Today, I attended mandatory training for active shooters on campus, meaning that the campus police sat a bunch of us down and told us how we should handle ourselves in the case of an active shooter on campus. I’ve always found these types of exercises bizarre because as good-intentioned as they are, they almost always rely on the hope that in the case of a disaster/emergency, the people who need to do the right thing are going to be capable of actually doing it. And quite often, if you listen to the conversations of the other people in the room, a lot of people have great expectations of themselves about what they’ll do in an emergency. But the only real way to figure out what you’re going to do in an emergency is to either go through one, or train extensively until you go through one. Neither of those methods is one that is appropriate for most people and most crowds. So, as I’m quite apt to do, let me tell you a story.

Some years ago, I was out of the service and working for a hotel in San Francisco. I was the hotel investigator, which for all argumentation meant that I was in the management of the Security Department. The rank structure went kind of like Security Director, Assistant Security Director, Fire/Safety Director, Investigator, and then Shift Supervisor. So, in most circumstances, the investigator (me) was usually not someone who had to exercise a whole lot of authority. However, one day, as these things usually happen in bizarre circumstances, there was a radio call in the hotel indicating a chemical spill in the sub-basement level (which is where Engineering houses its staff and headquarters). A laundry person had accidentally mixed some solvent with another that shouldn’t be mixed with, started a chemical reaction and was immediately knocked unconscious. Then everyone on that floor collapsed and went unconscious as well.

When we received the call, the Security Director, the Fire/Safety Director and the shift supervisor were all in a meeting with the director, in which his office happened to be located right next to the stairwell leading directly down to the sub-basement. So, they all rushed out of the Security Office, down the stairwell, and in a few moments were completely incapacitated right smack where the chemical reaction was still flowing. I happened to be walking back to the office at this time, heard the call and was about ten seconds behind the people rushing down to the sub-basement. What I did differently than the rest of the leadership going down the stairwell was notice that the path took us down one set of stairs, down the hallway and then back down another set of stairs. On the way to that second set of stairs was a laundry deposit room, and by instinct, I grabbed about ten towels that were damp from having just gone through a wash cycle (they were in a basket in our path and wet, about to be transferred to a dryer). Having heard “chemical spill” from the radio, my first thought was to throw a bunch of those blankets over my face and breathe through them. No instruction manual or class ever taught me to do that, but it just seemed to be a logical thing to do for someone who has been trained to react to emergency situations from my time in the service.

Anyway, when I got down to the sub-basement, the first thing I noticed was the leadership of my department coughing and wheezing from complete lack of oxygen, so I grabbed the nearest one, wrapped a towel around his face and turned him around, forcing him back towards the stairwell where he had emerged only a short bit ago. I did the same thing for the Fire/Safety Director and maneuvered him over to the shift supervisor, who was incoherent and wandering aimlessly, putting the Fire/Safety Director’s arm around him and pushing them both towards the stairwell, so they could use each other to push each other up the stairs.

I, breathing through wet towels, found a stumbling engineer, pushed a towel over his face and had him take me back to Engineering where there were tons of oxygen masks they used just in case of a disaster like this. Fitting masks onto the people who collapsed in Engineering, the engineer and I grabbed the one worker who had started the chemical reaction and carried his unconscious self by dragging him up the stairs with us.

Once on the main level, I got on the radio with Security and started relaying orders, like taking elevators out of service, as we were getting reports of employees going down to the sub-basement level and breathing in gas fumes. In a short bit of time, we had the situation under control.

When I wandered back to the main Security dispatch office (which is different from the administrative Security office), I noticed the assistant shift supervisor standing in the room with the dispatcher, not sure what to do. I asked him what his instructions were, figuring the security supervisor is going to be more up to speed on what to do than someone who was only in a leadership position because of title (and rarely exercised it). But he was even more incapacitated than the management of the department, except his incapacitation came from panic, not from not knowing what to do. So I turned to the dispatcher, asked her if there were any open calls that needed handling, which she said a couple of doors needed unlocking, so I sent the assistant security supervisor off to take those calls and then decided to continue running security until someone higher up was on site to relieve me (which didn’t happen for another two hours because what I hadn’t realized was that the rest of the management was now in ambulances that had been brought onto site, and I was basically the only one left in charge).

Two hours later, the assistant director of security, who was off site when this happened, showed up, and I turned over control to her, which ironically the next day she tried to explain to everyone how she had swooped in and saved everyone during the incident, to which the entire staff blew a gasket because they all knew she wasn’t there and knew exactly what DID happen. But that’s another story.

What I did learn at that moment is that often people don’t know how they’re going to react to a situation until the situation happens. We had all sorts of standard operating procedures and training, but until an incident occurred, no one knew what they would do, and those who thought they would do one thing did the complete opposite. The expectation that leadership would respond in some way went out the window when the senior membership was wiped out in the first few minutes of the situation.

I guess that’s why I sometimes have a hard time with these “active shooter” types of classes. I hope no one ever has to experience a real incident, but I’m not sure that I would be all that comfortable with the other people there, regardless of whether or not they attended a 1.5 hour class on how to respond. But I guess it’s better than nothing.