Leading Las Vegas

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It's fireworks! It's fireworks! Stop! Fireworks!

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Guys! Screams Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks

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Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks

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Fireworks Fireworks

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Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks

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Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks

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and revealing what it truly takes to be an emergency manager during a crisis by our very own leaders here in Las Vegas. We will be discussing the event preparations, the response, and debriefing surrounding the Route 91 mass shooting that occurred October 1st, 2017. Trigger warning guys, we will be going into details of the event and plating some audio clips from the night that some may find disturbing.

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While we have to discuss some of the gritty details, we are here to learn about leadership styles and

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what it takes to manage a crisis. So there's some good information here. Lots of good information. Our guests are exceptional. In this podcast we speak with Las Vegas Metropolitan Department Emergency Manager Rachel Skidmore and Captain John Pelletier of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Major Violators Narcotics Bureau to discuss the events that took place on October 1st, 2017. Captain John Pelletier was the former Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's incident commander during the Route 91 crisis. Originally from Buffalo, New York, Captain Pelletier has been a Las Vegas resident since 1990, when he moved here at the age of 17. Captain Pelletier is a former graduate of UNLV and joined LVMPD in 1999. He was only seven months into his leadership position on the strip when the October 1st shooting took place, which he discusses in detail on this podcast, along with his leadership role during that event. Rachel Skidmore is currently the LVMPD Emergency Manager and was in the position during the Route 91 crisis that took place in 2017. She has lived in Las Vegas for 13 years and is originally from Seattle. Her background is in international business finance and management. She has been with LVMPD for eight years and has served as LVMPD's emergency manager for six. While this is the most deadly mass shooting in US history, it's important to discuss the events in order to understand how we can mitigate and respond to future threats and ensure the safety and security of tourists to major events like this. So as many of you are aware, on the last day of the festival Steven Paddock, a guest at Mandalay Bay, fired over 1,000 rounds into the crowd. Over 850 people sustained injuries and 58 people ultimately lost their lives as a result of the attack.

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60 people, two more lost their lives this year from the injuries they obtained in

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2017. 61 when including Paddock. Like most tragedies it seemed unreal at first.

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At the beginning it sounds like fireworks. You can even hear some people

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say it's okay it's okay it's just fireworks. It does and it's an outdoor festival so it's reasonable to think that fireworks could be there. Unfortunately it only took a couple of seconds to realize that it wasn't. That's the scary part though. You now know that there's bullets but you can't tell where they're coming from so where is a safe place to hide? Captain Pelletier talks about that. Yeah I was very curious to hear his initial thoughts. Well he was at home when he got the call but like any other leader in emergency management, he was already prepared.

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I had, in my prior job, been the SWAT commander and I had kept my uniform and everything ready like I had in that position because it's a quick response position. As soon as something horrible happens, you have to go. So my boots were kept the same, my uniform was kept the same, and I kept my radio the same. And so I instantly turned the radio on and I could hear in absolute clarity, it was an active shooter, it was chaos and pandemonium.

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Oh, staying prepared.

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In this line of work, you have to. But back to your statement of where the shooter was located, Pelletier talks about that as well.

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And so you heard, hey, we have multiple people shot, and we knew the person was from an elevated position, or we suspected that. There was some conflicting reports of whether they were actually in the festival grounds or ultimately being in the Mandalay Bay.

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Well, in all the reports coming in from different areas, as he mentions people fleeing to Tropicana, the airport and a church, there are these calls coming from everywhere that pinpointing the exact location can be pretty hard.

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Right. And in the meantime, he also has to address those injured and handle the influx of calls to respond to and ultimately determine where the shooter was.

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You're setting up the call on the way, right? So I remember I got on the radio and said that I was responding. I made contact with a captain who's now the chief of police at Napa Valley in California, and he took the hospitals. Another captain, he made the phone calls after that point to the other captains to coordinate, but I coordinated with him. But he took the hospital as another captain would take the deployment operations center, which would be headquarters. Another captain would respond to downtown area command and handle downtown. And then I would take the incident and I would take command of that and then the strip as far as whatever needed to be done there.

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Something that is crucial to this field is prioritizing the information you have at the time and thinking ahead. We now know that there is an active shooter, so hospitals, transportation, 911 calls, and evacuation rally points are all different areas of response that require commanders, and that's what he is addressing here.

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Exactly. He is utilizing the information he has and his relationships with other agencies to respond where needed.

