nSide Participates in University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) Active Shooter Drill
nSide was invited by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s (UTC) Emergency Management Team including Executive Director, Robie Robinson and EM Specialist, Tim Pridemore to participate and support an Active Shooter Drill at UTC on 12/16/15.
The event was a ‘table top’ reenactment of an actual Active Shooter simulation occurring on campus during a busy school day within a heavily populated school building. Drill attendees included over 10 university departments, UTC executive leadership, Campus Police, Emergency Management experts, Chattanooga Police, Chattanooga Fire, Hamilton County EMA, UTK and many others.
The drill stepped through a series of ‘learning’ and ‘collaboration’ goals and ‘Inject Points’ so all attendees could better understand each group’s role, become better prepared and visualize how such an event would unfold during response and recovery. Robie and Tim lead the drill exercise engaging all participants with thoughtful questions posing how best to respond as each minute passed and new information was flooding in via phone calls, texts and tweets from students, faculty and first responders on site.
The team stressed the following primary goals throughout the drill:
- Life Safety
- Incident Stabilization
- Property Conservation
With everyone focused on successfully pursuing and fulfilling these, there was clarity to the actions to be taken at each moment.
nSide provided a campus and building visual that also added greatly clarity to the location of the shooter and how best to respond. nSide web and mobile versions of the software were projected on two large display screens, depicting a full campus views and then both applications zooming down to the building at the center of the incident. Moving into the building with 360 pictures of each room, walk throughs of all floors, showing critical fire and medical assets as well as identifying further potential dangers including hazardous materials, gases and contaminants that could cause more damage by the intruder.
UTC executives were very impressed by visualizations provided by nSide. Several executives stated the maps provided excellent information throughout the event allowing them to best understand the location and what was happening as the response was underway as well as how it ended and how recovery would be rolled out.
Robie and Tim both thanked the nSide team for participating. Robie stated,
“I think including nSide in the drill was great! It allowed everyone to better understand the area and all responders and administrators being able to access the map answered a lot of questions keeping everyone up to date throughout the event”
We applaud UTC’s Emergency Management team for their excellent efforts to engage the greater Chattanooga emergency response teams, create such a realistic event for learning and using innovative new technologies like nSide to be better prepared to respond more effectively and efficiently. This training exercise and those to follow make a dramatic impact on saving lives, minimizing the impact of an incident and protecting property in case of an emergency at UTC.
We thank UTC for allowing nSide to participate and working so hard to create a safer environment for everyone at UTC.
