Groton —The Crane Maintenance Facility at Naval Submarine Base New London transformed Wednesday morning into a simulation of an active shooter situation.

The drill was part of routine anti-terrorism and force protection exercises being held at Navy installations across the country. The two-week-long exercises have occurred annually since 2007. The goal: to help base personnel improve their ability to respond to such an incident.

“It’s designed really to test our force protection capabilities and to hone our skills against challenging and dynamic threats,” said Capt. Carl Lahti, base commanding officer.

Just after 9 a.m., a man dressed in black entered the crane building, usually home to maintenance work, with an air-soft gun resembling an assault rifle and opened fire. Rapid, loud bangs rang out, and several people depicting victims screamed.

“Get out of that truck,” the shooter yelled.

In total five people would simulate being shot, with mock injuries ranging from severe to fatal. They fell in various places around the large, warehouse-like building, with one slumping in the passenger seat of a truck, another sitting in his chair with a simulated gunshot wound to the head, and others strewn across the floor.

Just a few minutes in, personnel stopped the drill to debrief two first responders arriving on the scene.

“The advantages of running something like this is, when people don’t do exactly what you wanted them to, you just stop training and do it again,” Lahti said, adding that personnel could stop the exercise “as much as they need to.”

“We will often reset and retrain” during these types of exercises, he said.

When the drill continued, two people from the base’s security department responded to the scene, eventually taking down the suspect and checking to see if there were any other weapons or, worse, if there was an explosive device on the shooter.

During the exercise, Lahti received an automated phone message alerting him that the base’s Emergency Operations Center had been activated with full staff. Base spokesman Chris Zendan also received the message.

Pretending it’s real

While the active shooter drill was progressing in the crane building, select base personnel were playing out the scenario in the base’s EOC.

“I try to pretend it’s a real incident, so I’m just sitting at my desk dreaming of Florida or something,” said Alan Brown, emergency manager for the base.

Personnel inside the EOC exercised initial response actions. The first step is to alert personnel. Three different screens appeared in the front of the room: One showed a rundown of the events as they transpired, another displayed a set of command’s priorities and the third showed communications with Navy personnel in Norfolk, Va. The 18 desks in the room each represented a key function.

One issue, and a lesson learned, was that the emergency message sent out didn’t indicate the shooter’s location.

“In a more protracted event, or we’ve got mop-up or buildings collapsed ..., then we’ll go into a longer planning cycle,” Brown said. “We’ve got not only the initial response plans but we’ve also got recovery plans that we implement. We’re prepared to go for days and days in here. We have backup for all of the positions.”

Back inside the crane building, the security department personnel surveyed the scene and searched the victims to make sure that none of them was actually a perpetrator. They also gauged the medical aid required, and then called for EMS support.

“What we try to do is have all of our security department personnel have an opportunity to respond to an event like this,” Lahti said. “We run these scenarios regularly to be able to do that.”

Once the space was secured by the security department personnel, EMTs from the base’s fire department came to the scene, providing initial first aid and prioritizing victims by the severity of their mock injuries. They then readied the victims for transport to the hospital, loading them on stretchers and taking them outside, where firetrucks and ambulances were waiting with flashing lights.

While the drill was underway, a training team was evaluating the response. A safety team also was on hand to observe the drill. Immediately afterward, a “hot wash-up” was held to review their observations while everything was still fresh in their minds. Later, a more detailed written report will be made.

“Ultimately what we’ll do is we’ll look for anything that we need to retrain on or change our procedures or tactics or something and modify that to continuously get better,” Lahti said.

‘Run, hide, fight’

Base personnel also run the active shooter exercise in an office setting. Lahti uses the saying “run, hide, fight” to describe the strategic response to an active shooter event.

If possible, you want to exit the building and be aware of the exits accessible from your workspace. If you can’t do that, Lahti said, then you want to barricade yourself and “make it very, very difficult for an active shooter to get to you within the building.” This could mean piling office furniture in front of closed and locked doors. And finally, Lahti said, “If you absolutely have to confront the person, you’re going to want to fight.”

“Obviously you want to act swiftly and with maximum violence, but that’s going to likely be deadly because they have a gun and you don’t,” he said.

Lt. Kyle Strobeck, a security officer at the base who was observing the drill, said in the event of an active shooter, unless you are 100 percent sure that you can take out the subject, you should take cover, barricade yourself and “let us do our job.”

“No one on base has guns except for my department,” Strobeck said. He added that he thought the drill response Wednesday was “pretty good.”

The base will run a multitude of different scenarios throughout the two-week exercise. On average, it will conduct about six different scenarios a day, some smaller and some larger in scale. The scenarios will range in severity from a guy with a fake identification card attempting to get through the gate to a high-speed boat with a bomb aboard charging the base.

“The importance is to make sure that we keep our sailors and their families, the contractors and civilians and our key Navy equipment, the installation, protected from a series of challenging and demanding potential real-world threats,” Lahti said.

In Brown’s words, “a plan is nothing until you know that it’s going to work.”

“You need a good plan. You need the right equipment. You need trained people and they’ve got to exercise. If you don’t have all of those things going on, you’re not going to be ready,” he said, adding that the EOC is activated about 10 times a year for training purposes.

On Tuesday, the base ran a scenario where security personnel noticed somebody observing the base. Lahti said there will also be a number of different drills involving “threats to the waterfront and people attempting to gain access to the installation.”

“Ironically, we kind of had the real test a couple of months ago with the guy with the knife at the gate,” Lahti said. “And really, we want to fight at the perimeter, not inside.”

In November, Gary Ray Brunache, 35, of Norwich attempted to gain access to the base, attacking officers Brian McCarthy and William Kephart with a knife. Brunache eventually was subdued. He was charged with assault of a federal officer and assault with a dangerous weapon with intent to do bodily harm within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

Lahti said the tragic events at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013 “taught us some things about active shooters,” namely that “all installation personnel need to be trained” for an active shooter situation.

The Navy Yard was the site of a mass shooting that killed 12 civilians. After extensive renovations, the building reopened on Monday with reportedly 400 employees of the Naval Sea Systems Command reporting to work.

While the active-shooter drill was part of a Navywide exercise, Lahti said, “it’s part of regular installation training that goes on actively throughout the year.”

j.bergman@theday.com

Twitter: JuliaSBergman