A woman and a young man are sitting in an office, the woman reading a magazine and the man looking at his cellphone, when someone bursts into the room with a handgun and fires two shots into the shoulder of the woman.
The gunner exits the room as quickly as he entered, and the young man rushes over to assist the wounded woman. Within moments, gunfire can be heard in the hallway – a SWAT team is tactically moving its way toward the shooter, armed with M4 carbines and bulletproof vests.
Less than 15 minutes later, the gunner is captured unharmed, and the victims are cleared from the building.
The situation described above is a drill at Southern New Hampshire Medical Center, but the real thing also happens and with alarming regularity. According to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive’s Mass Shootings Tracker, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which at least four people are killed or wounded, there were 372 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2015, killing 475 and wounding 1,870.
Mark Hastings, director of emergency management for Southern New Hampshire Health, was in charge of the planning that went into the event.
"We’ve been working on a plan with the city of Nashua responders for a year and a half now on how to merge all the emergency services under one umbrella when it comes to active threats," Hastings said.
Hastings said he has been working with police, fire, medical response, emergency management, homeland security and the FBI to develop a unified approach to active shooter situations.
The event Saturday consisted of several highly realistic 15-minute vignettes, each with different challenges and circumstances.
June McNeil, a hospital employee who witnessed the drill, said it was very frightening.
"It makes you think that this could really happen and about what you would do in the event that it did," she said.
Scott Milligan, the drill evaluator for American Medical Response, said the event is important because it opens the communication lines.
"The fire, EMS and police aren’t always on the same channel when it comes to events like this, so we’re finding that the more communication between the departments, the more smoothly things go."
Milligan said the the main goal is to save lives.
Dr. Joseph Leahy, medical director of the emergency department at SNHMC and medical director for the Nashua Police Department’s Special Reaction Team, said he was impressed with everyone’s performance.
"Coordinating all the different agencies and having everyone on the same page and moving efficiently is always a challenge, but everyone’s doing great," he said.