Why a Micro-Nation for Disaster Testing and Training?

We have just completed the scenario handbook for a fictitious country for use in training our staff and testing our systems to ensure that we are ready to do our mission in real disasters.  It would seem that there are plenty of real high hazard areas and scenarios that we could use for this purpose.  So why did we do all the work to build a micro-nation?

 

As we looked at it, there are a number of very good reasons:

 

(1)   The Virtual Emergency Operations Center generates Tweets when we activate, change alert status, etc.  We realized that some are retweeting these as though they were real events (even though they are clearly marked Exercise).  If one goes viral, people will be asking government officials about the terrorist attack, flood, earthquake, etc.  And we will get complaints that we are creating unnecessary concerns, hurting real estate values, impacting tourism, etc.

 

(2)  All of our staff come to this work with their own experiences and built in assumptions about how emergency response works, who the resources are, etc.  Having a fictitious country allows us to build resources and design geography that requires attention to the actual details, not to assumptions.

(3)  We wanted to be able to work a wide variety of disaster scenarios, some quite rare, many geographically delimited.  With a scenario country we can design scenarios that work unusual problems that would not be found in the jurisdictions we support.

 

(4)  And we wanted to be able to test our systems with data so that we can see what the resulting displays look like, make sure we have the right options in drop-down menus, etc., not just rely on "test" as our best entry.

 

So welcome the micro-nation, the Republic of Perilo ("perilo" means danger in the constructed language Glosa).  We expect it to be a busy place.  To visit, simply become a member of our team, but remember that citizenship requires commitment to work.