HOUSTON – Federal agents were at Houston Methodist Tuesday for training on how to prepare for mass casualties. They set up a fake scene in which a shooter had attacked people at a night club.
The training session was planned months before the shooting in Orlando.
The FBI said mass shootings are on the rise.
The training session, planned months ago, is now all too real, but people getting gunned down in a nightclub is a situation the FBI and local first responders have to know how to handle.
"There's going to be that chaos. So, we have to prepare our operators, our medical personnel to provide emergency medical care in those situations that are just extremely stressful, very chaotic, and they've got to be able to prioritize who is the sickest and who is not so sick," said Michael Biamonte of the FBI.
"Within the first few minutes of an incident is where somebody is going to be killed from their critical injuries, so the quicker we get medical care to them, the better chance they have of survival."
Biamonte said Houston Methodist creates an extraordinarily realistic environment that helps them prepare for the worst.
"We are known as a world-class training facility for all health care professionals, for the Houston area and worldwide, across the nation. We have physicians that come from all over to train here," Angela Mitchell, operations manager at the Houston Methodist Institute for Technology, Innovation & Education, said.
Twenty SWAT emergency medical technicians from across the nation are using this training session to build skills necessary to make lifesaving medical decisions quickly while in a dangerous situation.
"Are you ever fully prepared 100 percent? That doesn't exist. There is no scenario where you can prepare 100 percent for everything," Biamonte said.