all right good afternoon I'm uh Bob walteri Pinellas County sheriff with me is Kevin Hendrick the Pinellas County school superintendent and Rich gancy division chief of the St Pete fire department representing Pinellas County Fire and EMS today we're in the process now of concluding uh an act of assailant mass casualty exercise the exercise today involved a shooter at a school as well as what we turned into a non-school site and insurance company across the street we wanted to simulate real life what would happen and then practice our response law enforcement response along with the schools and Fire EMS the shooter today parked in the parking lot one across the street to the insurance company where he had worked and had been fired and then came across here to the school where he had been a recent student he began fire and he was at a AR-15 rifle went through the school fired got to a classroom was confronted by school resource deputies who he shot and they returned fire and killed him there's a second shooter in the school as we simulated that they engaged that shooter and then really practiced everything that would happen during a real active assailant situation which is single Deputy response which is setting up casualty collection points which is rescue task forces with Fire EMS going through the whole process securing the school and we had multiple scenes so we really complicated it we had multiple Shooters here today there's no doubt as we view all of the video we get feedback from everybody that participated there's going to be a lot of lessons learned from this but that's what we do and that's why we do this is to figure out what our vulnerabilities are train on it fill fill those holes so we can be better and be better next year when we do it and every time we do this and God forbids the real God forbid the real thing happens that we're as prepared as we can possibly be so that's the purpose of it also today we had a reunification site and that it was run by the schools the superintendent can talk about that a little bit which is also a very very crucial part of this because especially in a school but really at any site where one of these happens is all the people that are there have to be reunified with family and friends and that can't happen at the site itself so there has to be a family reunification Center the school district ran that today they're in the process of doing that now we're just over there and it seemed to be going very well but like this part of that this exercise that part of it too I'm sure that there will be some lessons learned and we'll figure out ways to do better so I'll turn it over to the superintendent and then to the Chief and then we'll answer any questions that you all have thank you Sheriff we hope that none of these scenes ever play out in our schools but we have to practice and so here we are in the Summer where we train and get better and this is why we're doing the second consecutive summer we've gone through one of these exercises uh different scenarios as the sheriff said but on our end we have a lot of Administrators teachers participating as actors today trying to learn as much as they can from this scenario our our part as the sheriff said was the reunification site that's going on now where we bring the parents in bring the students in offer counseling make sure they have what they need reunify them with their parents and then work collaboratively with agencies to move forward each of these sites and and each of these times we do something like this we learn something and we learn from the incidents that happen across the country and we try to get better we often say it's not if this will happen but when and we don't want it to happen in our schools and it's important for our parents to know that we are prepared we are making them as safe as we possibly can and this District in this county is prepared to address these things when they occur and so I thank all of our partners that are here today from across our County from the Sheriff's Office fire departments EMS our Emergency Management Systems all of our cities that have participated because all of us need each other in these times of Crisis and we're happy to be a part of the sheriff and the team to make this happen so I'll turn it to the chief thank you my name is Rich cancer division chief of training for St Pete and also the training Chief coordinator for the county which is 19 to 20 agencies including dispatch so I was honored to be here with the sheriff and the school board to facilitate this type of training it's imperative that we work together on the missions while they're different that's always important that we save as many lives as we can and to identify the things that we need to fix in each discipline to be better in the future just honored to be here and reiterate with the sheriff and and the school board had said thank you don't have any choice any questions anybody anything sure can you talk to me about the response today what were your takeaways I know it's only been an hour or two but can you talk about initial takeaways in terms of that response yeah some of the things I saw initially and of course you know we're going to do a big after action on this will be a report I have to be cautious about uh analyzing it too much at this point because I have bits and pieces of it and things that I saw some of the things I saw that I liked were the single Deputy response as soon as the deputies got here they were going in um and there was absolutely no hesitation to confront the shooter and to go to the sound of the gunshots a couple things that I saw that our room for improvement would be setting up what we call the casualty collection Point uh probably too close to what we call The Hot Zone so those are some inside baseball things as they would say some maybe some things that seem nuanced to people but they're important to us because we want to get this as right as we possibly can so as we look at it we'll analyze those things some of the things that we saw in last year's drill were doing better this year and one of the things that did happen this year that didn't happen last