NEWS

Preparing for the unthinkable

Emergency management agents, police, victim-volunteers perform a simulated mass shooting

Brian Amaral
bamaral@providencejournal.com

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — Cops and first-responders swarmed onto Narragansett Town Beach on Wednesday morning to prepare for something they hoped they’ll never have to deal with in real life: a mass shooting.

Volunteers in bright green shirts and fake blood lay sprawled on the sand. A shadowy figure pointed a fake rifle out of a second-floor window of a beach pavilion. Real police radios burbled with urgent, but fictitious, messages: “Active shooter.”

Drill organizers said they hoped the event would prepare them if a shooting or other mass-casualty event took place in sensitive, wide-open areas where a lot of people congregate in Rhode Island.

Though mass shootings have occurred in recent years with startling frequency in America, they’re not all that emergency responders are preparing for. The state’s mass-casualty plan, which has never fully been put into use, came out of the Station nightclub fire in West Warwick 15 years ago, which killed 100 people.

“An incident is going to happen, and we want to make sure we’re ready for it,” said Chris McGrath, operations support branch chief at the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency.

Police departments often carry out active-shooter drills, but this one was unusual for its size — about 45 volunteers and mutual-aid departments from surrounding towns — and for the fact that it happened on a beach.

The drill started at 10 a.m. with the sound of what seemed to be something banging against a hollow drum, simulating gunfire from a pavilion overlooking the beach. Town cops showed up with blue-tipped rifles and cleared the pavilion, standing sentry around the exits to the parking lot.

It was a simulation, but confusion still prevailed. One re-enactor screamed to police that there were multiple shooters, including one in a black hat who’d run down the beach; reports of multiple shooters, particularly in early media reports, often turn out to be inaccurate.

The ambulances, fire trucks and police cars from several different towns were real, but the hospital was fake. First-responders used real registries to log victims, and had an information center for next-of-kin. The police even prepared to brief the media at a news conference afterwards.

Before the event, volunteer victims were outfitted with fake wounds as they drank coffee and ate doughnuts and bagels.

One of them, Patty McGrath — the mother of Chris McGrath — was outfitted with a fake gunshot wound to the leg. She couldn’t walk, and first-responders would have to carry her off the beach.

“The way the world is going,” she said, “you need to know how to deal with these real-time situations.”

Karen and Jerry Menard came down from Pawtucket to volunteer. They were playing people whose wounds were psychological: Jerry Menard’s character had also seen the Las Vegas shooting in October that killed 58 people at an outdoor concert.

“If this should happen, at least you know what you’re dealing with,” Jerry Menard said.

Karen Menard taught at Pawtucket schools for 35 years, she explained, becoming emotional about the toll of school shootings.

“To see the shootings happening in schools, I just break down thinking about it,” she said.

Volunteer Nancy DeNuccio had a fake gunshot wound to the left chest. She said she hadn’t worried about something like this happening at Narragansett’s beach, until Wednesday.

“We need to do more of this,” she said. “We need our first-responders to be prepared.”

Narragansett Police Chief Sean Corrigan said the event has been in the works for a long time, since even before the Las Vegas shooting. The event will help prepare the police for shootings and other incidents at which a lot of people are in desperate need of real help.

“We’ve known for a long time that it can happen here,” Corrigan said.

— bamaral@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7615

On Twitter: bamaral44

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