Carroll nursing students train for Capitol mass-casualty emergency scenario

More than 100 volunteers became patients Tuesday on Carroll College’s athletic practice fields as nursing students worked through a mock attack on the Montana State Capitol, a drill built to test how Helena would respond if a real mass-casualty emergency hit downtown.

The exercise ran from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. between the PE Center and Guadalupe Hall and turned campus into a temporary emergency scene with mock ambulances, triage stations and a hospital-style treatment area. Carroll said the simulation was designed as a full-scale disaster exercise, with 50 volunteer actors needed for each time block so students could practice the first minutes of a large-scale response when victims outnumber responders.

Students rotated through multiple runs of the scenario, assessing injuries, sorting patients by urgency and making rapid decisions about who needed care first. Carroll says the training is meant to cover triage, treatment, transport, retriage and trauma-informed care, skills that matter when a Capitol-area emergency could quickly pull in city, county and state resources.

Sophia Bourekis, one of the nursing students in the exercise, said the point was to be prepared before a real emergency happens. That preparation mattered in a city like Helena, where the Montana State Capitol, local hospitals and county emergency operations are all close enough together that a major incident could strain the entire response system at once.

The simulation also connected nursing students with local emergency response representatives, reinforcing how hospitals, schools and first responders would have to coordinate under a unified command. Lewis and Clark County Emergency Management says its mission is to protect lives, property and the environment through preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation, and the county’s emergency planning includes a mass-casualty, mass-fatality annex. County officials also say the Emergency Management Coordinator manages the Emergency Operations Center at Helena Regional Airport during emergencies.

Carroll has been expanding that preparedness work for several years. A 2025 college release said the mass-casualty simulation was in its third year and involved the Nursing Department, Theatre Department, Master of Social Work faculty, Computer Science Department and Hispanic Studies Department, along with volunteers from healthcare, law enforcement and county emergency services. Carroll also launched a Mobile Health Unit in spring 2025, a fully equipped towable trailer sponsored by Benefis Health for screenings, education and outreach across Montana.

This year’s Capitol scenario showed how much local readiness depends on more than one group at a time. It linked classroom training to the county’s broader emergency plan, and it highlighted the pressure points Helena would face if a real disaster demanded fast triage, tight coordination and enough trained hands to keep the response from being overwhelmed.