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And that's before they even knew where the shooter was.

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And that brings us to the ICS.

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model, incident command system model, priorities. Life safety one, incident stabilization two. And you have to go in that order, right? So my number one job is I've got to preserve as much life as I possibly can, and then I've got to get my hands wrapped around this incident, and I've got to stabilize it as quickly as possible. He followed the ICS model well.

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Absolutely.

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Another interesting statement. While the initial assessment was taking place around the fairgrounds, and they were addressing those injured. He also had to respond to those officers that were being shot because Paddock was targeting responders once they arrived.

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By the officers getting there they took the fire away from the crowd so they saved folks that way

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but that's how they would get shot. I love the bravery of these responders to draw attention away to save others. Obviously they didn't know they were doing it at the time but I feel like

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their actions wouldn't change if they did. I absolutely agree. That is a trait of anyone wanting to go into this field.

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Let's listen to what he says about the officers in the elevator going up to Paddock's room.

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Because there's no doubt that had we had officers with technical capability to go in, you know, they would have. And I do know that there was officers that were going up to the floor that this was happening at and there was discussion in the elevator you could see on their body camera of hey you know we're gonna have to do this and you know like you know what that means to them that we have to do this is we may not be coming back we're gonna have to take that threat out and we

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know what he's got. That had to be such a rush to not exactly know what they were going up against but still ready to do their job to get everyone out safely and to stop PADEC. 100 percent. So I was curious how the evacuation went for those on the floor where PADC was. Captain Pelletier does mention that. Obviously dispatch just called and they narrowed down that PADC is contained in the room. From there again he follows the ICS. So we know we're able to contain

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uh PADC in the room and then we we get that entire floor de-packed and you can get them down to the elevator banks and you can get everybody else out there so we can eliminate that threat. That happened very quickly.

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It's important to note that all of this activity inside the hotel is going on simultaneously with the commands on the fairgrounds and the hospital.

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Yes, lots of moving parts and partnerships.

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That's where we get back to establishing those relationships and communication channels to get updated information in order to make ongoing decisions or changes.

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Right.

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That was a question I had after they cleared the floor and Paddock was contained in the room. What was their decision to enter the room? And Captain Pelletier stuck with the ICS. Were there any other concerns around the environment that was led to the ultimate decision to use the explosive to get into the room?

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I'd say that was the first consideration. Obviously, you want to get in there because the quicker you get in there, the quicker you can answer a lot of questions, ultimately make sure that that threat, which is presently stopped doesn't start back up again, right?

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I think the team was successful in their management decisions, determining the location of staging areas and establishing triage at the hospitals.

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He really emphasizes the importance of those strategies with the communication and education, especially in this program here at UNLV.

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Adapting to problems, you talk about communication, you talk about relationships, a lot of that stuff is things that you've got to be able to be like water in a sense and I've got to deal with this. There's no blueprint on how to run 1 October that didn't exist.

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He does. I think that was one of his main takeaways for students pursuing this career choice, that and adaptability.

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Oh, absolutely. All the variables that were coming in from all the phone calls, you'd have to be able to think on your toes and adapt to whatever information you have in order to make the best decisions possible.

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It plays a role in the aftermath as well. Yes, I think this ties into the debriefings and then event planning that takes place prior to an event to prepare for incidents such as this one.

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The department has an after action and then FEMA has an after action. And that'd be a lot of those are listed in there. So some of the things that I would message out as I did one October presentations before and whether those are at different locations for law enforcement and law enforcement professionals and for the course, but obviously you wanna have communications within entertainment quarters. So think about it this way. I mentioned how we had the ability to do that. So there was an app called SecureComm and it was instant messaging between me and other folks. So you talk about best practices. What about other tourist destinations? Whether it's Ryan Head, whether it's Orlando, whether it's Anaheim, whether it's Waikiki, do they have that ability?

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As the captain of the strip when I was there,

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I had monthly meetings. I was a guest of the security chiefs. And so we had those those connectivities. So we're talking about having the training and the integration. We've talked about go-backs, right? So think about it this way. Let's just use the Venetian. Underneath that thing, it's a maze. I don't know what it looks like underneath there. I don't know if I go down this hallway where it's going to take me. But the security personnel there does. So do you have a pathfinder, right? That's the term we call it. Do you have a pathfinder that can take first responders to where they need to go? Do you have a go bag? In the go bag, is there access keys? Are there maps? Are there markers so I can mark a hallway of clear? And so we told each property, hey, have the go bags.

