CALEDONIA, Mich. — Police and fire departments in Kent County are training to respond to active shooter and stabbing situations.
Local departments met Thursday night for a review of reports from past mass casualty incidents, like the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado in 2012.
"(Law enforcement) try to learn from every single incident that happens, and we make modifications as we go. The modifications that we're training on tonight, all national fire and police agencies in the country are being exposed to this and have been within the last few years," Kent County Emergency Management Coordinator Matt Groesser says.
It's called Rescue Task Force training, a first responder strategy of providing life-saving medical care to victims and getting them out of an active assailant situation as quickly as possible.
Groesser says they've learned that getting victims out of active situations as quickly as possible is key to their survival.
The night started with a presentation, followed by hands-on practice.
"In partnership, those groups go into what we call 'the warm zone,' so an area that maybe has been quickly cleared, but maybe not completely secured by law enforcement," Groesser says. "(They're) looking for any type of shooting or stabbing victims that may be in there so that they can provide tourniquet care, chest seals, Israeli bandages, anything along those lines, and then get them out into an ambulance as quickly as possible."
This is the county's final rescue task force training of the year. In previous trainings, they practiced scenarios in different settings.
"We're actually trying to take different types of facilities each time we do this training. This can happen anywhere, as we know. And so it's something that we take very seriously, and we want to make sure that our first responders have a variety of training so that they're learning the concepts, but not necessarily only in a school setting, or only in a church setting, or township office or a government building. So we're trying to get as much of a blend of that as possible each time we do the training," Groesser says.
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