Department of Homeland Security Hosts Disaster Training Webcast

To help prepare communities for disaster, the Department of Homeland Security recently hosted a webcast providing information on how to be innovative when designing and performing disaster drills and exercises.

The webinar was given through the First Responder’s Group Capacity Building Webinar series, and it included speakers from FEMA and other organizations in the United States.

The main focus of the educational session was to give disaster preparedness officials best practices for their disaster drills, including the use of new technologies, social media and exercise swaps.

Carla Boyce, director of the National Exercise Division at FEMA discussed some systems currently in place to facilitate scheduling and design of emergency training exercises.

The suite of tools that they provide is used for scheduling, design collaboration, delivering exercises and evaluating the effectiveness of exercises.

Their toolkit is being placed into one single open source, and this toolkit is designed to help communities as well as FEMA.

The toolkit allows organizations around the nation to understand their own level of preparedness, and it allows for collaboration with FEMA.

For example, the toolkit was recently used to design an exercise in La Crosse, Wisc. to prepare for a shale oil spill. This training was one of three similar trainings that were held nationwide.

Douglas Kahn, manager of the Virtual Tabletop Exercise at the Emergency Management Institute at FEMA touched on the effectiveness of the Virtual Tabletop program.

The program allows for teleconferencing for groups of up to 10 or more at different organizations to help disseminate information about disaster preparedness.

During the teleconference, agencies discuss what they would do during a prepackaged scenario that is presented. The Emergency Management Institute partners with groups like CDC to make sure the information they’re giving is accurate.

Leaders of the organizations receive a copy of the situation guide, copy of the slides presented during the conference and a facilitators guide to help run the broadcast.

Boyce Wilson, homeland security planner at the Heart of Texas Council of Governments, presented on the value of exercise swaps for smaller organizations in disaster planning and a training he provides called the PB and J exercise.

Exercise swaps are when an exercise is developed and designed by one organization for another organization. This increases the exercise opportunities in that area and allows for more networking and sharing opportunities to trade more resources and tools.

The PB and J exercise shows the benefits of simply designed exercises by having groups take orders for and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while adding in rules and regulations, such as every knife only being able to touch one substance. This also helps teach about chain of command.

Kim Stevens, a consultant at iDisaster.wordpress.com discussed the usefulness of social media in disaster response training.

She gave tips on how to best incorporate Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress and text messaging into disaster exercises, and explained their usefulness. These platforms give users a real feel for the systems they may use during a disaster, and they all have privacy settings that allow no false information to be disseminated to the public.

To watch this webcast or to get more information on other Department of Homeland Security presentations, visit FirstResponder.gov.