year was the formation of what we call rescue task forces which is a combination of Fire EMS and law enforcement going in together we didn't see it developed as much last year so that's a really good thing that we saw this year I think there's room to fine-tune it some more but that's with everything and that's what we do and that's why we're doing this so we had multiple police agencies uh probably just under the total number of people it took to do this was about 300 people multiple police agencies Fire EMS everybody coming together the teamwork that I saw when you're taking people that are blinded from other agencies and putting them together I liked what I saw with that and these were people that don't work together I mean what happened is is we set up the scenario we set up the framework for this the people we had responding were given just certain information and that's it just like they would be if they're on the street they're in a station they're waiting for a call they got the call and they responded so for them to come together these aren't people who work together every day yet everybody from the Largo Police Department St Pete Clearwater Sheriff's Office Indian Shores different people so the fact that they're able to come together like that and that was a good out some of it respond and then the subsequent groups and where you have so I was there the superintendent and I and others were following the shooter and I can tell you that and I know this from you know all the work I've done and sharing the stone Windows commission over the last five years and studying these and being involved with it and one of the things that we know when it played out here today is that it feels like a really really long time from the time the shooting starts until the health Force gets there and it's a long time in the sense there's going to be a lot of casualties because the cops can't get there fast enough and this goes to the point that we stress and you know people don't like to hear it but there's a few realities the superintendent touched on one of them it's not a question of if this is going to happen again it is going to happen again the questions when and where we hope it's not here but we need to be as prepared as we possibly can another thing that is going to happen is that it's going to happen fast so if you look at Stoneman Douglas you look at what happened in Parkland 34 people shot in or killed in three minutes and 51 seconds so the majority of these they're over with very fast most of them are over within three min minutes or so three four minutes or so and you have mass casualties and somebody has to be there to stop it as soon as it starts because the cops can't be there fast enough I saw some of you there and when the shooting started between the time the shooting started over the insurance company he got out of the car walked across the street went in went down the hallway shot into the offices turned around came back was already in the parking lot shooting and in the courtyard look at how many people were shot or killed and there wasn't the first cop there so that's it feels like a really long time but the response was probably only a couple of minutes but when you're in involved in it and the number of people that are casualties because this happened so fast it's it's significant so I was happy with the response because it's consistent with what you're going to have because cops aren't going to be everywhere all the time in fact I made a comment to the superintendent about as we were walking is is that I was listening on the radio as we were seeing all these people being shot and all these people going down and all the casualties and I was telling them on the radio that what I was hearing was it hadn't even been dispatched yet that's concerning and again that's why you got to have somebody there that can stop it as soon as it starts now here on this campus today there were two sros but the sros who eventually confronted the shooter were at the other end of the campus when he was shooting at the other end so you know that's the reality of it and like you said it's at this point unfortunately not if but when um you guys deal with this every day and I'm sure you're pretty good at disassociating with it but to see just how realistic we were all talking about these wounds were these these actors really were what was well you know it there's all it felt real um and when you hear the gunshots going off you see the people going down you see the casualties and you're able to see it and people were made up there was you know fake blood there's fake wounds or stuff trying to make it as real as possible we're trying and some of what we were doing is is that we're trying to get that gunfire going to get the stimulus going so that when the cops show up we wanted to see what they would do are they going to run towards the stimulus they're going to run towards the gunfire what are they going to do in those circumstances so you know it's it is as real as you can possibly make it you couldn't make it any more real than what we did today and you in the past have talked you know responses in other areas of the country including Parkland that was you know a failure on the school resource officer's part so what do you train and tell your deputies here how should they be responding to one of these situations just that that they go in and they go right to the stimulus and they don't stop until they kill the killer I mean that's the bottom line of what law enforcement's responsibility is and and others the Fire EMS uh have their responsibilities and that our initial responsibility is not to treat anybody and that's one of the things that's hard to get instilled in the mind of the cops because they want to save people they want to help that's not their job that's the Fire EMS job their job is is to Stop The Killing and you got to walk past people you got to step over victims you got to go past them because nobody can do their job and nobody can save these people or help save these people or try to until the shooting stops and the killing stops so our job our role is to do that so that's one of the