Calif. Responders Prepare for Campus Shooters
Jan. 07--SAN MARCOS -- Emergency personnel from throughout North County trained Tuesday for a procedure they hope they never will use when an active-shooter drill was held on the campus at Cal State San Marcos University.
Students won't return to school until Jan. 25, giving authorities a realistic venue to train to take out a shooter and get victims to area hospitals with ambulances and helicopters..
"One of the unique things about this drill is it's not just police and our tactics, or fire and their tactics," said Robert McManus, chief for the 21-officer CSUSM Police Department. "This is really a regional test of the system."
The university coordinated with emergency agencies for the past six months to organize Tuesday's training, which involved two, three-hour events at the four-story Student Union building.
About 100 personnel from hospitals, police departments, fire departments and ambulance services participated in the scenarios, which involved one gunman and numerous victims.
Staging the drill on the empty campus provided authorities with a large, real-world environment. On a more sobering note, it also was an opportunity for law enforcement and emergency workers to become familiar with a site that could be a target.
"A big incident like this, if it were to really happen, Escondido, the Vista substation, Oceanside, Carlsbad, they're not going to be familiar with the location," McManus said. "For some of them, this may be the first time they've been up here."
Besides the personnel participating in the event, employees from local hospitals and officers from as far away as the San Diego Community College District were invited to watch.
Much of the activity was out of view of the media, although an eerie recording of people screaming could be heard echoing across campus throughout the exercise. At one point, a man with a gun was seen darting across a footbridge outside the four-story Student Union building, firing two shots as he ran.
McManus said the drill provided officers with a more authentic experience than they could receive in any classroom and helped various agencies learn how to coordinate during an emergency. The need for such drills has become increasingly apparent.
"We started planning this last summer, and since last summer we've had the shooting in the community college in Oregon, we had the Colorado Springs shooting around Thanksgiving, we've had Paris, and then obviously San Bernadino," McManus said.
Coordinating different agencies took months of work, with hospitals, police departments and colleges having to cover for workers and pay overtime to participate, McManus said.
A couple of dozen San Marcos Fire Academy cadets in moulage makeup played victims.
"I was there earlier, and it looked like the set of a zombie movie," McManus said about the "victims." "Very realistic stuff."
San Marcos Fire Chief Brett Van Wey said the campus hosted a similar event in 2010, when authorities responded to a mock terrorist attack involving guns and chemicals at a graduation.
New drills are necessary because response tactics have changed over time, Van Wey said. Since the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, for instances, paramedics no longer wait for a threat to end before treating victims, but rather work with law enforcement to find a safe route to the wounded as quickly as possible.
"We do patient care, and they do bad guys," Van Wey said."That's how we have to fit, and that's why these drills are extremely important."
McManus said in the past few years, officers at CSUSM have expanded their equipment to include active shooter kits that contain ballistic helmets and vests, extra ammunition and first-aid and trauma items. The department is getting new sports utilities vehicles just to handle the extra gear, he said.
"It's the unfortunate world we live in," he said.
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