CL360’s Louis Rapoli and Brian Reilly recently attended the 2014 ALERRT Active Shooter Integrated Response Conference in San Marcos, TX. It was the first time such a national conference was held with the specific mission of bridging law enforcement , fire and EMS responses to these events
One of the topics covered was the concept of deploying a Rescue Task Force (RTF) at the scene; The RTF couples non-tactical fire department/EMS providers with patrol officers to rapidly enter a “warm zone” – where bullets are not flying, but the scene has not yet been given the “all clear”. The armored care providers are enveloped and protected by a team of law enforcement personnel, whose sole objective is to protect the care providers implementing casualty care. The team then works in concert to extract the victim(s) from this zone and prepare casualties for transport to definitive care.
Another seminar was entitled, “First Care Providers”, which underscored the critical role of non-traditional responders in the Trauma Care Chain of Survival. After 911 is called, public safety agencies are generally still several minutes away. On-scene citizens, such as teachers, should know what measures to take in the first few minutes to prevent rapid death from bleeding and airway compromise. In the past few decades, aggressive training for citizens in CPR techniques (and now AED’s) has led to astonishing survival rates for cardiac arrest. The same concepts need to be applied to traumatic injuries.