This week my small municipal department started the first phase of planning for a shooting event by walking through the place that has the most people in it at any given time, our high school.
first off, I applaud you and your agency for actually being proactive in trying to preplan how you are going to respond to these types of calls.
Most of the time we were in the school we spent astounded about how complicated the floor plan was, that there are 400 people 3 times a day in the cafeteria and how most of the doors are glass. We realize that any incident that involves firearms, children and Mayberry’s finest is going to be an absolute nightmare.
glass doors (which most of the exterior doors in the HS I attended back in the day) are great for letting light in, and (realistically) are more for show than anything else (kind of like tempered glass windows on your car). You can lock the doors all you want, but if someone really wants to get in, they are going to get in.
One thing you should remember: active shooting incidents are extremely low frequency highly visible incidents, so many AHJs are not thinking about it happening in their school when they initially built the builds. and telling them they should change when (statistically speaking) the chances of it occurring are very slow will likely fall on deaf ears.
My question is have any of your limited resource services (2/3 rescues and PD) started planning? What challenges have you faced? What left field solutions has anybody come up with? The best idea we have right now is practicing our NIMS and putting a duffle bag full of TQs on each truck.
I spent most of the time just flabbergasted that this is something we have to do now.
Wake's Shooting/Stabbing kit is a good start.
We don't have any formal drills with schools and other resources like that, at least nothing that has trickled down to us that I am aware of. We get the gang related shootings almost daily and sometimes more than once a day. Just had one like 3 days ago myself, so at least when it comes to hands on assess/treat/move on aspects of it we are fairly comfortable with handling GSW's.
There is a huge difference between an active shooter and a gang related shooting.
Gang related shooting: homie from gang A shoots at homie from gang B. he either hits homie from gang B, hits some of his friends, hits an innocent bystander, or hits a solitary object. Than homie from gang A flees the scene, because he doesn't want the cops to catch him. it's a simply GSW, ABC, contol bleeding, and take person (or persons, occasionally two people get shot) to the trauma center. requires 1, maybe 2, ambulances for a "routine" shooting.
Active shooter: person is shooting everyone, often at random. multiple victims in a localized area. shooter often commits suicide, or doesn't care if the cops get him. There are no routine active shooter calls. And they don't only occur in school; they can occur in libraries, offices, malls, and any place where you have large amounts of people in relatively open areas that are confined by walls.
You really can't compare the two, other than they both involve firearms.
@Milla3P, with 2 or 3 ambulances available to you, I would focus on what you want those two crews to do, and how much mutual aid you have available to you, and what you want them to do. Your first ambulance will have two people, with one doing Incident command (scene size up, calling for additional ambulance resources, calling for state mutual aid disaster resources and trying to come up with a plan), and the other person doing triage. Your second ambulance will be the "rescue task force" and treatment.
Preplan your closest landing zones (note I said zones, since you might want to land more than one helicopter). Where do you want your mutual aid staging area to be? Do you want some units to respond directly to the scene to assist the in town crews, and if so, where do you want them to respond to? where will your command post be? how will you deal with the mentally damaged people who aren't physically injured? Will you recall off duty staff? do you have additional radios and vehicles for them to take? Does your FD do EMS? if they don't, you might want to utilize them as additional manpower and laborers to carry people and equipment around. If they do, utilize them as EMS providers. What radio frequency will all the EMS people be operating on? will you need more than one?
Also remember, there are law enforcement scenes. So make sure they know your plan, you know their plan, and neither of your plans are conflicting. But once the threat is neutralized, than it's an EMS MCI (unless you agree with the EMS going in while the gunfire is still going on, I'm not a fan). Once it's a confirmed incident, start your EMS MCI plan, and start resources from all over the county to the scene. it's going to take them a while to get there, so having staging areas already designated can make things easier, vs having everyone going to the scene and freelancing on what they are doing.
