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| Train Derailment |
A Municipal Emergency Management Plan is designed to be pulled out during a time of crisis so that whoever is manning the Municipal Emergency Operations Center doesn't have to invent the best way to respond to an incident - they just have to follow the plan. Just like how football teams have multiple plans and contingencies, so should a Municipality. There are no "one size fits all" disasters, so the plan has to be flexible enough to handle nearly any problem and lead the team to employ resources to successfully solve the issue. Additionally, a properly designed plan is one that the EOC staff believes in and will follow because they KNOW it is the best way forward.
So how does anyone KNOW that the plan will work or believe in it? One of the best ways is to conduct an exercise. There are essentially three types of exercises:
- Tabletop Exercise
- Constructive Simulation
- Live Exercise
The tabletop exercise can be used to talk about the plan and who would do what during a crisis, but it suffers from "bathwater drinking" in that the participants can wish away problems or consider problems to be solved, even though in real life they would not be. Tabletop exercises are a good way to run through the plan and discuss options, but care should be taken not to adopt "results" without additional study.
Constructive simulation exercises are where participants use a computer system to judge their actions impartially and inject time and space realism into the exercise. The constructive simulation is a step above the tabletop exercise because the computer acts as an external "reality check" and therefore forces the participants to listen to feedback from the computer system rather than just make internal decisions. The computer system should be relatively accurate for the purposes of training, but it does not have to be perfect. In fact, some imperfections may actually be desirable since they would cause a degree of unpredictability in the effectiveness of the participants responses. A good plan is flexible enough to handle multiple situations, and similarly, flexibly thinking personnel are preferred for handling difficult problems. Constructive simulation exercises are relatively new to the Municipal arena. If you want to find out more about constructive simulations, check out my company's web site at www.c4ic.com.
Live exercises can be very realistic. There is nothing more realistic than putting people in the field and dealing with the thousands of minute details, issues and logistics. If you need to confirm that your processes for deploying, employing and supporting large groups of people in a stressful and fluid situation are going to work, you should definitely consider conducting a live exercise. Live exercises have two drawbacks. First, they are very expensive and take people away from their day to day jobs. Secondly, since they do take place in the real world, they must suffer from built-in lack of realism. What I mean by this is that while we can do a realistic live exercise, there are going to be limitations. Of course we can't light a refinery on fire or tip over a train car with toxic fluids inside, but we can usually work around these limitations and provide very good training.
One of the latest techniques to achieve the best balance of realism and cost is to run a combined Constructive Simulation and Live exercise. The constructive simulation allows the size of the live exercise to be reduced and it allows the participants to play the events that would be impossible during a live exercise. The live portion allows for the detailed logistics and problems that having personnel in the field creates.
Getting back to the Municipal Emergency Management Plan - Why not run a number of constructive simulation exercises to ensure the overall validity of the plan(s) and then select one or two scenarios to either run as a live exercise or as a constructive simulation exercise with a wider audience? In this manner you will be able to test drive your plans, confirm that they work and confirm that the key responders know their part during a major incident.
Why go to tall the trouble? What is the worst that could happen? Why do we have to be certain about what works and what doesn't? Well, without being melodramatic, your plan is your community's insurance plan and it either works or it doesn't. If you could spend a little time and find out where the holes were, wouldn't you rather figure this out ahead of time rather than on "game day"?
My company just went through an exercise with a government agency. A brief half day exercise confirmed that parts of their plan worked, but their estimate on response times for some elements were out by a factor of ten...not intentionally - just a mistake that someone had made. They have altered their plans accordingly and everyone now has a greater level of comfort.
Will your plan work when it counts?
Keep training!
Bruce
