Napa drill to prepare first responders for mass shooting

On Saturday, Napa County police officers, firefighters and paramedics will practice a number of skills they hope they’ll never have to use.

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The former home of Harvest Middle School in Napa becomes a training ground for public safety officials as they prepare to protect and evacuate people during a gun attack. During two drills in the morning and afternoon, first responders will use simulated weapons, sirens, drones and ambulances to practice the skills and tactics needed to stop a gunman and save lives.

Training will take place from 8am to 5pm at 2449 Old Sonoma Road, where Harvest School operated until its closure at the end of the 2021-22 school year.

The exercise – which will come after three mass shootings in California this month, including the shooting of seven people in Half Moon Bay on Monday – is about more than learning how to engage a gunman to tending to wounded victims. designed to encourage the teamwork first responders need to get people out of harm’s way, according to Napa Fire.

“The purpose of the exercise is to prepare first responders, medical personnel and supporting agencies for a large-scale critical incident where communication and partnership between agencies are essential,” the department said in its Thursday announcement of the exercise. “By having hospital staff, police and fire departments, law enforcement and firefighters working together for this highly realistic training scenario, all agencies hope to be better prepared for real-world critical incidents that may occur throughout the City and County of Napa.”

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Attending will be members of the Napa and American Canyon Police Departments, as well as the Napa County Sheriff’s Office and the California Highway Patrol. Other agencies include Napa Fire, Napa County Fire, the county Office of Emergency Services, and American Medical Response, the county’s ambulance operator.

“The goal is for us to work together and hone our capabilities for an unfortunate event like this,” said battalion commander Ty Becerra of Napa Fire, the city agency organizing the exercise.

Saturday’s drill, which follows about two years of smaller training sessions, aims to improve speed and efficiency when there are multiple casualties and danger overwhelms security forces’ initial response – and first responders need to call for reinforcements and quickly figure out how they come medical help to patients.

Public safety personnel at the drill will be dressed and equipped as if they were facing an active shooter in a school building, Becerra said Tuesday. Firefighters and police officers will don personal protective equipment, authorities will attempt to coordinate their efforts as if an attacker were roaming campus, and medical personnel will rescue “victims” — a group of role-players drawn from the Napa Community Response Team and the Napa Community Response Team come from Napa’s Explorer program—from treatment and transportation buildings to hospitals.

According to Becerra, a 21-year Napa Fire veteran, the active shooter drills will reflect how the tactic evolved in hopes of stopping an attacker more quickly. In particular, he said, firefighters and other first responders have moved away from the idea of staging a crime scene far away until it is deemed safe, and instead are now being taught to create a “warm” zone that is not yet fully secured. but is closer to those in need.

“We’re taking more risks than we have in the past,” he said. “We have people bleeding, and once the bleeding starts, we only have so much time before someone bleeds out. That’s why we intervene with the help of law enforcement agencies; They are our shield when we go in to get people out.”

Saturday’s training will also include members of the Providence Queen of the Valley Medical Center practicing setting up a base station to coordinate medical care during an act of mass violence, Becerra said. During an attack, the station would help determine where victims would be taken depending on the severity and urgency of their injuries — by ground ambulance or helicopter, to Queen’s or Santa Rosa Hospital’s trauma center, or to Children’s Hospital in Oakland.

Although law enforcement will not close Old Sonoma Road or nearby roads, authorities asked local residents to avoid the area during practice and to use alternate routes if possible.

The Napa drill will be the second held in the county in recent months. In August, law enforcement, firefighters and paramedics from Upvalley in St. Helena joined forces with active shooters at Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School in an exercise in which volunteers took on the roles of victims or shooters.

A farm worker killed seven people in consecutive shootings at two mushroom farms that had employed him in Northern California, and the massacre is being considered a “violent workplace incident,” officials said Tuesday, as the state mourned its third mass killing in eight days. Officials arrested a suspect in Monday’s shooting, 66-year-old Chunli Zhao, after finding him in his car in a sheriff’s substation parking lot, San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus said. Seven people were found dead and an eighth injured at the farms on the outskirts of the coastal community of Half Moon Bay, the sheriff’s office said. The sheriff’s office said seven of the victims were men and one was a woman. Some were Asian and some Hispanic, and some were migrant workers.