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I like the go bags for each property and maintaining that communication with event coordinators of the hotel property.

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Exactly. He does go on to speak about different events like New Year's Eve and other annual events. Each of these differ from each other, but still, depending on the risk factor, they can identify what personnel is needed based on prior year debriefings.

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Which brings us to our next guest. While each incident has its own identifier, there are some similarities between emergency crises where we can learn from processes.

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I like that you mentioned both similarities and individual risk factors. It's easy to think all events are prepared for in the same manner, especially here in Las Vegas or other large cities, where major events happen almost every day. You would think

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that the larger cities would have event planning down to a checklist and it would be relatively easy to prepare for events, especially with how often they

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take place. Well we will hear in an interview from Rachel Skidmore that

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there are a lot of factors that go into any given event, especially one as big as the Route 91 festival. Can you tell me a little bit about her background?

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Absolutely. So she is the Emergency Manager for Las Vegas Metro. However, she does have an interesting background that includes federal funding and behind-the-scenes cost and training of responders for events. This isn't necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when people say emergency management, so it's interesting to hear her talk about that aspect of it.

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No, of course, of course. No, I am not a local Las Vegas. I've lived here only 13 years. So that, I'm a transplant. I'm from Seattle, Washington, actually. And my formal training and background is all international business finance and management. I've been on with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department for eight years. And I've been their emergency manager for the last six years. I do a lot of financial management, which I still handle for the department. So if you're familiar with the federal grants that are available to local law enforcement, they have several funding streams, which are required to have grant applications and other things like that in order to be eligible for funds. So with that background, I've been managing our counterterrorism funds for, even as a contractor, well over a decade. So it's our Homeland Security funds that I do quite a bit of work with. So you can imagine when you're talking about preparing and responding for significant events, there's a lot of equipment, training, and exercises that can and are potentially funded through the federal government when it comes to some of the Homeland Security grant funding streams that are available. So I have been in that arena on a financial standpoint for, like I said, just about over a decade. So that being said, it was, I mean, working in that emergency management response field and of course working in law enforcement, it was an amazing opportunity that arose. I think I was a year and a half on the department and they appointed me to that position as the emergency manager which was a seamless easy position because I was already familiar with all of our protocol response, ICS, and all the other backings required for planning and preparation. Very

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interesting background. Lots of different aspects to that role. I'm curious to hear how our initiatives in preparation and training played a role before and after

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October 1st. Well, they obviously had preparations in place for Route 91 in 2017. This is the third annual event before the incident took place. So like any other event, they have debriefings from years prior to understand opportunities and then work throughout the year to address them

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to better prepare for the following year.

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Let's start with the pre-planning function. So as you know, we adhere to NIMS, I-C-S, right? So all things fall within that role and that function. So when we have predetermined and pre-planned events here within our Valley, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has an events planning section that we staff with officers and lieutenants so that they can create those incident action plans, and of course we refer to them as IAPs. So prior to the event, an IAP is developed for significant events that will have several thousand attendees. It depends on the event, the threat, the threat stream, historical. There's a lot of components, but Route 91, due to the sheer number of individuals attending and the location. This is considered, of course, one of our special events. So it did receive that. So we identify and determine an incident commander. We put together a structure out on scene for how those ops and everything rolls through. And all of that pre-planning is done in advance of the incident. They even determine the communications channel, essentially going through what you would with like a 205 and things to that regard. So how we would communicate on scene, who's in charge, what's the devolution of authority, what does that look like? So it kind of goes through, of course, all of those components, the roles and staffing, briefing time, and all of that good stuff. So each one of those incidents will receive that attention. But in addition to that, I wanted to touch a little bit about all of our significant events. As emergency management here at LVMPD, it is my job to make sure that we are as best prepared for emerging threats, current threats and current events. And what we do here is we do several tabletop exercises a year.

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So as you heard, there's a lot of planning that goes into any event, each with different criteria, but preparations start months in advance.

