Preparing for the Worst: Emergency Responders Practice at New Canaan School

Despite the lack of any real danger Thursday, the halls of Saxe Middle School were filled with police officers searching for an active shooter, victims strewn about the floor and classrooms filled with volunteers all on lockdown.

Organized by Office of Emergency Management Director Mike Handler, close to 100 local, state and federal emergency responders and law enforcement officers and volunteers from the New Canaan community gathered to run through scenarios presenting fictional dangers to the school as a way to test best practices and procedures.

"Multiple agencies have gathered today to simulate critical incidents through different scenarios," said interim New Canaan Police Chief Leon Krolikowski. "We're going to run through a number of scenarios as if we had officers who got the call while on a shift to see how they would handle it."

In addition to the New Canaan Police Department, units and officials from Darien, Stamford, Newtown, the Fairfield County Hazardous Materials Unit, the state police and FBI attended the exercise as well to both witness the practices in action and act as responding units in the various drills.

"We're assisting New Canaan with their active shooter scenario because we participate in similar training ourselves," said Jim Comstock of the Stamford Police Department Bomb Squad. "I'm probably going to act as the shooter and they're going to come in and hopefully take care of me. It's a really good training exercise and people are doing this all around the county now."

The training consisted of four "modules." The first was threat recognition, where members of the schools front desk responded to unknown visitors to the school and different situations created by those visitors. The second was the elimination of those threats. The third was reaction by additional emergency responders like fire and EMS personnel evacuating classrooms and setting up triage units. The fourth was reunification of parents with their children following the resolution of a critical situation.

In addition to training for the appropriate actions to take, town officials were able to test a new technology within the school through their training as well. The AmNet AnyCam system was put to the test and allowed emergency responders to access the school's interior camera system from their iPhones and iPads, where they were able to view personnel movement on-the-go in real-time and even review floor plans of the building.

"We've provided camera surveillance technology that operates on mobile devices," said Amnet CEO and New Canaan resident Alex Sulpizi. "Officials are able to access the school's cameras from anywhere, from the principal to the police chief. It's an innovative approach. If the main office is locked down and that's where the camera monitors are, then what good does that do anyone?"

Community volunteers were as young at teens looking for a way to help their town refine practices that could ultimately save lives some day.

"I think it's really interesting," said 17-year-old Michael Pickhardt, of New Canaan. "It's a great opportunity to see what's involved in creating these safety measures and it's great to be involved."

"We're shaping a safer environment for the next generation of incoming students," added Eugene Constandaki, 17, also of New Canaan.

First Selectman Robert Mallozzi III was even on hand and pitching in, helping carry out "victims" on stretchers during the third module of training, each of whom had been tagged with a number of fictitious injuries or symptoms.

"It's an extraordinary amount of cooperation between town, state and federal resources and I'm very proud of Mike Handler pulling this together," Mallozzi said. "Exercises like today's are vital to our understanding of what works and what doesn't work during real scenarios where danger is present."

The fourth module, where frantic parents were fearfully and loudly demanded to be reunited with their parents, presented the first time New Canaan officials tried out different possibilities for handling that scenario.

"It's something we've never trained or drilled on before," Handler said.

After reunification, Handler reflected on the day saying he wouldn't be able to really tell how well the exercises acted as litmus tests for the policies in place until he'd had a chance to review the notes from the "Hot Wash" session, where volunteers and officers were debriefed and provided feedback on what they saw working and what wasn't.

"It's too soon to say [how the day went overall,]" Handler said. "I can say I've accomplished what I set out to accomplish today, which was to see how responders and administrators reacted to scenarios with some semblance of reality. I saw policies we've set in place over the last year need to be reworked. It demonstrated in individual departments areas for improvement. And working with state and federal law enforcement provided the framework for working with them again."