Canada-U.S. Enhanced Resiliency Experiment (CAUSE III) Northeastern Scenario After Action Report

On December 7, 2011, President Obama and Prime Minister Harper released the Beyond the Border (BTB) Action Plan. Specifically, the BTB Action Plan states that Canada and the United States (U.S.) will: "promote the harmonization of the Canadian Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System with the U.S. Integrated Public Alert and Warning System to enable sharing of alert, warning and incident information to improve response coordination during binational disasters."

To this end, the third Canada–U.S. Enhanced Resiliency III Experiment (CAUSE III) addressed this common goal in addition to several other initiatives. It was jointly sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) First Responders Group, Defense Research and Development Canada (DRDC)’s Centre for Security Science (CSS), and Public Safety Canada (PS). This cross-border initiative consisted of experiments held over the course of November 2014. This document reports the design, execution and findings from the experiment concerned with the Northeastern scenario that occurred during CAUSE III. Emergency management agencies in Nova Scotia and New Hampshire, supported by digital volunteers, tested the capability of officials to leverage social media. The experiment investigated the capabilities of the Canadian Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System (MASAS), the American Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), the Mutual Aid Support System (MASS) and Virtual USA (vUSA)1 to improve the efficiency of creating, sending and receiving emergency alerts; processing requests for mutual aid; and contributing to enhanced situational awareness (SA) across borders. The results demonstrated improvements to shared SA and interoperable communications, which had a positive impact on enhancing community resilience.