Active shooting incidents are on the rise in the U.S. The FBI confirmed 61 of them in 2021, a 53% increase. But Augusta leaders have taken the lead in heading off those types of events.
A Tuesday symposium marked the restart of #StrongAugusta, a 2020 effort to unite the community in using best practices for Active Shooter/Hostile Events Response, or ASHER.
Citywide, agencies are adopting the National Fire Protection Association’s NFPA 3000, a set of updated guidelines for dealing with active shooters and other hostile events.
“There is a national consensus standard on active shooter planning and what Augusta had done in January 2020 was to work with the NFPA and the public to become the first city to implement the standards,” said John Ryan, coordinator of the Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response, or CEPaR, at Augusta University.
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“Of course, COVID derailed the whole thing,” Ryan said. “What we did (Feb. 7) is put it back into action.”
Public safety personnel across multiple agencies heard from FBI, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Augusta University and local government officials about implementing the standards during the symposium.
“Several agencies collaborated to foment this initiative and champion this idea forward,” Ryan said. “It was key to have the mayor and the sheriff and the fire chief unilaterally in support of such a large audience of stakeholders.”
The group heard from Julie Downey, fire chief of Davie, Fla., who chairs the NFPA 300 committee which creates the standards. Downey spoke of the evolution of response to mass shooters, from Columbine in 1999, when law enforcement stayed outside for an hour and medical personnel took four hours to arrive. Until more recently, emergency responders didn’t use tourniquets to stop hemorrhaging patients, she said.
“No one should die from bleeding out,” Downey said.
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Davie, with a population of around 110,000, isn’t far from Parkland, where the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting cost 17 lives in 2018. In Davie, stop-the-bleed kits are required supplies in public places alongside automated external defibrillators, Downey said.
Hostile events now take multiple forms, including active shooters, using fire as a weapon, ramming with vehicles, civil unrest, the use explosives and others, she said.
Mayor Garnett Johnson greeted participants Tuesday morning and voiced support for the initiative.
“Across the country, we are seeing an increase in mass shootings, and we need to be as prepared as possible to handle a crisis. Days of education and training, like today, are important and give us a framework to lessen the impact of active shooter events and improve their outcomes,” he said.
Susan McCord is a staff writer with The Augusta Press. Reach her at susan@theaugustapress.com
