County officials and employees will be participating in an active shooter drill Thursday at the Union County Office Building. The trainings, similar to this one recently held at Marysville High School, teach participants to run, to hide, and to to use available objects to barricade themselves away from a potential threat.
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The Union County Office Building, 233 W. Sixth St., will be closed from 12:30 p.m. to 3 p.m., Thursday.
“We recognize this can be a little bit inconvenient, but we don’t want someone coming in off the street, seeing something and getting the wrong idea about what’s happening,” said Ginger Yonak, Union County’s human resources director.
What is happening is a workplace emergency training. Employees at the county auditor’s, engineer’s, commissioners’, treasurer’s, recorder’s and Emergency Management Agency offices will be participating in a Civilian Response to an Active Shooter Event (CRASE) training.
“This really isn’t just an active shooter training, it’s a rally that helps prepare people to deal with any type of emergency, whether it is an assailant or a tornado or anything,” said Union County Sheriff Jamie Patton.
The training will be a combination of classroom learning and hands-on scenario and role play-based training. The classroom training will be held in the auditorium, and will be led by officers from the sheriff’s office.
After the classroom instruction, employees will be released back to their offices to participate in the scenario-based training.
“We want people to be aware of their surroundings and to think, can you escape an emergency threat,” Patton said. “We want to give real-world training scenarios for employers so they can think about, if they had something happen in their area, how would they handle it.”
Patton said the program teaches employees that if they can run, they should run, if they can escape they should escape, if they can hide they should hide.
“But if you can’t run, if you can’t escape, if you have to go nose-to-nose with someone, we want to say, ‘Here are some options,’” Patton said.
The sheriff said the skills learned in the training, “can be taken out of the workplace and applied anywhere you go.”
Each floor of the county courthouse has already had a similar session. The sheriff said the role-playing is important because situations are very different than classroom learning. He said trainers will be using blank rounds that will give a similar sound to a live gunshot.
“You want people to get a feel for how they are going to react,” Patton said.
He explained that it is better to see and hear a gunshot in a training exercise than in an emergency.
“It gives a whole different perspective than learning in a lecture,” Patton said.
Following the scenario portion of the training, employees will then return to the auditorium for a brief wrap-up and Q/A session with the sheriff’s office. Additional instructions will be provided to participants during the actual training.
Officials have said that anyone with a medical condition or who doesn’t feel comfortable can opt out of the role-playing.
“They can just watch and listen,” Patton said. “But we do encourage them and stress they will get a lot out of the role-playing.”
The sheriff’s office began similar trainings at schools and at places of worship. Patton said the trainings have been completed at every school in the county and his office is conducting yearly refresher trainings.
Yonak’s office is working to make sure there are signs posted throughout the building and in each office informing visitors about the closure.
Additionally, the building doors will be locked and signs announcing the training and offering emergency contact information for the offices will be posted on the doors during the actual training.
Each office is being encouraged to record a voicemail greeting on their main phone lines during the training, explaining the brief closure, in addition to any social media outlets utilized by each office.
Yonak said that while the offices will be closed, there is a recognition that some people will need to conduct county business.
“We will have emergency numbers posted, some emergency cellphones for people who really need to get ahold of one of the offices,” she said. “We don’t want someone who really has an issue, or who drove for an hour or a situation like that to go away upset.”