Local first responders practice saving ‘victims’ during mass casualty incident training

A teenage volunteer in a white T-shirt stained with fake blood lay on her back, clutching the prosthetic wound on her side, crying for help from the baseball field at Mattituck High School. 

She was one of 59 volunteer high school students from across Suffolk County who acted as victims in a simulated mass casualty response training exercise Saturday morning. 

“It’s an act,” Chip Bancroft, deputy chief of the Plum Island Fire Department and founder of Firehouse Training Plus, which staged the exercise, said to the group of parents, elected officials and school district leaders gathered on the sideline to watch the scenario before he made the 911 call “reporting the incident.”

Mr. Bancroft developed the program in response to the seemingly relentless barrage of mass shooting events that continue to wreak havoc on communities nationwide. As of July 24, there have been more than 400 mass shootings in the U.S. this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The GVA defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four victims, excluding the shooter, are shot in a single incident.

Moments after Mr. Bancroft’s phone call, dozens of teenage voices cut through the still summer air as more than 150 firefighters and EMTs from the North Fork and Suffolk County began to arrive on the scene. 

“They are helping people train to save lives and they are making a bigger difference than they can even comprehend,” Farrah Soudani, a survivor of the 2012 theater shooting in Aurora, Colo. who attended the simulation, said of the volunteer students. “I’m very thankful that they’re willing to help.”

The teen actors behaved as though they were victims of a real shooting, screaming, even cursing at the first responders, demanding their undivided attention despite the dozens of other casualties in desperate need. 

While the students and observers may have witnessed only chaos, the medical personnel and firefighters responded with cool precision, shouting color codes — green, yellow or red in order of increasingly dire injury — as the triage began. 

“The biggest strength was teamwork,” Mr. Bancroft said after the drill. “[The first responders] realized the resources they needed, no one panicked, no one got egotistical about it … they went right to work.”

When responding to such a call, EMS responders provide the medical know-how, whereas the firefighters provide some much needed muscle.

“We’re more or less the bull work,” Mattituck Fire Department chief Jim Cox explained. “We pick up and carry patients across the field. And we always try to keep our EMS safe. I hope PD is doing that, but we try to do that, too.”

Across from the school yard on Pike Street, Mr. Cox, Southold Town Police Chief Martin Flatley and various other officials headed up the incident command center, loaded with communication equipment.

“For the most part our guys did pretty well,” Mr. Cox said after the drill. “We had some communication issues, we’ll probably need more [radio] frequencies. EMS basically took over the channel, which obviously was going to happen … Future reference for us, we’re going to be putting EMS on their own separate channel.”

Just as they would in a real incident, ambulances arrived at a staging area on Marys Road, then entered the school yard to pick up victims. A designated transportation officer kept track of the vehicles, personnel and patients leaving the scene en route to hospitals.

“They didn’t lose anybody,” Mr. Bancroft said. “I know that sounds to a lot of people like a joke, but when you’ve got people from different agencies going to this hospital, that hospital, running here and there, you have to track those kids. And they did, I was highly impressed.”

“We would have prepared a reunification center at Our Lady Of Good Counsel Church,” Chief Flatley added. “That would have been an after-the-fact thing, but if parents wanted to find out about their students … that’s where we would have tried to do something like that. If the kids were fine, they would go back to their parents and if the kids were in the hospital you could relay that, too.”

There are other aspects of a real-world mass casualty incident that could not have been effectively simulated Saturday. For instance, the chief explained, police would have opened homicide investigations into the two “deaths” on the ball field, a media pen would have been set up on the track and there, of course, would have been more officers from Southold and other departments across the county on hand.

“The police department [would be] responsible for securing that ball field,” he said of a real-life shooting. “If there was an incident there you would have parents everywhere [entering] that school … Within 45 minutes, I could have had at least another 30 officers there.”

While the firefighter and EMS response training unfolded outside, police officers from various Suffolk County departments trained inside the school for their role in such an event: finding and neutralizing the shooter.

In small groups, officers were ushered through various training courses before practicing taking down a shooter with paintball guns. Seated on stools in an art classroom, where a poster explaining the four “C’s” of art — concept, composition, craftsmanship and creativity — hung on the wall, Dennis O’Connor, a tactical medic with the Suffolk County Police Department, taught the officers TECC — tactical emergency combat care.

The officers learned how to properly self-apply a tourniquet within 30 seconds in case of injury and to assist any fellow officers who might also be wounded. Police are instructed to not care for any other victims they may encounter: Their priority is to prevent any more death or injury by finding and neutralizing the shooter as soon as possible. 

Support staff from Human Understanding and Growth Services, a Westhampton-based nonprofit that addresses the needs of Suffolk County’s youth, worked with the student volunteers Saturday to ensure they don’t experience any excess anxiety from the simulated experience.

“It’s pretty realistic, the scene and the sounds, and the visuals from the scene are pretty impactful,” Kym Laube, executive director of HUGS Inc, previously told The Suffolk Times. “We work on the back end with students and do a little decompression and a little transition and just talk with them about ways they can reduce stress, no matter what the stress is, not only for this event.”

Various school officials attended both the ball field simulation and the police training Saturday morning, including Mattituck-Cutchogue school district superintendent Shawn Petretti. With the new school year just around the corner, the training exercise will surely be addressed in conversations throughout area districts.

“There will be a debrief with the staff, and then anything we learn through the activities from today will be relayed to the kids through our emergency drills,” Mr. Petretti said. “We go heavy in the beginning of the year … we run through a battery of those drills.”

It has yet to be decided if the drill will become an annual exercise. Mr. Bancroft said it will be up to local agencies whether to have him back next year. If he returns, he will certainly need plenty of time to prepare.

“It’s a huge undertaking,” he said. “I have well over 200 man hours personally invested in putting this drill together. I don’t have a staff, I’m one guy.”