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Drills & Exercises
Drills and exercises are two of the best methods for implementing and evaluating your emergency management and business continuity program. Drills practice basic skills and allow instructors to evaluate competencies and the effectiveness of training and education programs. Participants learn by doing and develop self-confidence in their ability to fulfill their roles.
Exercises include tabletop exercises that familiarize team members with plans and challenge them to assess hypothetical situations and determine how to protect people, property, operations, and the environment. Functional exercises require team members acting in their assigned roles to manage a simulated incident. Full-scale exercises are the most extensive and costly type of exercise and involve the physical movement of people and equipment in response to a staged emergency incident.
Preparedness, LLC has extensive experience designing, facilitating, and evaluating drills and exercises with private sector and public sector organizations. Our extensive experience enables us to customize drills and exercises to meet your specific needs and to help you comply with regulatory requirements.
Drills
Every occupant of every building should practice evacuation drills. Fire and life safety codes require evacuation drills for most buildings. Fire codes and homeland security regulations in some jurisdictions also require shelter-in-place drills. The frequency of workplace violence dictates the need for lockdown drills. Members of emergency response and business continuity teams must practice skills such as operating systems and equipment to ensure they can fulfill their responsibilities during an emergency.
Preparedness, LLC can customize a drill program to comply with regulatory requirements. We can develop procedures for conducting drills and prepare user-friendly forms that will enable efficient, yet effective evaluation of drill performance. We can facilitate drills, so your personnel can learn by doing.
Exercises
Tabletop
exercises provide an opportunity for participants to learn about the
fundamentals of emergency management and how to apply these fundamentals
to manage hypothetical but realistic emergency scenarios. Exercises
enable participants to:
- Better understand how to use the Incident Command System to manage an incident. This includes assigning personnel to command positions; conducting a situation analysis; conducting an incident briefing, and developing an incident action plan.
- Identifying the means of communications and warning and the importance of effective communications to successful incident management
- Identifying and understanding the roles of internal team members and outside agencies
- Applying prescribed procedures from emergency response plans and business continuity plans to a realistic incident and identifying any gaps in procedures, resources, knowledge, or capability
Preparedness, LLC follows guidance from FEMA and the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation program to design, facilitate, and evaluate exercises. We conduct a needs assessment to help you determine the scope of your exercise program. We prepare situation manuals for use and reference by participants and tools to facilitate and evaluate each exercise. At the end of each exercise we conduct a “hot wash” to capture important recommendations and action items. Using the hot wash, participant evaluations, and exercise evaluators forms, we prepare a detailed after-action report that summarizes each exercise and presents recommendations for program improvement.
Click here to download emergency management services brochure.