On The Importance Of Disaster Exercises

This is an update and expansion on an earlier blog post on exercises based on our overall experience in 2014.

We  do some level of activation numerous times a year.  When we look at the data from 2014 we participated in 17 events, including:

• Responses for actual events - ranging from upgrading our alert status to Communications Watch to full Activation.
• External exercises - supporting the organizations to which we provide services.
• External day of ... exercises - the Great Shake Out is an example, drills that increase awareness of specific hazards and that allow us to practice our operations in the hazard scenario.
• Internal exercises and drills - intended to work on specific technical issues or to train our staff either in specific response actions or in responding to different types of disasters.
• Orientation seminar exercises - in our case as presentations of our capabilities to potential supported organizations or agencies.

Why do we, as volunteers, want to do that much work?  Each exercise that we designed required a full work-up, drafting a master sequence of events list, preparing inputs, doing an after action review, etc.  Some organizations count themselves lucky to do one tabletop exercise a year.

We respond to actual events because they are actual, and the organizations we support want our assistance.  So the simple answer to why is so that we will be able to respond when called.  But it is more complex than that, and the answer lies in what exercises and drills do.

One categorization of exercises divides them into discussion based and operations based events.  The discussion based events include:

• Orientation Seminars - to acquaint participants with new plans, concepts, resources, etc.
• Workshops - to achieve a specific goal or develop a specific product, such as a plan or procedures.
• Tabletop Exercises - to assess plans and policies and develop common approaches to problems.
• Games - to explore decision making in a team environment and to evaluate the results of decisions.

The operations based events include:

• Drills - testing a specific function by actually performing it.
• Functional Exercise - staffs do actual work but movement of field units is simulated to test and evaluate command center operations.
• Full Scale Exercise - with operations by all components of the system to implement plans, procedures, agreements, etc. developed in other exercises.

From this list we use orientation seminars (as part of new member Initial Qualification training), drills (to work specific functions in The Virtual Emergency Operations Center), and functional exercises (for a full function response to a scenario).

There is a long standing division in the exercise literature about what exercises are about.  Some argue that they are for training - you hold an exercise to train people to work as a team in an otherwise unfamiliar environment.  Others argue that training is something you  do in a classroom or training facility, and that exercises are only to evaluate whether the training has done its job and the procedures are appropriate.  We view this distinction as an exercise in pedantic pettifoggery.   Perhaps if you have a multi-million dollar budget, a large exercise staff, and essentially unlimited time, it might make sense to build firewalls around the purpose of an exercise.  But as a small non-profit organization every exercise has to train and test.

But it is more than simply training and testing.  One of the principles of training is that trainees do well things that are both practiced and recent.  Hint - this applicability of this principle does not stop when initial training ends.  Practice with repetition of key tasks builds both speed and quality of execution.  This is true in sports (a major league baseball pitcher who only threw the ball in games, but never in practice would not be a pitcher very long, no matter how many balls he threw in Little League, high school, college, and the minor leagues), or for that matter, any physical skill.  It is also true in mental skills such as decision making.  

But practiced skills must also be recently used to be at their top form.  I once had a job where I controlled tactical fighter aircraft in air combat training.  I was hand-picked for the job because of my proficiency as a ground controlled intercept controller.  I controlled thousands more tactical intercepts with more aircraft involved under higher pressure than the average controller in a tactical control unit.  And yet on Monday morning, having been off the radar scope for two days, I was noticeably less proficient.  The lesson of the war story is that if you work one disaster event a year (real or simulated) you will be less proficient the further you are from that one event, and certainly less proficient than if you work 17.