‘Terrorist’ exercises designed to prepare
7 simulated attacks held at different central Ohio locations
Brandon Todd could have been mistaken for a beachgoer in his long shorts, tank top and floppy hat, a relaxed smile occasionally spreading across his face.
The main thing that differentiated him on Saturday morning from the vacationing public was the hardcore-looking firearm he clutched while lurking behind an old storage tank at Anheuserbusch’s North Side brewery.
His target: Police officers who had just arrived on the scene, walking toward a yard filled with bloody bodies.
The subsequent sequence of events took about a minute to unfold, with Todd firing a few shots that sent the officers scrambling for cover and returning fire. They found him shortly afterward, face down on the pavement, an apparent corpse in an industrial area filled with other apparently dead or dying people.
More shots were fired by other attackers, around the corner. There was a pipe bomb nearby, and more bodies.
And then things really hit the fan, with simultaneous reports of mass casualties and suspected bombs and general murder and mayhem at other sites around town.
The simulated terrorist acts at seven Columbus-area locations were part of a complex coordinated attack exercise that was years in the making and funded as part of an $830,000 federal grant aimed at ensuring law enforcement, emergency responders and others are ready to deal with large-scale threats to public safety.
“This is really the worst-of-the-worst scenario,” said Jeff Young, director of Franklin County Emergency Management & Homeland Security. “Even if it never occurs — and we hope it doesn’t,
we spend a lot of time preventing those types of scenarios. This is just really to push the extreme or push the boundaries of how our command-and-control structure would have to operate.”
The end result will be a complex, coordinated terrorist attack response that will be added to Franklin County’s emergency operations plan and used in the event that the real thing happens in central Ohio.
Saturday’s exercise came two days after a suicide bombing at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan left 13 U.S. military service members dead, among many others who were wounded or killed. And it took place just as Hurricane Ida was preparing to make landfall Sunday in Louisiana, sending residents scrambling for safety and emergency responders standing at the ready to assist in rescue and recovery.
“You can’t look at what’s occurring in the world today internationally and nationally — Afghanistan, wildfires out west, hurricane on the Gulf Coast — you can’t watch those without realizing that there are large-scale disasters and incidents every day,” Young said. “We want to continue to create resilient communities and be as prepared as we can.”
About 50 law enforcement, emergency responder and other local agencies and 500 people participated in Saturday’s exercise.
Planners worked to make the scenarios as realistic as possible. Carl Roberts, homeland security coordinator at Emergency Management & Homeland Security Agency, said the scenario included a back story, complete with a main domestic terrorist group, a splinter group, even a plot to kidnap the governor.
Saturday’s exercise included a simulated mass casualty incident at Newport Music Hall on North High Street, near Ohio State University; a clandestine lab at a North Side business; explosive devices at Bolton Field on the West Side and the Historic Columbus Crew Stadium near the state fairgrounds; and other active threats at a Northeast Side location and at Cardinal Health in Dublin.
Michael Butts, an electronic engineer from the East Side, is completing the training to become part of the Franklin County Emergency Response Team, a free program aimed at preparing everyday citizens how to respond to disasters and other emergencies.
That’s how he found out about the coordinated terrorist simulation and volunteered to be one of the victims of the attack. He and more than 30 other actors arrived at Anheuser-busch early Saturday morning and had fake blood and bullet wounds applied to their bodies.
Butts was playing the part of someone who had been shot to the pelvis, the painful-looking wound visible through a strategic rip in his shirt.
His mental status was designated as “Pain” on the provided cue card dangling from his neck.
“I’m in shock, but I have to be quiet,” he said. “But I’m not dead.”
Simon Fernandez, a medical student at Ohio State University, was in worse shape, shirtless with four ugly bullet holes in his chest.
“Today, I am still alive,” he said, though noting that he was supposed to be unconscious and unable to talk or move. “I’m pretty seriously wounded.”
The scenario Saturday provided training on several levels.
Todd, a State Highway Patrol trooper for more than 20 years, was one of four faux terrorists Saturday. His plan was to draw officers into one area of the scenario space while the other terrorists fired from behind.
Todd has been involved in other training scenarios, though not on the scale of Saturday’s exercise. He said he tries to keep the practice events as close to the real thing as possible.
“If they get a good angle on you, a good shot on you, you go down,” Todd said. “If not, keep going. … My goal is to get some quality training, so that when this happens for real it’s second nature. … You’ve seen it before, it’s not new.”
The victims of Saturday’s simulated attacks were learning, too.
Fernandez, who signed up for the Franklin County & Columbus Medical Medical Corps, said observing emergency responders from the standpoint of someone wounded also provided a training opportunity for Saturday’s scenario victims.
“The thing about emergency medicine, knowing the logistics and knowing the people who will be bringing the patients from the field to a hospital … just helps you to plan better to make everything run smoother,” he said.
Ultimately, the simulation Saturday pushed dozens of local agencies to work together to coordinate their responses, determining in real time how to allocate sometimes-limited resources most-effectively.
Multiple agencies had to quickly establish an area command post and communications over common channels, then work together to identify and address active shooters, improvised explosive devices and other dangers. Scenes required patrol officers, bomb squads, SWAT teams, medical responders and other specialty units and equipment.
“Communication is the real big key to this,” said Perry Township Police Lt. Dan Quigley as he watched officers from his department respond Saturday morning. “As an officer, we all want to run in there and work to catch the bad guys and all of that stuff. But in these scenarios, we get to a point and we have to wait, we have to secure, we have to make it safe. … You’re guarding the victims and the fire department in the event that your bad guys see you and want to shoot you. There’s a lot of facets to bring all that together.”
Quigley added later that “on a day-today basis, the patrol officers are doing this, but now you’re adding other agencies and a bigger scenario. … It could happen. You don’t want to be a doomsayer and say that this is going to happen … but we’re training for the eventuality that if anything like that were to happen, we have some base of information that we can work from to take on those threats.”
Wrapping up late Saturday, Young said the exercise was a success, providing one of the first opportunities for group training locally since the coronavirus pandemic was declared early last year.
“We had groups coming together and coordinating that really had not operated or trained together since the beginning of COVID,” he said. “There are lots of items we learned and improvements to make. … There are incidents that occur every day, so you prepare and you try to be as prepared as possible to respond to them, realizing that every situation is unique, with its own challenges.” mkovac@dispatch.com @Ohiocapitalblog