Roughly 300 first response personnel and Wyoming National Guard members, some in Black Hawk helicopters, reacted to the situation at hand during a large-scale mass casualty training at Northwest College on Wednesday.

Elise Lowe, a Cody physician with the Big Horn Basin Healthcare Coalition, co-directed the training with Park County’s Homeland Security Director Jeff Martin. The event initially was going to be a countywide active shooter exercise for regional first responders when planning began a year ago, but it eventually combined with the National Guard’s statewide Vigilant Guard exercise, which added a hazardous material component and special teams to the exercise.

Martin said the main focus of the event is getting law enforcement and EMS workers from all hospitals training on the same event “and seeing what that integration looks like.”

“NWC was introduced to the Incident Command System in 2014 and we’ve run drills almost every year since then, whether they’re tabletop exercises, full scale trainings … or somewhere in between,” said Carey Miller, NWC Communications and Marketing Director. “The types of emergencies we’ve drilled on have been natural disasters, facility fires/explosions, active shooters (with and without mock fatalities), and even a cyber ransomware event.”

Miller said the last full scale training was held in 2016.

Agencies involved in the training in some capacity included Powell Valley Health, Thermopolis and Cody Regional Health, EMS, Powell Police, Cody Police, the Park County Sheriff’s Department, Powell Fire Department and the regional emergency response team based out of Worland as well as Guardian Flight.

Gov. Mark Gordon and other members of the Legislature along with members of the Tunisian National Guard, who are in a partnership with the Wyoming National Guard, observed the training. Martin said that this is evidence that the group of first responders training today are dedicated and set up a “great scenario.”

“So what we’re doing here is we’re running through multiple different scenarios where EMS and law enforcement are combining teams into a rescue task force,” Martin said ahead of the event. “They’re going in and in a safe manner we’re trying to get as many patients out as fast as we can without that wait time between, ‘It’s safe we can come in now.’”

Lowe said that mass casualty events are becoming more common and it is important to be ready for them. The data of past mass casualty events shows that a “very critical point” is the intersection of law enforcement and EMS. After Action Reports show that whether or not law enforcement is able to communicate with EMS when the event is safe enough to remove injured individuals is where “people live or die.”

“The moment an active shooter [event] occurs, even the biggest departments, the biggest counties, they’re almost practically overwhelmed,” Martin said. “There’s a lot going on, there’s a lot of moving pieces. So for a county, like Park County, we don’t get an opportunity like this to train with all of our responders, all of our hospitals, coordinating that response together.”

He added that not only would discussion continue after each scenario but months after the event.

 “If it looks like we need to do some follow up training, or some tabletop training, or even just come in and just have a discussion, we’re going to do that,” Martin said. “So whatever it takes to get to the end game that we’re trying to get to, which is everybody on the same page talking and communicating, we’ll do whatever it takes.”

Lowe said the event received a lot of support from the community including volunteers, employers granting time off work, Northwest College allowing the use of buildings and Groathouse Construction, who altered the perimeter of their construction zone for the event. 

“I want the citizens to know that we’re out here, our responders are out here. Some of them are out here, on their days off, constantly training, constantly sharpening those skills to be able to come out and provide that resource that they’re here to do,” Martin said. “So just that we’re here, we’re thinking about how we can be safer as a community every single day.”