Sue Lani Madsen: Multiagency drill a stress test for the system

Nobody wants to be Uvalde. It’s a refrain repeated many times in the nearly year of planning leading to the Screaming Eagles Active Assailant Exercise on the K-12 school campus in Reardan.

Uvalde, Texas, has become a synonym for lack of preparation, poor command structure and communication breakdowns in response to an active shooter. It’s why law enforcement officers from three counties and seven agencies, along with local fire and EMS, spent Friday stress-testing systems, should the unthinkable happen in our rural community.

Three significant situations in the past school year prompted the Reardan-Edwall School District to go beyond planning to a full-scale multiagency active assailant drill. One required an emergency evacuation of the entire campus. “Hope is not a strategy,” Superintendent Eric Sobotta said. “We can sit around and hope nothing is going to happen, but we choose to be as prepared as we possibly can. Our board and our district want to do everything within our control to keep students safe.”

And so Friday, I joined my colleagues from Lincoln County Fire District 4 for what one observer described as the first of its kind for a rural community in Washington. It was designed to test abilities to work across agency and county lines in a worst-case scenario for any community anywhere.

Nearly 100 people had arrived by the appointed time. Unsurprisingly, to those who know me, I was late. My partner and I arrived in the Edwall EMS response truck and started the exercise with a bang. Literally. While maneuvering in the intersection to get to the last clear parking spot, I clipped the rear bumper of a car driven by a friend of more than 40 years. Fortunately, the only victim was the car, an ignominious start to a day designed to be stressful.

Reardan Station Chief Joe Bell told a KXLY reporter before the event that it’s about “getting the feel of how we’re going to respond, react with each other and keep our emotions behind us as we’re doing our job.”

About two-thirds of the students in the district come from Spokane County while the school is in Lincoln County. Students also choice in from Stevens County. Officers from Reardan Police Department, Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington State Patrol and Spokane Tribal Police all participated.

Every person in the park was checked by the training unit from Spokane County and cleared of weapons, except for a designated security team protecting the drill. Training weapons were issued to provide real-world sound and required real-world eye protection against nonlethal projectiles. Being stripped of the tools of their profession was stressful for law enforcement members, now flagged with crime scene tape tied on their shoulders.

Journalists were weapons checked and issued green safety vests. Players were in standard duty uniforms with yellow safety vests. The controllers and observers in orange vests were the “invisibles” and included representatives from ESD 101 and Chandra Fox, deputy director of emergency management for Spokane County. Assailants would be in black with full helmets and face shields.

After one final joint briefing, 20 volunteer victims and four assailants were sent to set the stage at the campus. Victims were school staff and their own children, plus superintendents from the Odessa and Harrington school districts observing from the inside.

Lincoln County Fire Department 4 District Chief Jim Adams ran through the plan for responding to real-world 911 calls during the drill, like the one that had just called Davenport Ambulance back to Lincoln Hospital.

FAFB medics were available for minor injuries to players, but if any participants went down with a heart attack our crew would stop the exercise and jump in.

“Shall I just put the pads on now?” joked a 68-year-old volunteer EMT.

First responders deal with stress with a lot of dark humor.

We reviewed using the triage tags designating patients by urgency as green, yellow or red. A black tag for dead or good as dead would mean leave them and move on. Chaplains prepared to practice their role staffing the family advocacy center. It used to be designated the family reunification center, one of the chaplains said as we waited in the park, but they changed the name because not all families will be reunited.

Reminders like that kept our heads in the game.

The script used realistic response times from home or work, although nothing would feel normal about this kind of call, but the staggered arrival of resources is a reality, especially in rural communities. We gamed hard and learned a lot.

Multiagency drills like this improve coordinated response for a variety of risks. School buses crisscrossing the district on any typical day, freight and passenger trains passing hourly, and fast-moving range and timber fires all stress the system. We learned we do a lot of things of right, made note of ways to improve and acknowledged that face-to-face unified command is essential to compensate for incompatible radio systems.

Mass casualty response is a combination of military-style planning and jazz improvisation, and playing improv goes better with a familiar ensemble. At the end of the day, we bonded over pulled pork prepared by the FFA and a debriefing for an after-action report that will help other districts prepare for the unthinkable.

Contact Sue Lani Madsen at rulingpen@gmail.com.