Emergency Responders Factor in Shooters

(TNS) - On a late October day, Fairfield police, firefighters, and members of the local branch of American Medical Response ran a drill at the Fairfield Public Schools, testing everyone on how they’d respond if there was a shooting at one of the schools.

“The call started out as a benign dumpster fire, then it turned out that was just a distraction, and it was actually an active shooter,” Bill Schietinger, general manager of AMR Fairfield County operations, said of the drill.

It’s the kind of exercise AMR companies do on a fairly regular basis, meant to measure everyone’s response time and knowledge about what to do in an emergency. In most cases, Schietinger said, people play their roles and, when the dry run is over, they return to business as usual, hoping they’ll never need to use the skills they’ve just tested.

But that wasn’t the case with the Fairfield drill. Within 48 hours of that dry run, telephoned threats forced an actual lockdown of all 17 Fairfield schools, with 10,000 children in them. The threats — which included claims of bombs at Ludlowe and Warde high schools, and a man with an M16 assault rifle headed to Holland Hill Elementary — thankfully didn’t bear fruit.

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