No need to be alarmed, but in the next two weeks a host of law enforcement agencies and emergency services will be swooping in on Northwest College.

Cody physician Elise Lowe, the Big Horn Basin Healthcare Coalition’s physician adviser and a member of Park County Search and Rescue, said in an earlier interview it’ll be the first such event at the college in seven years and in scope and magnitude will dwarf even that. 

Even the Wyoming National Guard will be involved, as it also recently sent out a notice to not be alarmed when seeing a helicopter flying low overhead. 

I for one am glad to see this kind of training. Our relatively sleepy corner of Wyoming may seem worlds away from a mass shooting or terrorist attack, but then I would’ve said the same thing about Littleton, Colorado in the late 90s, living just a couple miles from Columbine High School. 

It’s never the wrong decision to be well prepared, and in the area Northwest College has one of the greatest concentrations of people — at least during the school year — and thus local law enforcement and emergency services should always be well prepared for a potential mass casualty situation. 

And we don’t all have to be on the sidelines of this if we don’t want to be. The company helping with the training is hiring locals to portray mass casualty victims during the training. It’s your chance to help in an important training, maybe learn a little about how best to respond as a victim of such an attack, and likely test how well you can act injured, or worse, if you’ve ever felt the urge to become a thespian.

All kidding aside, it’s good to see all of these agencies in the region coming together to plan for the worst possible outcome. Hopefully it’s never needed, but it’s always best to be prepared. As I tell my sometimes far-too-negative son — prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.