Members of Calgary's fire department, police service and EMS participated in a formal training session to brush up on strategies to keep people safe in complex and dangerous situations.
The Rescue Task Force, a new partnership made up of members of all of the city's first responders, will help make sure citizens are safe during planned major events, environmental emergencies and potential acts of mass violence.
"RTF is focused on the rescue and care of casualties from active emergency situations," said CPS Inspector Sheldon Scott. "It also focuses on integrating emergency responses to ensure first responder safety when attempting to attend to casualties in active emergencies."
Scott says the reason for the formal training comes from the situation that many police and emergency services face across North America and a lot has been learned from the sessions.
"We face a lot of communication challenges; there's delays on information being relayed from one service to the other," he said. "The understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the people in the particular situations, whether they are in the front line or in the command position. [The training] has clarified a lot of that."
Members of the RTF have also had consultations with authorities from the United States who've been involved in incidents such as the Pulse nightclub shooting and the Colorado theatre incident.
"The overarching learning objectives that are coming from that, in the message to us, are you have to practice that, you have to be in a room together, you have to have commitment and you have to go out and build these programs and be a part of it the day of."
Officials said the system is also designed to strengthen the partnerships with agencies across Alberta.
