Active shooter drill prepares responders

The Socorro County Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) met on Thursday, March 27, at the Socorro Convention Center to conduct a tabletop exercise designed to prepare key responders for an active school shooter scenario.

This tabletop discussion followed one held December 19, 2024, and involved 84 participants from various agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Emergency Management, the Socorro School District, New Mexico Tech and local law enforcement, fire and EMS. Key insights included communication issues, particularly with radio frequencies, and the need for improved unified command.

During the exercise, attendees were presented with emergency scenarios and asked how they would respond. Jason Everett said this is just the beginning of a process to find out where things currently stand, and where improvements need to be made. Everett is the fire chief at the VLA and chairman of the Socorro County LEPC.

“The idea is we identify our shortcomings or our deficiencies in a controlled environment so we can work through them and address them prior to having a real life situation,” Everett said. “There were a lot of epiphanies that people made during the discussion.”

Future plans include gathering the data collected from the day’s exercise and producing an after action improvement plan report that leadership from the different attending agencies can use to improve their emergency plans.

“As the chair of the LEPC, it was apparent to me that we need to get ahead of some of these kinds of issues and start to do some collective training,” Everett said.

A second tabletop exercise will occur in about six months and a full-scale field exercise in a year.