Preparing For A Real Emergency

Guns, emergency crews, and even injured students came out of Jersey Shore High School, Monday.

Corinne Buttorff is a freshman there and says, "if you're not prepared then when it comes to the drill then it's going to be chaos because you won't know what to do and there's no way around it."

It was not real, it was role playing. Corinne says, "as long as I am helping he community I don't mind."  She gave up her day off to make sure her father and the rest of the Lycoming County first responders know what to do in an emergency situation.

Her dad, Jersey Shore Mayor Dennis Buttorff, says, "the reason why is that they have an emergency plan but they exercise it through fire drills and things of that nature.  What we are doing is basically intensifying it a little bit with a fire drill and intruders and a few little explosions on the inside."

The government requires drills of this nature yearly as part of the national incident management system.

Superintendent Richard Emery says, "hopefully we never have to actually put this plan in place but our goal is to improve it and perfect it to the best of our ability."

Mayor Buttorff says Columbus Day was the perfect time for the exercise because they could control who came in and out of the building.  "Always, the first thing is to walk before you crawl. You got to learn to craw before you walk and before you run and in this case here we are doing it with the teachers first because the student population is going to be looking up at them for direction," says Buttorff.

When asked if the violence in schools these days scared her, Corinne had this to say, "it doesn't scare me because I know that the local EMS, fire department, and police department will keep out school district safe no matter what incident it may be."

Mayor Buttorff says a similar drill will be held next year during a normal school day while students are there.  From here they will assess what they need to improve in the case of a real emergency.