Reforms sought for emergency response
CARSON CITY, Nev. — A Las Vegas-area fire chief who warned lawmakers months before a 2017 mass shooting at a music festival that Nevada should bolster its emergency management planning says he wants to bypass state lawmakers to get changes made.
Six months before the Oct. 1, 2017, shooting on the Las Vegas Strip that killed 58 and left hundreds injured, Clark County Fire Department Chief Greg Cassell testified before state legislators in favor of a bill that would have required more coordination of emergency medical resources ahead of such a large event.
Investigators say gunman Stephen Paddock acted alone when he fired from a high-rise suite in the Mandalay Bay casinor-esort into the crowd of 22,000 at the Route 91 Harvest festival. The FBI concluded Paddock sought notoriety in the attack but said it found no “single or clear motivating factor” to explain why he opened fire on the concert.
Cassell said that had the legislation passed, the fire department would likely have had a fire incident commander on the scene before the shooting. Having such a commander at the event could have improved communications and made for a cleaner response plan, Cassell said. Months before the event, he told lawmakers the effort would avoid delays in ordering and directing emergency help.
The legislation he supported in 2017 passed the Assembly unanimously but failed to make it out of the Senate.
This year, Cassell is instead pushing for Clark County to make changes requiring events of a certain size to have fire personnel on scene and in unified command with police.
While police and ambulance services were on duty at the concert and event organizers obtained a required fire department permit and inspection, they were not required to and did not have any on-duty fire personnel at the concert.
A report released by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in August also recommended the change and revealed that some of the firefighters responding to the shooting were unaware that the festival was occurring and had to quickly set up a command when they encountered the chaotic aftermath.
The chaos was something Cassell warned lawmakers about during a March 2017 hearing on the bill.
“If we are waiting for a battalion chief to respond to an event from their station or another location, we have to wait for calls to take place, dispatching, routing and driving through traffic,” Cassell said, according to the committee minutes. “It terrifies me because we are a resort community, and we have to be prepared on the front end with the right people in the right spot at the right time to mitigate these things as fast as we can.”
While Cassell is pushing for changes at the local level, it’s unclear if Nevada lawmakers will follow suit. Assemblyman Michael Sprinkle, DSparks, who sponsored the 2017 legislation, declined to comment about why his earlier bill failed and whether he would revive the legislation.
The state Division of Emergency Management has requested a handful of bills addressing emergency resources and procedures, including a measure to quickly license out-of-state doctors to practice in the state during a disaster, something then-Gov. Brian Sandoval allowed by executive order after the shooting.