For police and paramedics who were first on scene at the Lapu Lapu Day tragedy in Vancouver last April 26, the carnage was almost impossible to comprehend. Eleven festival-goers were dead and dozens more lay injured on the street.
”I don’t think any of us ever expected an event like that to happen here, but it did,” said Katryna Bowland-Kwok, the B.C. Emergency Health Services operations director for Vancouver and Richmond.
“That event is unprecedented,” said Const. Michele McKnight, a Vancouver Police Department peer support officer who was called in that night.
“We really didn’t know what we would be walking into as we were there to support our members.”
After the scene was cleared, police and paramedics were invited to debrief with crisis response teams.
“I’m not sure that any of our first responders have been through something like that,” said McKnight. “I remember seeing a lot of blank faces, a lot of exhausted faces. We were listening to the stories of some of the members who had responded. It was: ‘What do we do with this? We’ve never experienced this before.’”
While paramedics are all trained in mass casualty events, the vast majority had never attended one like the Lapu Lapu Day attack.
“We never expect to navigate it,” said Bowland-Kwok. “You have to come home. Many of us have children or spouses or significant others, and you have to figure out a way to process that and then also come back into real life where the general population doesn’t necessarily see or understand.”
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The VPD’s wellness dog Zen was part of the emergency response for members that night.
“He brings this calm, gentle atmosphere with him wherever he goes,” said McKnight. “Something tangible to distract them from maybe what they’re thinking about or what they’re visualizing and centre themselves so they can bring their central nervous system down.”
In the ensuing year, Vancouver police and BCEHS have been acutely of how responding members were impacted by the deadliest attack in Vancouver’s history.
“Some paramedics I know that attended that event still aren’t able to talk about it,” said Bowland-Kwok.
“Just the magnitude of it and the large scale of it in terms of the large number of victims, the large area that it covered, and the graphic scenes and the things they had to do to help people, it really did impact everyone,” added McKnight.
As the anniversary approaches, McKnight said her team has been “engaging people who have been involved in the event, reminding them to take the care of themselves this week and to look out for each other.”
While the scene was likely the largest and most difficult of their careers, “they did a phenomenal job,” said Bowland-Kwok.
“They did the job to the best of their abilities, and we are really proud of the work that they’ve done.”
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