It is near noon as the rain-threatening clouds begin to part and the sun comes out through the clouds. A trickle of media and observers stood on the edge of a parking lot on Northwest College campus in Powell. In front of them stretched a yellow caution tape. About a half a football field ahead of them, on the other side of the parking lot some actors pretending to be Northwest students are milling around in front of a building.
Without warning, a guy dressed in all black pretending to be a shooter, began firing at the people in front of the building. The actors fell pretending to be shot.
The fake shooter ran into the building. After a couple of minutes police cars sped to the scene without a noise. Their sirens were not on. Police in full gear ran into the building.
Seven minutes after the first shot, the first ambulance arrived and eight minutes after that there were about six to seven ambulances on the scene and people were getting put into them.
Slowly more people pretending to be injured were carried out of the building by law enforcement. A woman began the triage process.
“If you can stand, if you can walk, I want you over here,” she yelled.
As triage commences, a fake patient was placed on a stretcher and put into the back of an ambulance.
This all in about 15 to 20 minutes. That is the point of the training, said Jeff Martin, the co-director of the event and the homeland security director for Park County.
“We're trying to get as many patients out as fast as we can,” Martin said. “Without that delay, it's safe, we can come in now. So we're trying to find that sweet spot, get everybody on the same page.”
Dr. Elise Lowe, the other co-director of the event and the Bighorn Basin Health Care Coalition rep, said they are trying to address the point where things have not gone exactly according to plan in other real-life events like this. Lowe said what needs to be fine-tuned is the communication between the law enforcement and emergency health care providers to figure out when it is safe to move onto the scene.
“The critical point is when law enforcement meets EMS, because we know our EMS are prepared and trained, we know our law enforcement train all the time,” Lowe said. “But having that interface where they say, ‘It's safe enough, we have a plan to start bringing EMTs and paramedics in and getting the injured out.’ We talked about the transition from, ‘Stop the killing to stop the dying’.”
At first when the idea for this training started to come to fruition about a year ago, it was only going to involve the Park County first responders – EMS, the fire departments, ER doctors, Sheriff’s and police departments. It came out to about 100 people. But Martin said pretty soon after they started planning the National Guard reached out.
“When the National Guard reached out and said, ‘Hey, would you like to incorporate our training into a larger statewide exercise?’ We thought, ‘Absolutely, the more people we can bring together and establish those relationships, the better off we are’,” Martin said.
Because when those relationships are established that would make it easier to respond to a real mass shooting. At the training in Powell, there were about 300 people involved in the training.
Martin said even the largest cities and counties are overwhelmed when a situation like this happens --- there are so many moving parts.
“So for a county like Park County, we don't get an opportunity like this to train with all of our responders, all of our hospitals, coordinating that response together,” he said. “So this is critical…bringing everybody together after every scenario that we've done this morning, they get together, they talk about it, they debrief it, what worked, what didn't work.”
Lowe agreed. She said it is especially important because of the rural nature of the county.
“I think the rural areas…rural emergency response is really tough, especially on a large disaster scale,” Lowe said. “None of these communities can respond to a huge mass casualty event like that on their own.”
In real-life situations, the problem is the breakdown of communications between these departments that usually do not work together. So this training is trying to address that problem.
Back out on the scene, about an hour or more since the reenacted shooting, two black hawk helicopters flew in to retrieve patients. Another helicopter came in after, picking up the last of the injured on the scene. It took about two hours for the scene to be cleared.
For Lowe and Martin, the training was a success, and they feel more confident that the agencies can work together if the worst-case scenario happens.
