SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — It wasn’t a real emergency at the Sioux Falls School District’s Career and Technical Education Academy on Friday. It was training, but not just for students; it was also training for people who already serve as first responders.

“We’re doing a mass-casualty [event] for a semitruck that ran into the building,” said Amy Drummond, an EMT teacher at the CTE Academy. “The injuries are down by the automotive lab. We’ve got some vehicles that we normally do maintenance on, and they’re all kind of queued up as a crash, essentially.”

It’s meant to simulate an actual emergency for the benefit of EMT students here.

“They are working with first responders from Sioux Falls and utilizing their skills that they’ve learned the whole semester and treating these patients,” Drummond said.

Lincoln High School senior Ethan Wasmund is taking an EMT class at the academy and took part in Friday’s training. He is planning to eventually be an EMT on the campus of South Dakota State University.

“We’re practicing assessing if they are immediate, could wait a little bit or if they’re green and they don’t really need to be worked on right now, and then we’re just verbalizing what treatment we would give them and then bringing them out to the transport people so they can take them,” Wasmund said.

This realistic training helps these students prepare for real emergencies.

“I think it means a lot, ’cause they get to put all the pieces that they’ve learned and put them together and see, like, ‘This is what she’s talking about,’ or ‘This is what it means,'” Drummond said.

“We’ve never really worked on like, a lot of patients at once, so it’s kind of interesting to have a whole bunch of them coming at you,” Wasmund said.