Support to Local Disaster Planning and Exercises

Many small towns, counties or organizations lack the disaster planning and exercise expertise to plan, exercise and evaluate themselves in response to a realistic mid to large scale emergency management scenario. State-level agencies should form exercise support teams that work with local emergency managers throughout the HSEEP lifecycle in planning realistic exercise scenarios that are tailored to their needs. During exercise execution, the state sends a small multi-disciplined team to facilitate and control the exercise. Throughout the event, team members serve as mentors and advisors by providing multi-disciplined HSEEP-based feedback. At the end of the exercise, team members collaborate with exercise participants from different ICS functional areas and lead discussions in facilitated after action reviews that are focused on tangible improvements that can be made to improve emergency response, training, resourcing, etc. These multi-disciplined teams leapfrog throughout the year to different locations to provide unbiased, non-political and improvement-focused support to exercises across the state. By supporting many exercises, these teams gain on-the-ground lessons learned and best practices that can be shared between locations. To expand exercise realism, partnerships with private and public organizations (such as hotels, theme parks, malls, retirement homes, corporate headquarters, power plants, etc.) could engage many more players and participants and multiple echelons. The state teams could also form a cadre to augment actual emergency response efforts.