ORLANDO, Fla. – Months before the pulse tragedy, Orlando Health and the FBI teamed up for a training drill at Orlando Regional Medical Center.
Many credit this drill as the reason so many lives were saved on June 12.
This drill, which took place in March, involved 50 law enforcement agencies, 15 hospitals and over 500 volunteers
It took four hours.
The drill featured a hypothetical scenario with an active shooter with hundreds of casualties.
What no one could anticipate was that this training would be used a few months later in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history at Pulse nightclub, killing 49 people and wounding over 53 others.
"Because of what we did back in March, that helped us understand what they would need to do in a real situation," said Eric Albert, Orlando emergency preparedness manager.
Albert planned and organized the drill in March, and because of the recent active shootings that have taken place across the county, he knew the FBI needed to be involved in this exercise.
“One of the things that we know working with our FBI partners is they are going to have to come and interview our patients and their families-- anyone who was really in that situation to try and find out the story. We really need to practice this piece because we never done that before," Albert said.
FBI Special Agent Ronald Hopper said success equals everyone being on the same page.
"That training exercise was absolutely essential because we don't normally work or focus on the medical portion," Hopper said.
"How important is it to have agents in the hospital relaying that information back to the command post?" News 6's Eryka Washington asked.
"Those people are your best witnesses. They were the ones that were there and witnessed it firsthand. It could be as simple as over hearing someone coming into the hospital just regurgitating something they see, saw or heard during the incident," Hopper said.
In this drill, his agents practiced doing their job without impeding doctors from theirs.
"The nursing staff or the intake staff says, ‘Hey, this person can wait a few minutes you need to hear what they have to say’ -- that happened in a lot of cases. We needed to make sure there wasn't a second shooter and because of that training we knew what to do we knew what questions to ask we knew how to ask them without being in the way," Hopper said.
In a real tragedy, time is of the essence: ‘Where do I go,’ ‘What do I do?’
Dr. Chadwick Smith said this training helped answer those questions.
"It gets people to where they need to be to accept this influx of patients. It also puts in the whole team's mind who needs to go where. We train our whole careers for something like this and hope that it never happens,"Smith said.
However, having a plan is priceless.
"You hear the feedback that what we did during that exercise helped save lives that night," Smith said.
Orlando Health has already started planning for next year’s training drill, which is set to take place in April.
It will include four counties with even more hospitals and more victims, and the FBI will no doubt be involved, too.