By Ray Duckler
The Concord Monitor
CONCORD, N.H. - Don’t panic if you notice police and firefighters scurrying around Allenstown Elementary School today, looking serious.
It’s only a drill.
The town will conduct an emergency management exercise from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Several streets around the school, including Main Street, will be closed at this time. Police and fire agencies from several towns will participate in a massive project to prepare for a potential domestic terrorist attack.
“It will be very realistic,” Allenstown Police Chief Shaun Mulholland said. “It will be like going to the movies.”
Except that the actors involved, unlike those in Hollywood, will be striving for realism without a thought to an Academy Award. They’re trying to help law enforcement and emergency personnel prepare for a nightmare scenario.
The plot is simple and scary: A local resident, angry about school taxes, enters the school and starts shooting, injuring several students on the first floor. Then he takes hostages on the second floor.
Twelve students and nine adults will participate as actors. The state police, local police and firefighters from Concord, Pembroke, Hopkinton, Bow, Deerfield and Hooksett will respond to actual 911 calls after the initial siege.
“The officers will have to go in and rescue the students on the first floor before they bleed to death,” Mulholland said. “You will have kids coming out as (the police) arrive, and there will be kids in classrooms who will be popping out of classrooms that you have to react to and hopefully not injure them.”
The next step is a hostage ordeal, involving four students on the second floor. The hostage-taker will threaten to explode a bomb if the police approach. “We have an actual explosive device that will go off without damaging the building,” Mulholland said. “It will just make a very loud noise. Smoke will come out, and the fire department has to put the fire out.”
Meanwhile, the blast will injure the abducter. “The four hostages will also be hurt, and there will be all kinds of debris they have to clear,” Mulholland said. “And the police have to take custody of the terrorist and take his weapon, and if the officer exposes himself, we’ll have injured officers. We’ll go to the point of notifying the next of kin of the officers. Everything is in play here.”
When the smoke clears, police, firefighters and medical personnel will all be evaluated by officials from Concord, Exeter, Portsmouth, Manchester and the Grafton County Sheriff’s Department. Credit will be given and mistakes will be cited.
“We’ll look at what went wrong and what went right,” Mulholland said. “We’ll have to submit a lengthy written evaluation and then we’ll have a meeting to discuss what went wrong and we’ll put a correction plan in place. We have to correct that before next year’s exercise.”
The exercise, funded by the federal government to assist with homeland security, costs $50,000. Those of this size are rare, Mulholland said.
“It’s been a long time since an exercise has been done of this magnitude, involving all these multiple agencies,” Mulholland said. “Certainly there’s never been one like this in Allenstown.”
Copyright 2007 Concord Monitor