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Exercising

When most people think of an exercise, they immediately visualize a full scale exercise involving all emergency response agencies mentioned in their emergency plan. This is not true. An exercise of this magnitude should be the last step of many exercises previously conducted by an emergency organization within its training cycle.

An exercise is a substitute for actual experience. It enables you to learn by practising. During an actual exercise, a monumental mistake does not, generally, translate into a disaster.

Purpose of exercising

The purposes of exercising may be summarized as follows:

to stimulate and maintain interest and enthusiasm;
to practice, test, evaluate and improve plans and operational capabilities; and,
to promote and refine cooperation and coordination between operational teams, staff groups, department heads, official authorities and others involved in organized response in an emergency.

Types of exercises

The type of exercise that you select depends heavily upon the purpose, and the availability of human and material resources.

Here are a few types of exercises that can be developed to exercise your emergency plan:

Tabletop/Workshop - an exercise where all participants describe their response actions using a map, diagram, or table-top model complete with message inputs, based on a case scenario.
Field - an exercise during which telecommunications resources are used and all human and material resources are physically deployed to a staged site.
Specialty - an exercise that mainly involves speciality teams although other agencies can be expected to provide support. Here are a few examples: bomb threat, hijacking, radiation spill, hazardous material spill.
Telecommunications - an exercise designed to test or develop an alerting system and telecommunications between municipal response agencies and volunteer organizations.

The success of an exercise is not measured by how many mistakes the responding organizations made, but rather by whether it provided a realistic setting for practising emergency response. It should serve to identify and correct mistakes that appeared during its holding.

Assistance

Putting together an exercise may sound deceptively easy at first. After all, what’s involved? Just choose a date, find some volunteers, pick a site for the emergency, blow the dust off the emergency plan, and at the appointed hour, sound the alarm. It logically follows that everyone should then respond promptly and knowledgeably carry out all of their assigned responsibilities.

With a lot of luck, that could happen. But if the steps described were the extent of the advance preparations, it is far more likely that you will suddenly find yourself with two emergencies ... the one originally staged, as well as the one caused by inadequately planning the first one.

Maximum benefits must be reaped from each and every exercise. Such benefits can only be achieved through planning and close cooperation of all agencies involved.

If your community or organization is interested in holding an exercise, either table-top or field, EMO is available to provide direction and assistance. We also have a data-bank of various types of exercise scenarios available to assist you in developing your exercise, to test your emergency plan or response procedures.

Visit our Field Exercise To-do List page for an overview of what is involved in preparing for an exercise. If you have any questions or require assistance please contact our office and we will be available to meet with your community or organization.