2011-10-21

Falls police and firefighters prepare for a nightmare with 'Active Shooter' training exercise

By Rick Pfeiffer Niagara Gazette The Niagara Gazette Wed Oct 19, 2011, 10:59 PM EDT

NIAGARA FALLS — On a cold and wet Wednesday morning in October, Falls police and firefighters were faced with a perfect storm.

Three armed gunmen took over a city school. Some students had been shot, others were held hostage, and the gunmen triggered an explosion and started a fire just for good measure.

The good news was, it was just a drill.

“We wanted to make it challenging,” said Falls Police Lt. Dave Kok, who helped coordinate the “active shooter” exercise. “It was a joint exercise between us and the fire department to (test) how we would handle the shooters and they would handle the victims.”

Students from Niagara Falls High School were brought to the old police headquarters building in the 500 block of Hyde Park Boulevard to create a school-like atmosphere and three Falls cops moonlighted as the “bad guys” for the exercise.

At 9 a.m., the police radio crackled with a message that 911 operators were receiving calls of shots being fired inside a city school. Patrol officers and firefighters raced to the old Public Safety Building and were greeted by gun shots fired at them.

“We fired some blanks so they got the sound of gunfire,” Kok said. “We hadn’t told them what to expect and we wanted to test their response. They reacted accordingly.”

As officers entered the building they saw wounded students in the lobby and three armed men confronting them. The “bad guys,” fired on the officers again.

“They shot one suspect, but the other two then fled further into the building,” Kok said. “One hid and the other took over a classroom and took the students in there hostage.”

The patrol officers then called for backup from the department’s Emergency Response Team. As members of the ERT were brought in, firefighters, with help from EMTs from Rural Metro, began to tend to the wounded students.

“The police kept us busy,” said Battalion Chief Tom Colangelo, who was in command of the firefighters. “They constantly kept (wounded) people coming out. We set up a triage and performed emergency medical services.”

After ERT members searched the building and found the suspect who was hiding, the suspect in the classroom set off an explosion and started a fire. Colangelo called that “an added surprise.”

“Yeah, we hadn’t expected that, but we were ready for it,” the chief said.

Without revealing the details of how ERT members did it, Kok said the students held hostage were freed, while the suspect who commandeered the classroom “didn’t fare as well.”

Brass from both the police and fire departments said they felt the exercise was valuable.

“I thought it went well,” Colangelo said. “We’ve been looking to do a joint drill (with police) for awhile and I think we learned a lot.”

Colangelo and Kok said throughout the exercise, they found ways to “tweak” communications between police and fire to improve their response.

“With any major incident like this, communication is the critical thing to make the response work,” Colangelo said.

Kok was especially pleased with the first response of the patrol officers.

“I thought they performed great,” he said. “They did what was expected. They locked it down.”

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Source: http://niagara-gazette.com

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