“Active Shooter” Drill at UC San Diego
Tests Campus Teams and New Technologies

Paul K. Mueller | Oct. 29, 2007

San Diego Fire Department members wait to help evacuate “victims” during the Oct. 16 emergency-response drill on campus.

A complete cross-section of the campus community — administrators, faculty, staff and students from every college and division — listened as Chancellor Marye Anne Fox praised the crisis-response drill that had just ended.

"We hope the day never comes," she said from the podium in the tent behind the UCSD Police Department, "but we are more ready today than we were yesterday, and for that I thank each and every one of you."

Multiple campus groups had just concluded an "active shooter" drill on Tuesday morning, Oct. 16, testing their response to the possibility of a gunman or gunmen bringing violence to UC San Diego, and evaluating the performance of a variety of campus-alert systems implemented in the wake of shootings at Virginia Tech earlier this year.

The exercise — like many similar exercises conducted recently — had been meticulously planned and implemented by the Environment, Health and Safety (EH&S) staff, the UCSD Police Department, and other campus groups determined not to be caught unprepared for a crisis.

The remote-controlled “Gizmo,” tested during the exercise, was just one of the technologies tested by teams from Calit2.

The School of Medicine volunteered the use of Leichtag Building, and students and staff there agreed to play their parts. Geisel Library offered meeting rooms and refreshments for numerous pre-drill meetings, and practiced “sheltering in place” during the event, when staff and others secure themselves inside the building. Staff at Thornton Hospital agreed to handle the expected “victims.”

Calit2 researchers from the RESCUE and ResponSphere projects successfully demonstrated nearly a dozen new technologies which support emergency responders, including their “Gizmo” remote-controlled toy truck carrying cameras and other technology, and a command-and-control wall display of screens that gave campus leaders real-time video and data feeds from the scene.

Most of these groups had done this before. Earthquakes, fires, hostage-taking, flu pandemics, all have been, and are being, considered by panels of campus representatives.

A “victim” of the incident is escorted from Leichtag Building by a member of the San Diego Police Dept., which worked closely with UCSD police teams during the drill.

On this Tuesday morning, those same campus groups — including police, fire, and hazardous-materials teams, Campus Emergency Response Teams (CERT), Student Affairs, University Communications, facilities staffers and many others — responded to reports of gunfire on Library Walk.

CERT volunteers, "wounded" in the line of duty, watched as campus and San Diego police cordoned off the Leichtag Building — where gunmen had wounded more people and taken refuge — and moved in to eliminate the threat.

Very quickly, messages went out over new text-messaging, voice, and e-mail systems to the campus, advising everybody that an incident was occurring and urging everybody to shelter in place until an all-clear message was broadcast. (Messages made very clear that the announcement was for an exercise, and was a test of the system. The fact of the drill had been advertised heavily in numerous messages and all-campus e-mails in advance.)

New message-and-camera towers around campus, recently put in place, sent messages and gave campus leaders at a central operations center a comprehensive view of the area.

Fire Department volunteers rushed this “wounded” man to Thornton Hospital, which also played a key role in the drill.

Chancellor Fox and her vice chancellors, tuned into audio and video reports from police and others on the scene — thanks to new systems pioneered by Calit2 — guided the university's response. Public relations staff, working closely with police and other responders, crafted status statements for distribution over phone, e-mail and Web outlets, and updated media crews on the scene. A reunification center was established at RIMAC arena, for students and parents seeking friends and family.

In about an hour and a half, the police and fire departments, assisted by other campus and off-campus responders, had the situation under control, and campus leaders began the complex process of finalizing reports and evaluating their teams' responses.

The planners of the exercise — principally EH&S managers — had deliberately thrown several surprises into the drill, so participants all found glitches in their responses. Every weakness thus exposed, however, was analyzed in a post-exercise debriefing. Fast-paced emergencies stress every organization, and breakdowns in planning, communications, and logistics show up quickly.

"That's why we practice," said Chancellor Fox to the assembled team at the lunch afterwards. "We want to know where we need to improve. The safety of our students, faculty and staff is our highest priority, and your efforts today — and in similar exercises we've conducted — help us ensure that we're doing our best to fulfill that obligation."

San Diego Fire Department people and equipment backed up UCSD Police and San Diego Police during the exercise. Campus and San Diego first-responders frequently train and work together, a partnership which benefits both communities.