Question

As much as I hate to say it, our department has taken preparatory steps to deal with active shooter scenarios with multiple policies, procedures, and the addition of ballistic gear for each member on duty that is stored on the apparatus. We have had two law enforcement officers murdered by active shooters in our community in the last eight years. During the first incident, one of our ambulances was provided an incorrect location by dispatch and they were in direct fire but luckily rounds only struck the vehicle and none of our personnel. In this situation as described, there appears to be an active shooter rather than ordinance/ammunition simply “popping” off due to the structure fire. It is not easy to determine the exact steps we would take as the situation is extremely dynamic with many variables that would affect decision making but the first step would be for personnel to find cover and prevent any injury or loss of personnel (Fond du Lac Fire/Rescue SOP 2.12, 2018). The next step would be a rapid gathering of intel to determine what the risks are and where they are located along with identifying safe cordons of travel for personnel. We would make attempts to get personnel who are out of the line of fire, to apparatus to don ballistic gear under their bunkers (Fond du Lac Fire/Rescue SOP 2.14, 2018). We would quickly establish a unified command system with law enforcement (LE) and develop plans to safely establish firefighting operations and rescue task force (RTF) operations (Fond du Lac Fire/Rescue SOP 4.8, 2018) while LE initiated contact teams to address the shooter. The most complicated factor to deal with in this scenario is the apparent use of fire as a weapon. There are no detailed policies or procedures that we have that accurately identifies a standard plan to deal with these situations. The best policy is to attempt to put water on the fire remotely from the cover of a mechanized armored source such as a Bearcat or to access the fire from a location outside of the line of fire. Research from the FBI (Blair & Schweit, 2014) shows that 69.7% of all active shooter incidents during 2000-2013 ended in five minutes or less. In many cases, the incident is over before LE even arrives. In a situation like this, our benefit is that we always have LE involved in our fire operations so a situation like this would receive a quick and effective response and hopefully mitigated in short time allowing unfettered rescue and firefighting operations. In these situations, there are no easy answers. It is a balance of risk versus reward based on intel that is immediately available.

What would you have done differently?

Answer 1

In this situation, i would like to help the local community and civil administration. I would try to make a team of people who talks to each stakeholders to meet the challenges like any disaster, fire , flood, etc. I would be provide special care and protection to the children, senior citizens , disabled etc. It will be a better option to use modern technologies to control the damages by integrating the forces.