A year has passed since the December 2, 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack that targeted the employees of the county’s Environmental Health Services Division, and the impact on county employees and the organization has been profound.
Thirteen county employees and an Inland Regional Center worker were murdered that day by an apparently radicalized co-worker and his wife during a day-long training session and awards luncheon at the IRC, a non-county facility. Twenty other county employees were physically wounded, some quite severely. The other 38 employees who witnessed the attack are wounded emotionally to varying degrees in ways very few people who weren’t there can comprehend. Many of the survivors have not returned to work. Some are still recovering from gunshot wounds. Others just couldn’t bring themselves to return.
San Bernardino County owes a huge debt of gratitude to the counties of Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Marin, Orange, Riverside, San Luis Obispo and Ventura, who provided mutual aid support to the EHS division in the days, weeks and months following December 2, and to the counties who sent warm messages of support to wounded and grieving employees. The county still relies heavily on contract staff to fill the void left by employees who can’t yet return to work full-time or at all.
Something the county learned first-hand from this incident is that trauma affects everyone differently, and the effects of the attack extend far outside the four walls of the conference center where the attack took place. The EHS employees who did not attend the training that day are suffering from the sudden and violent loss of their friends and co-workers, as are the other people within county government who knew them or had once worked with them.
After asking the employees who were the targets of the attack whether they wanted to return to their previous workspace (they overwhelmingly said yes), the county completely remodeled it to remove anything that might remind them of the way it used to look, smell, and feel. The county even re-wrote its workers’ compensation form letters to make them more clear and compassionate. Much of this has been uncharted territory and there have been bumps along the way, but the county has tried to learn from its mistakes and improve its practices along the way.
To read more of Guest Commentator San Bernardino County Supervisor James Ramos' article, please click here.
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