16-year-old classmate to a carbon monoxide accident and a 19-year-old graduate to a handgun accident during the school year.
“The graduating seniors have been very much affected by firsthand death,” Lamson said. “It all drives home the finite nature of life.”
Fire engines, ambulances, hearses and lifesaving equipment will be employed, so much so that Malcolm asked residents around town to ignore sirens blaring Tuesday morning.
The accident scenario will be finished by 10 a.m., and after lunch, several speakers, including drunken-driving victims and possibly a perpetrator, will address a school assembly in the gymnasium, Buzzell said.
Residents are invited.