The University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department will simulate a bomb detonation in Camp Randall Stadium at 7 a.m. next Thursday to test the agency’s preparedness in a crisis involving massive casualties.
The simulation will involve several local and national departments, including the City of Madison, the American Red Cross, several area hospitals and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, UWPD spokesperson Marc Lovicott said Wednesday. The exercise will close Monroe Street between Randall and Regent Streets.
Lovicott said the simulation has taken over a year to plan.
“This is a full scale exercise and it takes a ton of time to pull something like this off involving multiple agencies,” Lovicott said.
The simulation will involve more than 400 officials from all over the county. Actors will be on the scene in makeup to simulate injuries and casualties from the imitated explosion.
At 7 a.m. UWPD will initiate a loud blast sound effect and trigger a column of smoke from within the stadium. Sirens from the responding vehicles will be turned off by 10 a.m., according to a UWPD statement.
Local police agencies regularly conduct similar training exercises but never anything on this scale, Lovicott said.
“[Camp Randall] is obviously an icon in Madison,” he said. “This will prepare us for something we hope will never happen. For whatever reason, sports arenas are sometimes looked at as a target because, obviously, you have a lot of people in one given place at one given time.”
Lovicott said judges will oversee the simulation and file a report highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the agencies involved.
“The success is that we will take a learning experience from [the exercise],” Lovicott said. “Nobody is going to be punished for doing something wrong. This is for us to make sure that we’re prepared if something like this were to happen.”
Activity from the production will wind down by 4 p.m. Lovicott added that while local agencies regularly reproduce situations for training purposes, nothing else on this scale is planned for the coming months.
