Exercises

NPHS 1510: Federal and International

Exercises

Exercises

An emergency exercise is a scripted scenario to assist organizations to better prepare themselves for emergencies. As we have discussed before, some common benefits of exercises are:

Training -
Teamwork -
Communication -

In the previous section, we discussed the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP). While this program is a standard for federal agencies, it is too expensive and cumbersome for small organizations and for small exercises. The purpose of this section is to point out some pitfalls that occur in exercise design and suggest some ways to overcome them.

The Center for National Preparedness (CNP) at the University of Pittsburgh conducted an exercise at the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Conference in 2007 sponsored by the Resilient Communities Research Consortim (RCRC). Approximately 250 attendees from the public and private sectors attended the two day conference and participated in an exercise to explore critical infrastructure interdependencies on the first day.

Ken Sochats, a Director of the CNP discusses unique aspects of the exercise.

See television coverage of the conference and exercise by WTAE-TV (ABC) News by clicking on the image to the right.

Reality

Exercises should be as real as possible. Some people, when designing exercises, try to throw lots of events into the exercise. This has a tendency to overwhelm the participants and they get little from the exercise. Participants will learn more from the exercise if they can relate to the situation.

There is enough variability in everyday life to provide challenges. On any given day the weather may vary, some employees will be ill or pregnant. Business activity will vary with time of day and day of the week.

The tables and graphs below show the wide rangee of variability that occur naturally. Select your exercise circumstances sso that they appear natural.

Pittsburgh Average Daily High and Low Temperatures (2010)
Month	Average High Temperature	Average Low Temperature
January	31.9	19.8
February	32.8	19.9
March	53.7	32.9
April	67.7	43
May	74.5	52.6
June	79.7	61.9
July	85.9	65.2
August	84.9	63.9
September	76.3	55.1
October	63.6	43.2
November	52.4	32.1
December	30.8	20.4

Pittsburgh Monthly Rainfall (2010)
Month	Rainfall Inches
January	2.9
February	3.22
March	2.19
April	1.76
May	5.19
June	5.13
July	2.86
August	1.68
September	3.27
October	2.12
November	5.97
December	1.56

US Average Births per Day (1995-2002)
Month	Average Births
January	10,411
February	10,662
March	10,667
April	10,574
May	10,782
June	10,956
July	11,245
August	11,345
September	11,420
October	10,865
November	10,551
December	10,611

US Average Deaths per Day (1995-2002)
Month	Average Deaths
January	7,357
February	7,082
March	6,831
April	6,472
May	6,229
June	6,091
July	6,030
August	5,967
September	6,051
October	6,306
November	6,502
December	6,976