“It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Gary Hanebrink recalls the safety drills conducted on Eastern’s campus last week.

Hopefully Hanebrink, Eastern’s current safety office, is right.

Hopefully, students and faculty alike will never again bare witness to crisis response teams and hazmat units.

Hopefully, Charleston residents will never again be awaken by the thunderous sound of helicopters hovering over the city.

However, hope does little to keep the university and town safe, and therefore, these drills are absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, we live in a society of increasing violence. Columbine High School, Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University can attest to this claim, as can their surrounding communities.

Whether or not we choose to accept it, we must prepare ourselves for one simple fact—violence on college and high school campuses has seen dramatic increase over the last decade.

With that in mind, Eastern students and Charleston residents should feel some reassurance from last week’s drills. Chemical leaks, hostage scenarios, “emergencies within emergencies”—these are all very realistic concerns on college campuses, and while the possibility of an emergency occurring sometimes seems unlikely, preparation for such an event is undoubtedly helpful.

The same way one would expect a professor to keep their respective skills sharp, or expect a professional athlete to always strive for improvement, last week’s drills serve as indicators of the commitment of the university and town’s law enforcement and fire departments.

It’s good to know the level of preparedness of those sworn to protect us, and in the event that Eastern does experience such an emergency, it should be comforting to know that an established, scrutinized and practiced reactionary plan exists. Without these drills, many students might not have understood the competency of both the town and university’s safety officers.

The drill proved that, while there may be an occasional mishap, the university has adopted a very sophisticated and refined protocol for dealing with emergencies, even if the majority of students are unaware of such a plan.

It should also be comforting to know that preparation did not stop when IEMA parted ways with Charleston. In fact, one could say that preparation has yet to even truly begin.

According to Doug Downey, the exercise coordinator for IEMA, the agency will spend the next few weeks evaluating information from the drill, and will eventually implement new response strategies.

Ultimately, the effects of last week’s drills have yet to be seen. Hopefully, a lack of emergencies will help them remain unseen for quite some time. Until that time, it should be indubitably comforting to know that our police, firefighters and other safety teams are ready to protect us.