Several students still remember the incessant cries of children asking for help or the image of their classmates moaning over apparently lifeless friends.
A father recalls his growing discomfort at the very real aspect of fake wounds and artificial blood.
A fire chief marvels at how well a schoolgirl had played her role as a heartbroken teenager, to the point of making him and three other first responders believe she really needed medical assistance, and an EMT burst into tears.
On a Saturday in early June, less than two weeks after a shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas, killed 19 students and 2 teachers, the small coastal town of Greenport, on the North Fork Peninsula, Long Island (New York), starred in a spectacular exercise: a simulated armed attack on a school.
The objective: for the immediate intervention teams to prepare their reaction to a hypothetical violent attack on a school.
A crime that, in recent years, has become frequent enough in the US to be included in the usual crisis response protocol.
This drill at the Greenport High School, in which, according to the organizers,
involving 62 fictional victims and about 240 first responders from various public safety agencies and fire districts, was not directly related to the delays and mismanagement of the Uvalde shooting.
The practice had been on the agenda for local fire marshals since early January, when First Deputy Chief Alain de Kerillis of the Greenport Fire Department proposed putting it on the year's training schedule.
The world we live in today, he argued, requires instruction so that departments are logistically and psychologically prepared at all times.
“Thirty years ago, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, all we did was put out a fire and then have a couple of beers and talk about how cool it was,”
De Kerillis declared in an interview in mid-June.
“There is something truly evil in what is happening.
How to mentally prepare for it?
A policeman displays a replica of a pistol at Greenport High School.
Lindsay Morris (INSTITUTE)
Data on the frequency and scale of mock school shootings in the United States are scant.
School districts and law enforcement agencies have been doing them since at least 27 people were killed in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
They are not easy exercises to organize or carry out or witness.
They use tension and a high degree of realism as ingredients, and go far beyond the usual, and often legally mandated, lockdown drills held in schools across the country.
In them, students and staff members practice how to take refuge quietly in classrooms or other facilities in the center in order to limit danger and reduce, at least in theory,
the number of victims.
But much more dynamic and intense exercises like this one from Greenport can be used to train not the students and teachers, but the first responders.
There are no national standards for these simulations.
Their design, objectives and techniques vary widely, sometimes including fake active shooters carrying dummy weapons or firing blanks, an element that, like the simulations themselves, has been criticized for the danger of traumatizing participants. , particularly children.
Diana, 16, a student at an institute in the area who wanted to be part of the drill.
She was given the role of dead.Lindsay Morris (INSTITUTE)
The Greenport drill was not mandatory for either staff or students at the center.
It had the voluntary participation of some students and was carried out during a weekend, outside school hours.
The town of Greenport collaborated with Firehouse Training Plus, a private company that, through courses and drills, helps departments improve their abilities to stage this recurring contemporary American horror and try to articulate the means to combat it.
Retired Fire Chief Chip Bancroft explains that the drills require “thorough planning, collaboration and outreach so no one mistakes them for an actual shooting,” and that regardless of public misgivings about the drills,
its demand by school districts and public safety organizations is increasing.
His company, he says, has more requests on Long Island than it can handle.
Officers Jonathan Jensen (left) and Michael Casper, searching for the suspected shooter. Lindsay Morris (INSTITUTE)
In designing the exercise, Bancroft and his colleagues took into account the structural limits of local immediate response capacity.
In many areas of the United States, a mass shooting can almost instantly overwhelm victim care resources.
Out-of-town jurisdictions tend to have few or no ambulances and relatively few first-aid personnel, as well as little or no blood products, hospital beds, or nearby emergency rooms.
Greenport is fortunate to have a fire station with ambulance service a few blocks from the exposed brick school buildings that house public school students from preschool through high school, and a hospital with an emergency department a little more one and a half kilometers.
But the firefighters are volunteers, the ambulance service is made up of two vehicles and the emergency room cannot be expected to attend to 62 patients.
In a matter of minutes, a mass shooting could cause more serious injuries than local services would be able to move or attend to alone.
Student Lainey, while a mock wound is made on her arm.
Lindsay Morris (INSTITUTE)
One of the student volunteers.Lindsay Morris (INSTITUTE)
Also, mass shootings almost always come as a surprise.
Unlike other hazards that can strain emergency response resources—extreme weather events, a wildfire, a pandemic—there is often no warning or sign that allows supervisors to rally their staff or stockpile equipment and supplies in the days or hours before victims are harmed.
