By Michelle Costa
A portion of the campus of Idaho State University was under "lock down" Thursday for an emergency response exercise.
The drill started with a 911 call around 9 am at a residence hall behind Reed Gym. The caller told police there was a shooter inside the dormitory.
Crime scene tape surrounded Dyer Hall Thursday morning.
This dorm was the center of an exercise evaluating local responders on their response time and management.
"To test our ability to cope with that many patients, to keep students safe, and verify the suspect was taken out," said David Gates, Pocatello Fire Department, Operations.
Multiple agencies were involved in the simulated school shooting.
The first thing everyone's worried about is...
"Securing the scene. Making sure that we can gain access. We can start treating people and getting people out from areas that are hard to get to," said Gates.
Police did get a suspect into custody to and multiple victims were carried out. But, with so many agencies responding, sometimes communication breaks down.
"There are a lot of people here. For me personally, we set up what we call a unified command and I had a really difficult time finding out who that person was," said Gates.
"We just recently purchased a reverse 911 system so we wanted to test that and see how long it would take us to contact all the phone numbers on campus," said Steve Chatterton, Director of ISU Public Safety.
It took about an hour for the reverse 911 and minutes for information to go up on the University's webpage. But, the drill was different looking through students' eyes.
"Honestly, I think they could have done a little better. A lot of us were laying there for a really long time. We would probably have all died if we were really hurt. They dragged me down the stairs. So, they picked me up and dragged me down the stairs, my head was like hitting the stairs on the way down, kind of uncomfortable," said Daniel Barrett, ISU Student, Fake Victim.
Students believe people panicked and they'll need to do more drills.
The drill lasted about an hour and a half.
Gates said they are planning on having more communications drills in the future. He thinks they did well, but there's always something you can improve.
