You may have noticed signs around town talking about an event planned for early August.  While it might sound alarming, the Active Shooter Training Exercise is designed to help prepare all the county’s organizations and groups that will need to respond to such an emergency  should it ever occur.  The Sheriffs Office, School District, Oneida County Ambulance, Search and Rescue, Oneida County Officials, and Nell J Redfield Memorial Hospital are the most directly involved entities, but such a critical incident will involve the support of many others.  The better prepared all parties can be, the quicker the response time will be, the less chance of miscommunication and mistakes, and more adroit the reaction.

While Malad might not seem like a place where any such thing could happen, an analysis of a year’s worth of school shooting incidents shows that the size of the town does not have any direct correlation on the likelihood of an incident occurring.  In fact, a proportional majority of gun deaths take place in suburban and rural areas, partly as the result of suicide by firearm being included in the numbers.  Another important factor is that security protocols tend to be less rigid in smaller areas, and the agencies involved have less experience dealing with the threats or incidents.  For Malad, training is an important way to improve the response capabilities of local agencies.

However, those agencies are very clear that they do not want to panic members of the public, or create a dangerous situation in an attempt to prevent one, and have asked the word to be spread to the community. 

The drill will take place on August 7, and the Sheriff’s Office and emergency management officials want to make sure that people know that there will be intense activity at the High School on that day, but that it will be a controlled exercise that does not present any actual danger or threat to the community.  In fact, the only real potential for problems comes in the form of panicked reaction, which is why the word is being aggressively put out into the public.  Make sure to inform your neighbors and friends, as the more the town is prepared for it, the smoother the operation will go.

In many ways, these exercises function like stress tests to determine where, if anywhere, there are weaknesses in the incident response networks.  For instance, problems with communication networks or chains of command might emerge that had not been anticipated.  The test allows authorities a way to discover any problems of that sort when the stakes are significantly lower than they would be in a live incident.

It is also the case that many of the individuals involved in the response, while used to trauma in various forms, may not have any direct experience with the emotional and intellectual impact of a purposeful, active shooter in a school setting.