An active-shooter drill Friday morning at River Park Hospital helped local emergency agencies prepare themselves for a mad gunman unleashing an unprovoked attack in this community.
“It helps us get on the same page,” said McMinnville Police Chief Bryan Denton of the drill involving local law enforcement and emergency agencies at Saint Thomas River Park Hospital. “We can assess our response through drills like these.”
The drill began just after 9 a.m. when 911 dispatched police to the hospital, telling them there was a man with a gun who had opened fire inside the facility. Dispatchers were quick to warn the fictitious shooting was a drill to avoid a War of the Worlds-type incident where scanner listeners might believe the armed assault was real.
As emergency responders took their positions around the hospital, a tactical team made its way into the building and began sweeping the hospital, looking for the gunman. When he was found, barricaded in a room minutes later, a negotiator spoke with him on the phone and convinced him to surrender. The entire drill took about half an hour.
“We streamlined it a bit since we were conducting it in a working hospital where there were patients present,” Denton said, noting future drills at other facilities will be more involved.
E911 director Chuck Haston said such drills are important because it gives emergency responders an idea of how they will communicate if an assailant opens fire.
“Back at the Twin Towers, a major problem was you had fire departments and ambulance personnel and many of them couldn’t communicate with one another because of the numerous frequencies,” Haston said. “Drills like this help us learn how we will communicate between agencies during a time of emergency.”
Ambulance service director Brian Jennings said the hospital drill was important for another reason.
“The hospital is where we take people once something like an active-shooter incident happens,” Jennings said. “This adds a new dimension to an already stressful situation.”
Police were joined at the scene by members of the Sheriff’s Department, Emergency Management Agency, McMinnville Fire Department, and Warren County Ambulance Service.