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That makes sense, especially when she talked about who is going to be in charge of what and the communication channels. I believe that all should be established due to the number of people attending any particular event. She also mentions the number of different agencies that take part in the tabletop exercises, which are trainings to include

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active shooters, crowd control, and egress prior to events. And it was a full-scale active shooter response exercise at Sam Boyd Stadium. And when we talk about partner agencies, I had more than 30 plus partner agencies out there from very disparate different groups. So of course being law enforcement and it being an active assailant, active shooter threat at a stadium, we had all of our partner law enforcement agencies in town. So that's going to of course include my area commands here at LVMPD, but that's going to include Henderson Police Department, North Las Vegas Police Department, Clark County School District Police Department, UNLV Police Department, Nevada Highway Patrol. It involved members of the FBI, city marshals, county marshals. So you name it, there's a big chunk of individuals that we have that respond to and co-train with these when we do these large-scale exercises. In addition to that, you have all of our fire departments that we pull in from Henderson, Northtown, CCFD, LVFR. And then we have our private EMTs and community that would include community ambulance, AMR, Medic West.

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So, there were lessons learned from the debrief of October 1st, as far as triaging and staging emergency personnel, and transportation to hospitals.

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Absolutely. Whether it be hospital staffing, on-site personnel, or communication channels, I think the outcome of debriefings and these tabletop exercises are to be prepared to respond and expect the unexpected.

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I would believe there would be several changes in responding and preparing after the debriefings.

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Yes, there were several things that changed from different agencies. I know one was that the hotels mandated that a will for a check be completed by two security officers. As you remember from Captain's interview, the security officer at Mandalay Bay was performing a routine check by himself when he was shot. Although he called dispatch, it wasn't until a maintenance worker came to fix the door that he called about, saw him, and then called the police due to his injuries. So hotels really reinforce the buddy system here. Rachel also talks about the additional resources from the hospitals as well.

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Clark County Fire Department had adjusted plans after this saying that it would be of benefit to forward deploy engines and rescues so that they could help to triage at the onset as people are arriving to help make things more seamless.

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That brings up another point though, how are the trainings funded? Certainly no one expects a tragedy like October 1st to happen. So it could be a hard sell to find funding for training that mitigates what we hope or do not expect to happen.

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Well, I think you said it, we hope it doesn't happen but certainly glad that our emergency management teams have gone through some sort of training when it does. Rachel does mention some ways of funding though.

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Now here's the fun part. Funding was 100% all on LVMPD. We don't, okay, so I say that with all of our employees. I'm pulling on-duty resources. We're pulling in squads that are on training days. I'm pulling in specialized, our SWAT team is coming because it's a training for them. So it's all on duty. So I'm not paying, I'm not bearing the burden of an overtime or callback cost, right? But then Clark County Office of Emergency Management was able to request a small dollar value and it was from federal funds and they were able to procure that for, I want to say they had a coordinator, a contractor that they were paying to coordinate at the county level. And I think that they did the hosted loan and a couple of other posters and things to that effect. But the majority and why I want to stress home is that the lion's share of this is individuals that these all of our partner agencies are pulling these individuals on duty and putting them in a training capacity so that they can

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respond, learn, garner and grow from these training experiences. And without that buy-in and that partnership from our partner agencies, we wouldn't recognize the screaming successes that we do at

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these full-scale exercises. Wow, that's

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I know that most agencies do on-site training, obviously as required for their respective fields, but the partnership that comes from getting all agencies coming together to coordinate, collaborate, and practice responding while they are on call to limit the amount of funding needed to protect their community is impressive. It's honorable.

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Absolutely. Shout out to all the agencies in Las Vegas community for your continued efforts to keep us all safe.

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We really do appreciate you. So we've talked about tabletop exercises and debriefings as a way to prepare and learn from past events, but I'm curious to know what goes on in their mind when they get that phone call that

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something's happened. I was wondering the same thing as well. I remember exactly what I was doing and what I thought when I got this call, so I was curious as prepared leaders what was their immediate response? Right. It would be

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expected that they would have the same initial thoughts or feelings of what is happening. Is it real? Is my family okay?

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That's a hundred percent expected and as you heard in the beginning of the podcast This is real. This is real just goes to show you that the initial shock you felt when you heard that clip is what everyone is Probably thinking but what rachel says she remembers is almost identical to what I felt when I first got the call from umc

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Thanking myself like oh at least I'm dressed. Walking in the door and from then on it was going to business.

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Mission focused and straight to business.

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Exactly. She mentioned she was thankful she even had shoes on. That's a real thought because they are so quick to respond that shoes are a subconscious idea. She probably didn't even realize she put them on but her body was like, hey, you probably need shoes to do this.

