“No department in the country that I know of could single-handedly handle this,” he said. “No way.”
Take the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut last December. He said if that happened in Hamilton they wouldn’t wait to be asked to respond.
“If something happens at Ross High School, I guarantee you, if we get word there are shots being fired our guys are gone,” he said. “We’ve launched them, because our SWAT officers especially have all their equipment in their cars, they’re en-route. We don’t even wait for a call from the sheriff’s department.”
Jeff Galloway, director of the county’s Emergency Management Agency, said they have three strategically placed mobile mass causality trailers that are fully equipped to handle victims of attacks like the marathon. One trailer can treat 100 people and the other two can handle 35 people apiece. He said they have the equipment to handle any type of mass casualty incident — from trauma to hazardous materials.
Galloway said in his four years with the agency, they have never had to deploy the mobile mass causality trailers.
The EMA also has an annually updated emergency operation plan that assigns out tasks to the various first responders countywide in the event of a disaster, he said. The final piece of the preparedness puzzle is an annual large scale training exercise, where they simulate a mass casualty event.
“Training together in a full scale exercise leads to better cooperation for something like Boston and Texas, when we have to go to the real one,” he said, also referring to the other tragedy this week, the Texas fertilizer plant explosion.
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