Several first aid services would rush to the scene of the shooting at almost the same time, and coordination could fail.
Bancroft and the participating departments hoped that the Greenport exercise would uncover weaknesses and enable improvements to be made before an actual event.
At Greenport High School, the shooting was imagined to take place in the bleachers of the sports field.Lindsay Morris (INSTITUTE)
Student volunteers during the drill at Greenport High School. Lindsay Morris (INSTITUTE)
The scenario created by him imagined that a young man had opened fire on the students and teachers who were sitting in the stands next to the football field, about to attend an animation show.
He also assumed that the attacker was running into the school, where police officers were to contain and arrest him.
In the exercise itself no shooting against the stands was simulated;
the students who volunteered to play the victims did not witness a mock attack.
Instead, two drills were run virtually in parallel.
Outside, next to the sports field, simulated victims took up positions on or near the bleachers, and firefighters and EMTs rushed to treat and evacuate them.
Within,
Although no shooting was staged, several participants said they were upset by the drill, in part because Bancroft and the other organizers characterized the alleged victims with fake gunshot wounds, sprayed them with artificial blood, and assigned them roles to play. These include being in shock, conveying confusion, or appearing inconsolable, terrified, or dismayed.
Four of them had to pretend they were dead.
To add tension and resources, various machines were blowing smoke into the nearby woods;
a car was set on fire, which had to be extinguished, and a medical helicopter was summoned, landing next to the football field to simulate transporting critically ill victims to Stony Brook University Hospital,
The rescue team had to rehearse how to accomplish the greatest number of transfers in the shortest amount of time.Lindsay Morris (INSTITUTE)
The volunteers, nearly all high school students from Greenport or other Suffolk County districts, gathered early to prepare.
Among them was Diana, 16, a Brentwood High School senior who hopes to attend Columbia University and become a gastroenterologist.
When the organizers asked her what role she would like to take on, she chose a bloody option.
She had a latex imitation gunshot wound placed on her forehead and fake blood was sprayed on her torso.
Thus, and with instructions to play dead, she spent much of the morning lying motionless on the grass.
Although she knew that it was a drill, when the exercise began, she felt uneasy.
Her screams startled her.
“One of my best friends, Dayanna, is a very good actress, and I heard her yell:
'Three friends of mine have been shot and no one is helping them!
Please help them!” says the young woman.
“When I heard those words, I imagined the little children of Uvalde screaming and seeing their dead friends.
She hurt me to the core.”
While the first aid technicians were triaging the alleged victims, one of them put a black tag on the alleged victim that distinguished her as deceased and therefore a low priority for evacuation while first responders worked with the living.
She lying face up in the sun, with the ants running from her arms, she heard again the voice of her companion: “These are my friends!
Why do they wear black labels on their clothes?
Her friend Dayanna, a 16-year-old high school student like her, learned about the exercise from the Brentwood Legion Ambulance Service, whose first-aid technician training program both friends take part in.
She was not interested at first, but after the Uvalde murders she changed her mind.
Dayanna, who hopes to attend Stony Brook University and become an ER nurse, felt the need for this kind of preparation.
"Unfortunately things like this happen," she says of mass shootings.
"To avoid more deaths, you have to give a little more of your time."
When the student arrived at the field, she asked to be assigned a difficult role.
“I volunteered to play hysterics,” she explains, so she spent the drill yelling,
running through people with bloody clothes and even pulling rescuers and trying to drag them to stop treating the wounded and help the simulated dead.
“I tried to make it as real as possible,” she explains.
During a mock shooting, stress management team leader Joseph McCarthy tries to calm student Dayanna over the presumed body of a murdered friend.Lindsay Morris (INSTITUTE)
Four students who participated in the drill with fake injuries.Lindsay Morris (INSTITUTE)
One of the firefighters, Deputy Chief Craig M. Johnson of the Greenport department, explains that performances like the one this student was simulating are disconcerting.
"The screaming shocked us," he admits, "I had to back up for a moment and collect my thoughts before continuing."
The most unexpected consequence of the Greenport drill would come a week later.
A 15-year-old boy, a 3rd-year high school student at the center, was arrested for threatening to attack the school, authorities said.
The teen's name was not released to protect his privacy.
After the arrest, the fire chiefs declared that their duty and the point of these drills were even more evident: "Our children," concluded Chip Bancroft, "must have all the security and protection that we can afford."
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©
The New York Times
/ Translation of News Clips
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