By Jay Warren
WSLS10 Anchor
Published: March 17, 2008

Sirens, flashing lights, wounded people dripping in fake blood, even screaming victims. It all looked very real and all too familiar. But it was a drill hosted by VMI.

“They [VMI] just said we’re going to offer you the facility and you come and play. And, that’s what we did,” said Lexington Police Chief Steve Crowder.

This training, that there’s an active shooter on campus, had a real sense of urgency. Whether it was police in full armor storming the barracks or EMT’s carrying out the wounded then assessing their injuries in a makeshift triage, there’s a lesson in it all.

“We learned that things can go wrong. A lot of things went right, but there were issues to go wrong,” Chief Crowder said.

At the drill there were a lot of different colored trucks and uniforms because there were a lot of different agencies involved in the drill including Lexington, Rockbridge County and Buena Vista Police and EMS, State Police, the Red Cross, VMI and Washington & Lee Police, and others. The key to the training is coordination. How do all of thee different groups work together?

“It all comes down to coordination, communication and cooperation,” said Captain Richard Denney with State Police.

Captain Denney, who oversees the Salem District for State Police, said communication is often an issue in mass response situation including different agencies using different radio systems. That’s where State Police’s Remote Command Center comes in. It can coordinate everything, including the differing radio systems.

The groups involved in the drill looked to previous disasters like Virginia Tech to see what could be improved. At the top of the list was this: just be ready.

“We could hope that it wouldn’t happen, but we would much rather be prepared to deal with something just in the very rare event that it would happen,” said Lt. Col. Stewart MacInnis with VMI.