Large-scale emergencies require all hands on deck.
You may have seen some smoke and a bunch of fire trucks at the Nugget Casino Tuesday morning.
The City of Sparks and Northern Nevada Public Health hosted a multi-casualty training.
The purpose of the training is to see how different agencies come together to respond as a team in stressful situations.
"So, this will involve law enforcement, first responders, fire, hospital and other health care facilities in the region so we can appropriately respond to any large-scale incident at a public event," said Jordyn Marchi, Public Health Emergency Response Coordinator, Northern Nevada Public Health.
This training allows them to test Washoe County's emergency plan and to get them ready if tragedy were to strike.
"No emergency is going to be like the one before it, but as long as we have a foundation that we can build off of is what's important to exercise here. And that's why we're all here today," Marchi said.
The scenario for the drill was a car bomb detonated outside a concert venue with thousands of people attending.
The training started with law enforcement assessing the area for immediate threats.
Then, multiple fire departments and first responders arrive on scene to treat victims.
The responders go to each victim, identify their injuries and the severity of them.
From there, they wrap them either with red, yellow or green tags.
The red means they need immediate treatment, yellow is delayed treatment, and green means minor injuries.
Once assessed, the responders will grab all the red tagged people first and make their way down.
Next, they place them in their separate areas and then send them off to get medical treatment.
There were many actors in makeup acting as victims, and they were transported to some hospitals to see how they would handle the influx of patients.
During the whole training, evaluations are being made on how effective they are being.
"Just the strengths of communications," said Scott Means, Division Chief of Emergency Management for the Sparks Fire Department. "Our ability to integrate with each other even though we're different departments. And our ability to efficiently triage, treat and transport people to hospitals during a critical event."
They also look for areas to improve.
"Testing our plan regularly identifies gaps and things maybe we haven't come up with before. Also to identify future hazards that maybe we can mitigate before they happen," Means said.
Means says the hardest part of dealing with a stressful situation like this is the emotion.
"Most of the time it's just telling everybody to remember to fall back on their training and do what we're trained to do," he said. "It's hard to not get emotionally tied up. A lot of people here, you may know some people here."
Law enforcement says that when going to events, people should always keep their head on a swivel and keep tabs on where exits are, because an event like this can happen at any moment.
