Ventura County deputies, firefighters participate in active shooter drill in Westlake Village

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. (KABC) -- Deputies with the Ventura County Sheriff's Office and firefighters worked together in an active shooter drill at Westlake High School.

The training is all about knowing what to do when you're confronted with a gunman and containing a violent situation where there have been numerous casualties.

"Our goal is for them to go through and for us to get a little bit of stress and for them to actually hear gunshots that we use with the blank rounds, than to address the shooter, and then come in and work as a team and move through the problem," says Nick Odenath with the Ventura County Sheriff's Office.

They've dealt with this problem in a real life situation. Last November, the deadly Borderline Bar and Grill shooting in Thousand Oaks left 13 people dead, including a Ventura County Sheriff's sergeant and the gunman.

Odenath explains the Borderline shooting and the recent mass shootings in El Paso, Dayton and Gilroy, has them training for many different scenarios, like a school, shopping mall or a fair.

"Each of those incidents where we have the ability to look at the information and take pieces of information to apply it to our training, so that we can try to prevent those incidents from occurring here again, or at least be able to respond to them," he said.

Ventura County Sheriff's Sgt. Marta Bugarin says there are three things you can do to save your life during active shooter situations: run, hide, fight, in that order.

"If you're able to run, get out of there as fast as you can. If you can't, then hide," Bugarin said. "If you're presented with the attacker or threat, you need to fight because you're fighting for your life at that point."