The Exercise Planners Guide - Part 1
This page:
Introduction
This publication provides guidance to those who have to design and carry
out emergency exercises. Experienced emergency planning officers and safety
officers may wish to use it as a check list.
It will be helpful to managers, executives, chief officers and others who
decide their organisations overall strategy for contingency planning,
including training and exercising, to help prioritise the allocation of
resources.
It is based on the guidance for managers Why Exercise your Disaster
Response but gives more detail on this essential topic. Acknowledgements
are due to all those who contributed to its contents and in particular to
staff of the Emergency Planning Division of Derbyshire County Council who
prepared the first draft.
The Millennium date change provides us with four triggers which may cause
the use of contingency arrangements. They are:
-
the failure of life-critical systems,
-
the domino effect,
-
a disaster caused by Y2K failure in another country,
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and public expectations and reactions.
It is for these reasons that the Home Office encourages all agencies to
include such elements into all exercises and to consider alternatives to
mutual aid arrangements which may not be available due to pressures on
other authorities, organisations and agencies.
Emergency Planning Process
Exercises should be regarded as an integral part of the emergency planning
process - not an isolated option. It is important that emergency plans have
been prepared and the appropriate staff trained in their roles before an
exercise is planned. After any exercise, the plan should be reviewed and
amended from lessons learned before the process starts again.
Types of Exercise
The choice of exercise is important : it should provide the most
appropriate and cost effective way of achieving its aim and objectives.
There are basically four types of exercise, although there are variations
on the theme of each:
Seminar - also known as
workshops or discussion based exercises;
Table top - also known as
floor plan exercises;
Control post - also
known as training without troops; and
Live - also known as practical,
operational or field exercises.
New plans or players would normally be involved in seminar or table top
exercises before a control post or live exercise was planned.
Seminar Exercises
Seminar exercises are generally low cost activities and inform participants
about the organisation and procedures which would be invoked to respond to
an incident. The emphasis is on problem identification and solution finding
rather than decision making. Those involved can be either new to the job or
established personnel. This type of event will bring staff together to
inform them of current developments and thinking. These events may take
place within the framework of a seminar which also includes and/or panel
discussions and are primarily designed to focus on one particular aspect of
the response.
Table Top Exercises
Table top exercises are a very cost effective and efficient method of
testing plans, procedures and people. They are difficult to run with large
numbers, but those players who are involved are provided with an excellent
opportunity to interact with and understand the roles and responsibilities
of the other agencies taking part. They can engage players imaginatively
and generate high levels of realism. Participants will get to know
realistic key procedures along with the people with whom they may be
working in an emergency. Those who have exercised together and know each
other will provide a much more effective response than those who come
together for the first time when a disaster occurs.
An element of media awareness can be introduced under controlled
conditions, such as the preparation of press releases at the tactical
level, or the use of trainee journalists, under the direction of their
tutor, to play news hungry reporters.
Control Post Exercises
In control post exercises, the team leaders (and communications teams) from
each participating organisation are positioned at the control posts they
would use during an actual incident or live exercise. This tests
communication arrangements and, more importantly, information flows between
remotely positioned team leaders from participating organisations. By not
involving front line staff, these exercises are cost effective and
efficient in testing plans, procedures and key people.
Live Exercises
Live exercises range from a small scale test of one component of the
response, like evacuation - ranging from a building or "incident"
site to an affected community - through to a full scale test of the whole
organisation's response to an incident. Live exercises provide the best
means of confirming the satisfactory operation of emergency communications,
and the use of 'casualties' can add to the realism. Live exercises
provide the only means of testing fully the crucial arrangements for
handling the media. A live exercise would not normally be undertaken until
you had confidence in those involved.
