When William Evans, then-Superintendent of the Boston Police Department, found out that there had been bombs set off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon last year, he was at home, having just finished running the race himself. “All the way driving in, and it probably only took me about 10 or 15 minutes to get back, I kept saying, ‘This can’t be happening. It can’t be,’” says Evans. “I still was hoping that it was more of a transformer fire or an explosion. I was in disbelief until I got back onto that street and went to work. To see the damage, to see the bodies there, it really hit home. To have run down that street an hour earlier and have seen the joy and the happiness and the beauty of the day, and then to return and see the destruction and the windows blown out… it was surreal, it really was.”
It’s no easy feat to secure a soft target like a 26.2-mile marathon, but previous training helped immensely in the aftermath of the marathon bombing. “We always planned that (the marathon) would be a target that would draw international attention, but we thought there was more of a possibility of someone trying to disrupt the race. I don’t think anyone in their wildest dreams thought we’d have two bombs go off at the finish line,” Evans says. In preparation for the worst to happen, the Boston Police Department had undergone several multi-agency training exercises through Urban Shield for the past few years, says Evans, who is now the Boston Police Commissioner. The Urban Shield training “is a 24-hour exercise during which first responders are deployed and rotated through various scenarios. That helped us get to know each other and build relationships, so when this happened on marathon day, we were able to deploy our partner agencies, and we all worked together well,” Evans says. “Training is key. None of the cooperation at the marathon happened because we all happened to be in the right place at the right time. There are a lot of great relationships there, a lot of knowledge of each other’s capabilities, and that came about because of the importance of training.”