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Fire Departments hold high rise drill after Vegas mass shooting

Posted at 6:16 PM, Oct 05, 2017
and last updated 2017-10-06 07:25:15-04

Right here in the Cream City more and more high rises are going up and Thursday afternoon multiple fire departments in Milwaukee County held a fire drill at one of the tallest buildings downtown.

City leaders say they always need practice.

Thursday's drill gets them ready for emergency responses similar to the situation in Las Vegas.

The drill is a new county-wide standardized high rise fire response.

This took nearly two years of development and the partnership has been effective since Sept. 1. 

John Halechko, Executive Vice President with Associated Bank gets a sense of security to know emergency responders are practicing this.

Shocked from the terror in Vegas, if a situation happened like that in Milwaukee he knows first responders are prepared.

“One of the benefits of doing things like this it protects everybody not just our employees here but our tenants here as well,” Halechko said. 

“I think it’s really impactful here is how all the fire departments are participating together and I think in a large scale tragedy or event that may occur it’s not just going to be one fire department that’s going to be called, everyone’s going to be called,” he also said. 

Milwaukee Deputy Fire Chief Aaron Lipski said this drill is similar to various emergency response situations.

“The organization structure that we’re using to solve these problems would very easily be laid in on a major emergency or mass casualty.” Lipski said.

“There [are] huge side effects, very positive side effects to us practicing in these building, we could use this template just about anywhere,” he also said. 

Prepared to make a difference in life or death situations. Almost 50 firefighters participated in Thursday’s drill. 

Fire officials say these fire drills are and will happen more frequently.