A twisted ankle sparked the active shooter phone call. Update to this story.
Via Air Force Times:
Officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on Wednesday detailed a series of miscommunications and confused reactions that led two emergency exercises to snowball into a massive, chaotic active shooter scare in which security forces shot a door open.
And while the Aug. 2 incident on the Ohio base ultimately ended with only minor injuries to one security forces airman, it could have been far worse.
The communications breakdown that occurred that day “led to a completely uncoordinated and ineffective” response that could have ended up causing serious injuries or property damage, officials said.
The problem began when the 88th Air Base Wing Inspector General set up what was intended to be a stand-alone active shooter exercise, around the same time the 88th Medical Group held their own, unrelated mass casualty response exercise at the Wright-Patterson Medical Treatment Facility.
While the wing’s IG and the medical group alerted each other to their exercises, they didn’t record what the other was doing in their own, respective master scenario events list outlining how their exercises would proceed.
Things started to spiral out of control when an employee of the medical group twisted her ankle while running on base and called a co-worker “screaming and crying,” the summary said.
That co-worker called 911, and the injured runner was brought to the emergency room at the base’s medical treatment facility — at the same time the simulated casualties began to report.
“This was the beginning of bleed over from exercise to real world events,” the summary said.
In a news conference Wednesday at Wright-Patterson, installation commander Col. Tom Sherman said that the arrival of the real-world injured jogger, who was in a considerable amount of pain, at the same time as the simulated casualties “caused enough confusion within the [hospital] staff that they began to initiate the lockdown procedures.”