things that is hard to kind of break that instinct of wanting to help and to go past people is that if a copier with goes down they go down you keep going because otherwise the killing is going to continue especially in a situation today where you had a guy who was simulated but as an AR-15 AR-15 is wreak havoc and they're going to keep that killing going and if you're sitting they're attending to him and the shooter comes around the corner you're going to get shot so you got to keep going so that's uh you know one of the biggest things in instilling in them and also just the the methodical nature of what they need to do and how they need to clear the buildings how they need to respond how they need to work together the communication needs to happen so these are all the important things that go into the training and as I said I I think we made progress from last year I could see some areas certainly today where there's room for improvement but overall very happy with how it went and one of the things that I'm happiest about is the exercise itself because it exposes people to it and lets us see you know what we can do and test ourselves that's really what it is it's about testing the limits and trying to push the limits so that we can deal with it again if it does happen here and we're best prepared about the students involved can you discuss who they were volunteer um just kind of background on them sure we had adults involved where our administrators teachers students were a lot from this school some were thespians from other schools that we had many though were were seminal students some of which were related to School Employees right and then are now reconnecting at our reunification site we work hard you know on the front end to make sure that any of these situations we prepare everybody for them there's a lot of mental health and wellness checks that go into getting ready for this day but as we think about an actual event all of the supports that are needed and so it's School staff but it's also County Health Department as well helping us with that but the students you know this is a part unfortunately of the world that we live in today and so the students were very excited to help keep our County safe what did you see um or is there anything are there any takeaways on your side well one of the things that you know coming out of the Stoneman Douglas and the work with that is a lot of the school safety and security measures so are our doors locked right what are our teachers and administrators doing what is happening you know in this case they went across the parking lot so you know in a regular school day the parking lot should be clear but if it's you know is it lunchtime what are those things so we're looking for some of those Safety and Security checkpoints from a school's perspective and then even looking at as the sheriff's team is coming through what things might we be able to do to make their job easier in one of these situations and we've had lots of conversations about keys and key fobs and how many of those can we get into the hands of these teams and so that's something we've been working on see a lot of improvements you know I'm no expert on the law enforcement side but even from what I see and talking to the sheriff we see some of that but on our end the reunification site we've already seen improvements particularly in how students are checked in and the care and well-being of that I think one of the things that's always going to be a challenge is working with parents as they're so eagerly awaiting to see their child that's something that is always going to be a struggle I think for any school or place that has this as people are waiting for their loved ones I saw improvements from last year but I think we can always improve I did I think you know the sheriff's team you know just just some things there's a long after action report that we've met on probably six times this year and we saw those things in play today you know one of the things I think is always is a challenge as an educator is when you're seeing any of this happen in your school and that's the the part that we just have to say these drills are worth it so that it doesn't happen in our schools and we can solve them quicker can you talk about just again the reason why we're here and why you specifically chose this location and across the street turning it into a insurance company well I mean as far as this location is concerned um we want to do a big excuse me a bigger campus than we did last year this obviously is a big campus it was a conducive environment because we wanted to assimilate something that was off campus and on campus we wanted to incorporate that uh so we wanted to do some things differently than last year so it was it was you know that was really the reason uh to make it harder of course we put a second shooter in it we did an off-site location from the schools so we had victims that were non-school victims School victims so that that's the reason why we did it here again is to kind of raise the bar take it up from our level and the one next year I'm sure we'll incorporate some other things to make it even harder than that so we're going to look at continuing to do these things we may do one that is in a non-school environment some of the things that we didn't incorporate in this that I'd like to see us incorporate in the future is to get the hospitals involved further with Fire EMS and in that role to do some additional things with reunification so there's there's so much that it goes into a a good a proper response to these things that it takes a lot of time and these take these things to do them right takes a lot of planning a lot of effort a lot of work worth every bit of it but again there's a lot that goes into it so um the last these two that we've done have been School involved we certainly will do another one next year the school involved but we may do one someplace else it's just a bit because these things can happen any place and sometimes depending upon you know where it is the new there will be different nuances to the response all right thanks everybody appreciate it thank you