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Friday, February 14, 2014

Springfield Tech Drill Gets Mistaken for Real Thing


February 14,2014
 
 http://rutlandherald.com/article/20140214/THISJUSTIN/702149941/
 
By ERIC FRANCIS

CORRESPONDENT

SPRINGFIELD — A planned lockdown drill at the Howard Dean Springfield Tech Center got a little too real Tuesday evening when a dozen police officers who weren’t informed in advance that it was an exercise ended up swarming into the building looking for an intruder.

“I haven’t had a chance to reach out to the school officials yet to find out where the slip up was, so I don’t know their side of what went on, but obviously they had a drill and we were not aware of that drill,” Springfield Police Chief Doug Johnston said Wednesday.

“It wasn’t just us that didn’t know,” Johnston emphasized. “There were people in the Tech Center who started texting about what appeared to be going on (in the hallways), thinking there was an intruder, and that’s how the police department ended up getting notified of that. People didn’t realize it was a drill versus the real thing, and that understandably caused some people to panic.”

At the time, Springfield officers were discussing via their police radios a possible lockdown and what was described as a “barricaded door” to one of the Tech Center classrooms. That quickly led other police officers in Chester and Weathersfield, and several state police troopers who were also listening Tuesday, to respond to the Tech Center to back up the Springfield units beginning around 6:40 p.m. By 7:20 p.m. police had swept through the campus and determined that nothing untoward was actually taking place.

“There were multiple agencies that responded and investigated,” Johnston said, noting that while the Tech Center has done drills in the past they have usually been during daylight hours and with some sort of notice to authorities.

“By law the schools have to do some sort of drill every month. It can be a fire drill or now, with all the school shootings that have happened, it can be a drill to go through procedures to protect the kids from that,” Johnston explained.

“Unfortunately it went the way it did,” Johnston said of Tuesday’s drill effort. He said that in the days ahead the police department plans to review what happened with school officials and ask them how the drill itself was intended to have gone in the first place, “So we can prevent this from happening like this in the future.”

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