Exercises

Campus Exercises

Drills and exercise scenarios of real events are performed to practice the procedures in the emergency operations plan. Once a drill or exercise has been conducted, and the operation plan evaluated, retraining occurs on the areas which improvements were identified. The plan is then tested again, and the cycle continuously occurs, keeping those involved with the emergency operations plan well prepared in the possibility that an emergency event does take place.

There are several different types of drills and exercises used to test plans in place:

• Drill: Supervised activities with a focus to examine a limited portion of the emergency operation plan.
• Tabletop Exercise: Written and verbal scenarios given to test the effectiveness of an emergency operations plan, without any time constraints. Equipment or resources are not deployed or used and no physical events take place, instead, a run through of events is discussed in an informal setting.
• Functional Exercise: A simulation of a disaster without equipment being moved to an actual site. The scenario is designed with a set time allowance and communication dialog between involved departments. The emergency operations center, a facility or area from which emergency response is coordinated, is usually activated during this type of exercise.
• Full-Scale Exercise: An accumulation of the previous levels of drills and exercises. Response teams are tested, resources are utilized and equipment is used. The scenario takes place in "real-time" and several emergency functions are tested. Actors are staged as patients or victims of the disaster, the emergency operations center is activated, and mutual aid agreements are implemented to test interagency coordination.

Posted on Oct 24, 2008 - 06:55 AM

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