Zombie Experts Visit College

The Casper Journal brings us word of such experts providing information in the university setting:

Inspired by the television show, zombies will visit Casper College on Monday nights, beginning Jan. 28. The Continuing Education department is offering a class called “Zombies” which looks at how society might address potentially devastating events, like a zombie infestation.

The class will be led by Lance and Pam Jones, who’re big fans of “The Walking Dead.”

“We were sitting around after watching the show one night and just got to talking, wondering, if it really happened, what would be done?” Pam said.

“We thought, wouldn’t it be cool to do a class about this? And it so happens we both work for the college so we approached the Continuing Ed and asked if they’d be interested,” Lance said.

There will be a lot of humor to the class, but there’s some serious information to be had. “We want to be serious about it, but using the zombies as the cover story, we really want to talk about crisis management. We’ve got some heavy hitters coming in to talk about this, we’re just kind of the facilitators,” Pam said.

Speakers from the Natrona County Emergency Management Agency will talk about coordinating a response to a crisis, which pertains to zombies too. “They’ll talk about mitigating the situation, coordinating the response and then the resources for dealing with refugees,” Lance said.

The Casper-Natrona County Public Health Department will talk about disease outbreaks and how they’re spread. “A zombie outbreak is essentially a contagious person-to-person contracted disease,” Lance said.

The Wyoming National Guard will provide an expert on the military response to an outbreak as well as the impact of standard weapons and how to use them effectively. “Zombies operate on the remnants of the central nervous system, so the classic doctrine is that you have to shoot them in the head to stop them and who better to talk about what may or may not work than the National Guard?” Lance said.

The Natrona County Coroner’s Office will present on the real world issues surrounding what happens to dead or dying bodies. The question is, if this were real, how long would the zombies be running — or shuffling — around until they fell apart?

Finally, a Wyoming Medical Center trauma nurse will talk about things related to disabling the bad guys or the effect of trauma on the living.