Cherokee County First Responders Complete Training For Simulated Act Of Terrorism

Cherokee County first responders were put to the test Thursday, in a training exercise where they pretended a plane sprayed chemicals over a crowd at a Little League baseball tournament.

They said these are the kind of threats they need to be prepared to handle.

It looked real, it was done in real time and came as a surprise to local first responders. To make this training as real as possible, no one involved knew the exact scenario.

Tahlequah Police officers and firefighters were called to a park about some people down in a field. They quickly learned the situation was much more serious and called in hazmat, a medical helicopter and other recourses, trying to figure out how to deal with the situation.

"You want there to be an element of surprise, simply because you don't know what is going to happen in the real world,” said Scott Pettus with Cherokee County Emergency Management.

Pettus said first responders got to the scene, knowing nothing, and had to react as they would in real life.

"On something like this, we are going to set up our hazmat, we are going to decom, to where they are safe to go in an ambulance to get medical treatment, after that we are going to try to determine what is the chemical,” said Chief Casey Baker with the Tahlequah Fire Department.

Crews said this training not only teaches them how to deal with worst case situations, but also shows them how far their resources will go before needing extra help. In this scenario, they called in the Civil Support Team from Oklahoma City which is made up of Army and Air National Guard members.

"Our specialty is in weapons of mass destruction. That is our primary focus,” said Sergeant First Class Ron Poland with the Oklahoma Army National Guard. "We are here to support the local responders, fire and emergency medical services.

First responders said this is the setting to make mistakes, so they can learn from them.

"It gives us an opportunity to see just exactly where we are, what our strengths are, what our weaknesses are with all of our responding agencies,” said Pettus.