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Yeah. As leaders, especially in emergency management, that's the way we think though. Our response and focus goes immediately towards helping those in need. So it makes sense. Plus all the tabletop exercises and preparations they had in place for this event assisted in at least having some sort of vector or direction to give. So the transition into business would have been streamlined.

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That's exactly what those are for. But even with all the IAPs created and practiced on, there are still going to be things that aren't going to be exactly how you practice or what you wrote down.

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100%. But I think Ms. Skidmore said it best when it comes to planning and managing each incident.

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We can plan all day long and we will have amazing plans and we will dust them off, we will exercise them, we will do improvement plans, we will change the plans and then we will exercise. At the end of the day, when your significant incident happens, Captain Pelletier could not be more right. A level of adaptability has to take place. There has to be a level of resolve that you can rely on to be able to make critical decision thinking and making, rely on the training that you've done, and press forward with the best information that

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you have at that time. You really just never know what's going to happen. There

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are so many variables in every situation. There are, but in that sense, Ms. Skidmore continues on to reinforce the

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relationships the agencies had with each other prior to the event. That really helped with the response. The number one thing that I can rely on that evening is

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the level of relationships that are

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developed prior to the significant event and it is really that relationship management that truly I honestly believe

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Very valuable assets to have in this field.

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One of many for sure.

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What traits can you say have attributed to your success? Like what are the most beneficial?

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I see you're going to laugh because it's the same thing I've been hitting home at, relationships. If you, in any aspect of your life, your personal aspect, in any career, in any field, I truly believe that the ability to be able to work closely with your partner agencies, to work closely with the community, to work closely with event coordinators or school administrators or hospital administrators, it is so important that one, the two of you are meeting each other's needs, two, the two of you know what each other's needs are, and it is really that relationship management that truly, I honestly believe is success and failure.

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Adaptability is key because if you don't have that and you don't have certain ability to discuss that, we early on in my profession, when you're a BOO level cop, they say, be flexible, be flexible, be flexible. It truly is. That relationship building should be taught.

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It absolutely should be. And as it's, I believe that LVMPD, we truly have to, you can't recognize success as an entity. We recognize success as a team, as a community. And that is something that is taught and pushed. But I mean, if you talk about it, even at an education level, the emergency management program that you guys are doing over there at UNLV, I know that that's something that's been touched on as well, but that truly, and I know I'm beating a dead horse, but I cannot express enough the examples I have that night and those following days with the FBI or friends at FEMA back in Washington, D.C. You know, that you were back doing a training with two years ago, that you went out and did a paper and spoke on in Arizona. Like all these people that you need to call on to have support, to quickly get resources, to quickly move, push, pull, open freeways, close freeways, open hospitals. It's so important, those relationships.

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Don't be scared to do things that challenge you. And I mean it by this. I gave you my resume at the beginning and I said I got to do these different jobs and those are all great. But, and every one of them added to or built on the ability to be the incident commander that night, right? If I didn't have SWAT, maybe I couldn't have done that. But if I didn't have K9, maybe I didn't have SWAT. But if I wasn't willing enough to put my application in and try, then I wouldn't have had that. And each one of those is a building block. And I remember being 17 years old and putting my application in to go to UNLV. And if I wasn't willing to try that, then maybe those other things wouldn't have happened. And, you know, we get to watch people do incredible things, but they're people. And we lose sight of that. I think there is no one leadership lesson. There's no, because look, there's 10,000 leadership books, right? 10,000. And every once in a while somebody writes one. Seven steps of this, five steps of that. There's a whole course, right? A whole covey course, right? There's a whole, there's a whole deal. But I would say this, there are certain skills and there are certain challenges in life that affords you the opportunity. And a hero and a coward, they're the same person, but it's the hero that chooses to act.

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As you hear, both Captain Pelletier and Rachel Skidmore mentioned, establishing relationships, maintaining communication and adaptability are essential when dealing with a crisis. So leaders be prepared, communicate and adapt to the information you have in order to succeed in this field. We'd like to take a moment to recognize the work of our professor, Dr. Joel Lieberman, our podcast group, Alexa Rodriguez, Justin Levinsky, and Chris Phelps, our fellow classmates, and of course, our leaders in crisis guest, Captain John Pelletier and Mrs. Rachel Skidmore. and Mrs. Rachel Skidmore. This wouldn't have been possible without all of you, and we greatly appreciate your support.

Transcribed with Cockatoo