First responders test mass shooting response in large-scale Palmyra drill

First responders train constantly to be prepared for emergency situations when 911 is dialed, but rarely at the scale seen during a mass shooting drill held Saturday at Palmyra Area High School during a training exercise called Operation Cougar Prowl. 

Bob Dowd, director of the Lebanon County Department of Emergency Services, said 250 people participated in the all-day exercise, including around 145 first responders from 20 local first-responder organizations, 64 Palmyra Area School District personnel, and about 40 actors to make the scenario as realistic as possible.

“At a real high level, what we’re doing today is a multi-jurisdictional, multi-discipline, large-scale exercise. The entire point of this is to exercise the entire public safety system in the most realistic way possible,” Dowd said. “We’re trying real hard to make sure that the things that happen in the exercise are realistic. … That includes making sure that the sequence of events generally follows what the real world timeline would be, including response times and when we arrive.”

Dowd provided a further explanation of the depth of training at the high school and away from it.

“We want to see what works, we want to see what doesn’t, we want to make sure that we are prepared and ready to act,” he said. “So several pieces with this that you’re not going to be able to see from here (the school). The biggest thing is we’re also testing the capacity of our health systems’ ERs. We’re also having Good Samaritan and Hershey Medical Center participating as well. We’re not taking patients from here to those facilities, but each of those facilities is going to basically inundate their ERs with patients, test their own internal processes, and make improvements where they can.”

The afternoon portion of the exercise involved what Dowd called a reunification process.

“Anytime you have an event at a school, one of the biggest concerns is how do we reconnect our families, our students with their parents,” he said. “It’s a difficult thing to track when everybody is in panic mode.” 

The reunification process is part of the district’s emergency preparedness plan.

“What will happen anytime there is an incident like that like as such or any other incident where school where students have to reunify with parents, the school has to have a plan for that and this is the opportunity for the school to exercise that reunification plan, get their staff who’s going to operate in that reunification, getting to exercise their skills and really practice that function,” added Dowd. 

Also scheduled was a same-day debrief while the events of the day were still fresh in everybody’s minds. 

In the months to come, a written report will be submitted to the Department of Homeland Security, which provided a grant to the South Central Task Force, a regional preparedness task force consisting of nine counties, including Lebanon. The grant amount was unknown since it comes from a pool of monies received for such projects. 

“So we’ll put together a report that we have to do since this is a federally funded exercise through the task force,” Dowd said. “We have to put together an after-action review and an improvement plan. And with that, any things that we identify that need improvement, we’ll start spinning up training and go further with the areas that we need to train better on. And then hopefully in the future, we’ll be able to do an exercise like this again.”

Gary Verna Jr., deputy director of Lebanon County EMS, said he led the two-year planning process on behalf of the county. He said the training exercise took “a lot of coordination,” noting the process started with a planning meeting. “This is the idea. What do you want to see happen? What would you like to exercise?”

This kind of event happens every few years, he added.

“Every four years there’s what’s called Wide Vigilance that happens with the Pennsylvania South Central Task Force, and this was coming up and we were fortunate enough to be able to host this,” Verna said. “There were planning meetings, probably monthly, until we got to a certain point where we shrunk that planning route down to myself and Michele Parsons from the South Central Task Force, the Good Samaritan Hospital and Penn State Health (Milton S. Hershey) Medical Center. So there’s just a lot of planning, scenario building, inject building (a simulation tool used in disaster exercises to test response), and response time building.”  

Dowd set the stage for the press just before the start of the shooting scenario.

“What’s happening is the 911 center is getting a call about a situation happening at the high school involving some sort of armed assailants. They’re getting information. They’re going to pass that on to first responders,” Dowd said.

While certain parts of the scenario are planned, many details are left unscripted. 

“The goal is to set up the scenario, but not dictate the response. We want to test the response. We want to learn from it. So we expect that people are going to actually call 911. Everybody involved in the exercise has been told they can,” Dowd said. “However, they have to say this is an exercise because our 911 center will treat anything that doesn’t come in as an exercise (as a real call).”

A focus of the training exercise involved testing communications across numerous first responder agencies, including law enforcement, emergency services, and firefighters who arrived on scene once the first call was placed to 911, according to Parsons, who is a member of the South Central Task Force and a deputy director in emergency services in Cumberland County.

“All of our disciplines usually stay on their own channels or frequencies. They usually don’t cross talk one to the other because there’s no need for it. But when we have an environment like this, the firemen need to be able to talk to the police officers, they need to be able to talk to the medical folks that are here. Because they all have stake in the game,” Parsons said. “We need to know where those most critical patients are, how do we get them out? And we can’t do that alone, but we have to be able to communicate.”

Communications were also examined with the school district’s internal procedures during the exercise, according to Palmyra superintendent Dr. Bernie Kepler.

The engagement by school personnel, which included live communications with families, has “been much more realistic than any other type of active shooter drill we’ve done in the past,” Kepler said.

The county’s mobile command center, which LebTown profiled in 2024 when it was being outfitted, was integral to the communications occurring between all first responders, according to Verna.

“This gave us an area where the exercise command could work. We have computers there or the internet. We’re able to have our injects up, our flow, how we want to go, and things that we want to slide in there to try to test some capabilities out,” Verna said. “So we were able to have one area where three of us could get in there and track what’s going on, hear communications, have communications with our staff, our exercise staff.”

Following the media observation portion of the exercise, LebTown asked Dowd how a training event of this magnitude helps lessen the element-of-surprise advantage a bad actor has when committing a crime of this nature.

“The key is rapid neutralization, and that requires everybody to be playing the same sheet of music. So the faster you can get there and the faster you can deal with it, that is how you minimize, and exercising something like this helps us fine tune that,” Dowd said. “That’s how you become good at it. It’s just like anything else.”

Provided list of participating local agencies

• North Londonderry Twp. PD
• South Londonderry Twp. PD
• Western Lebanon County Regional PD
• Lebanon County Regional PD
• South Lebanon Twp. PD
• Fort Indiantown Gap PD
• Lebanon City PD
• VAMC PD
• Derry Twp. PD
• Life Lion EMS
• First Aid and Safety Patrol
• Palmyra Citizen’s Fire Company
• Campbelltown Fire Company
• Annville-Cleona Fire District
• North Annville Twp. Fire Department
• Mastersonville QRS
• PA South-Central Terrorism Taskforce
• Lebanon County DES
• Palmyra Area School District