CASS COUNTY — In the event of the unthinkable, the Cass County Firemen’s Association now has equipment that will allow them to better assist law enforcement and help them save lives.

On Monday, Feb. 26, the Cass County Firemen’s Association unveiled its new tactical vests at the Newberg Fire Department in Jones. Each of the fire departments in Cass County has two tactical vests, which are similar to a bulletproof vest, only these are equipped with medical trauma supplies. The vests are to be used by a department if a mass shooting were to take place.

“Our goal and our jobs at these is going to be extracting potential victims,” said Paul Harris, a captain at the Edwardsburg Township Fire Department and member of the Cass County Firemen’s Association. “We’d be going into what we call the warm zones. A hot zone would be where there’s an act of violence going on. A warm zone would be where there’s not an act of violence going on in the area, but it’s not danger free.”

According to Harris, each vest costs roughly $700. In order to raise money for them, the firemen’s association partnered with Midwest Energy and Cobank in Colorado, both of which contributed $5,000 towards the endeavor. The association also dedicated all of their profits they made from the Firemen’s Grill at last year’s Cass County Fair.

The Cass County Firemen’s Association is comprised of the 13 fire departments in the county. The purpose of the organization is to promote cooperation between all of the departments. According to Harris, around 95 percent of the firefighters in the county are volunteers, so it’s important that the departments collaborate on larger incidents or when not enough volunteers are available from one township.

“We’re a pretty tight-knit group,” Harris said. “Everyone knows each other. It’s kind of a fraternity. We work just to promote the interest of the firefighters and try to implement and conduct trainings for the group. So we saw a need about two years ago after having seen what’s going on in the country recently with these school shootings and acts of violence happening in the workplace.”

To be clear, in the event of an active shooter, it would not a firefighter’s job to neutralize the situation. Instead, their intent will be to rescue as many victims as possible. This is an incredibly important task as the longer victims with a gunshot wound go untreated, the higher their mortality risk is. According to Harris, a delay in treatment resulted in additional casualties at the Columbine shooting in Colorado in 1999.

“A lot of those victims bled out while they were waiting to be rescued,” he said. “They could have been saved had they been pulled out earlier but there [were no plans] in place at that time. They had to fully secure that building before people went in to assist the victims, so they bled out.”

Purchasing the equipment was the first step towards the local fire departments being able to assist law enforcement in the event of a mass shooting. Next, the firemen’s association needs to create and enact a training program.

“It’s a program we probably won’t be implementing for another six months to a year at least,” Harris said. “It’s in the stages where it’s developing. We’ve figured out what we want to do. We’ve got the equipment. Training is kind of the last stage until we actually put ourselves in service.”

If there were an active shooter before the training has completed, the sole responsibility of firemen in Cass County would be to help direct traffic.

It was around two years ago that the Cass County Firemen’s Association decided that they needed to be prepared for a shooting in case one ever happens locally.

“We saw this need in our county [and thought], ‘Boy oh boy, we have no training at all if something like that happens,” Harris said. “God forbid, if anything like that were to happen in the county, how prepared would we be? And what’s going to be expected of us from law enforcement?”

The hope is that a mass shooting never happens. Thanks to the tactical vests and the communication between the firemen’s association and local law enforcement, Cass County is one step closer to being better prepared if one ever does.