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Fort Hood conducts active shooter training

Posted at 4:01 PM, May 10, 2017
and last updated 2018-11-03 15:19:52-04

"Are you gonna run, are you gonna hide or are you gonna fight?"

-Mark Peterson, Fort Hood Emergency Manager

That's the question when there's an active shooter situation.

"For everybody that lives and works on the installation, us doing training like this only is going to enhance our ability to respond to them, to save lives," Jonathan Caylor of the Directorate of Emergency Services on Fort Hood said.  
    
Fort Hood staged three active shooters to provide first responders of Fort Hood and surrounding cities as well as local hospitals the opportunity to practice in the case of a real emergency.

So, for the last year, Fort hood Emergency Management have prepared for this very training. The Copland Soldier Services employees have been preparing for the last three months. 

"The Copland Center is one of the busiest locations day-in and day-out on the installation," Caylor added. 

"But this building now is trained for an active shooter event," Peterson added. "This training will go to our other directorates and installation support offices, and they will learn from this incident."

A learning lesson that can't be taught too much or too often in light of Fort Hood's previously devastating active shooter situations.  

"All of the real world events that we've had on the installation have absolutely forced us to go back and look at the way we do things, made us take a look at out tactics and go out and find best practices," Caylor said. 

The training exercise included 67 role players who acted as victims with a wide variety of injuries for six local hospitals to practice treatment on. 

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