An active shooter training took place at Cayucos Elementary on Saturday morning. It was the first of three trainings happening over the next coming weeks.
The elementary school will be home to parts two and three of the Battalion One training involving multiple agencies from San Luis Obispo County including CAL Fire, Morro Bay Fire, San Luis Ambulance, and the sheriff’s office.
Today, it’s just preparing us for that unfortunate event that could happen in this day and age,” CAL Fire Station 16 Captain Victor Carrillo said. “We could have an active shooter involvement incident. And that entails a lot of extra resources, a lot of safety aspects that we have to go through and mitigate before we can enter and start helping the treatment process.
First responders utilized classrooms to create a real-life scenario using volunteers as pretend victims with first responders putting their training from the previous month to the test.
CAL Fire does have a law enforcement side and they put on three classes to practice tactical EMS for an active shooter event,” Carrillo added. “So today was basically go time.”
Three active shooter scenarios were performed, some taking up to 40 minutes. San Luis Ambulance Division Supervisor Paramedic, Tim Benes, said in his 30 years with the fire and ambulance departments, he fortunately never had to deal with a mass causality shooting but is grateful to train alongside professionals he knows.
“Our job is to take the patients and make sure that they’re triaged correctly and do any lifesaving measures, treatments that weren’t done in the field,” Benes said.
The next active shooter training is set to take place next Saturday and Sunday from 9 in the morning to noon at Cayucos Elementary.