‘Stop the bleeding, keep them breathing and give them a Snuggie’
March 3, 2019
The Zanesville public safety building was transformed into an active shooter simulation over the weekend as a training exercise on how to medically respond to a mass casualty situation,
Local and neighboring fire fighters, EMS and law enforcement officers went through some extra training courtesy of Silverback Safety and Training Solutions, Inc.
The three days of training were designed to educate personnel from area agencies about how to medically respond, treat and evacuate victims during an active shooting.
Day one was comprised of following principles of tactical emergency casualty care. Instructors taught how to treat wounds inflicted by active shooters using the basic components of “stop the bleeding, fix the breathing and keep them warm,” owner of Silverback Safety & Training Solutions Troy Lowe said.
Day two and three included putting those skills into action individually and then working as a team to communicate, use the skills and get the victims out of the situation and to a safe location.
The second floor of the public safety building was converted into the active shooter simulation with gunshots, strobe lights, blaring music, fog-filled rooms, people yelling and wounded victims scattered about.
Teams were sent up through the simulation — wearing ballistic gear including helmets, vests and knee pads — led by a person representing a law enforcement agent followed by medical response personnel and ending with an additional law enforcement agent.
Two gun shots signaled the start of the simulation in which a team would run up the stairs and wait for the law enforcement agent to scan the area before beginning to treat the victims that had various wounds to different parts of their bodies.
Medical response personnel would have to assess each victim, address life-threatening wounds with a variety of tourniquets and patches and stabilize the person before moving on to another victim or removing their victim from the situation if all others were being attended to.
“Stop the bleeding, fix the breathing and give them a Snuggie,” Lowe said. “We’ll be OK, we’ll save lives that way.”
The loud and chaotic environment was setup in an effort to interrupt thinking. Lowe said by practicing the taught skills in such an environment, it taps into the part of the brain that makes a process become second-nature. The interruption of that thought process helps trainees execute the skills they learned without having complete focus.
“The faster we can get help to these people, the higher their survival rate,” Lowe, a former Navy Corpsman with the Marine Corps and a current fire captain and SWAT medic, said. “How we do that is by working together as a team, fire and law enforcement communicating together on a training … (with) skills that we’ve learned.”
The high-stress environment is designed to be the closest experience to a real active shooter incident in an effort to help prepare first responders for a real situation.
“You just have to consciously slow yourself down,” Kyle Jones, a Zanesville firefighter, said. “Stuff like this… it’s confusing, chaos, so you gotta kind of step back in your mind and say, ‘OK, just do what you’ve been trained to do,’ and hopefully things will work out.”
Assistant Fire Chief with ZFD Doug Hobson said the training brought many local agencies together to experience the simulation as a group. He continued by stating that in the event of an active shooter, there will be various agencies from out nearby towns working together to ensure the safety of as many people as possible.
“We always say, unfortunately, that, you know, that active shooter’s out there,” Hobson said. “We pray and pray and pray that it’s never in Zanesville, but there may come a time.”
In addition to law enforcement, fire and EMS, Lowe said his company also trains bystanders.
“As fast as law enforcement and EMS and fire are coming now, no one will beat the person that’s already there,” Lowe said. “So we teach everybody from civilians to fire, EMS to law enforcement.”
Silverback Safety & Training Solutions, Inc. is dedicated to training people on the medical responses in an active shooter situation.
With the increase in mass shootings over the years, many entities and organizations train on responses to active shooter situations, but the founder of Silverback noticed that there was a deficit in training on the medical side of the response.
“One of the things that I saw with the active shooter (training) was there was no addressing the medicine, there’s no addressing the wounds,” Lowe said. “And it’s not their fault, it’s not their lane. So, I kind of took it upon myself to brush up on a lot of the current techniques that do work, that are effective, and we’ve created this program.”
Training is just one aspect of Silverback. The company has developed the Barracuda Intruder Defense System — which is a device designed to secure inward swinging doors from opening from the outside — as well as a variety of BITT kits designed for trauma situations.
Lowe said the best part of his program is saving lives. Merely four days after a paramedic went through Silverback training and obtained one of the trauma kits, that paramedic’s team used the kit to save an officer’s life.
“She was shot four times,” Lowe said. “And they used the gun shot kit that we developed and the training we taught them to save her life. So that was the coolest thing ever.”
Silverback Safety & Training Solutions, Inc. branches out much farther than its Nashport home-base to do training for schools, law enforcement, EMS and fire, various companies, including Honda, and is expanding to Costa Rica to train the Special Emergency Response Team there.
To learn more about Silverback Safety and Training Solutions visit their website here.
The Zanesville Fire Department would like to thank Olive Garden for providing lunch for Sunday’s event
