It looked real.

But an emergency at the University of Kentucky this morning was just a drill as an assortment of first responders and volunteer forces gathered to act out a full scale training exercise for an active shooter scenario.

The exercise, which was performed down to the smallest details police barricades and fire department vehicles, surrounded the Whitehall classroom building where the training took place.

Some volunteer survivors even had fake injuries, according to University of Kentucky Police Chief James Monroe.

The level of realism is important for training.

We feel like it's important to be able to understand what our capabilities are and what areas we need to improve on to respond to a real world events that may occur on our campus.

This actually puts the players in the in the spots most in the field.

So you get to test everything.

Test your, you know, your wi fi.

Test your communications capabilities.

Test your equipment.

We've done everything from a response out as well as our communications plan and our testing, our EOC, as well as our hospitals, mass casualty plays.

So this was a very inclusive, yearlong process to design this exercise.

What this exercise was able to do is help us identify what are areas for improvement, what are our areas of strengths and what can we do better.

The training session included more than 140 participants.

The University of Kentucky partnered with Texas A&M Engineering Extension Services, or TIEGS for the exercise takes organizes immersive training courses for various disaster scenarios.