Any campus is vulnerable to a disaster. To respond appropriately, whether they are natural or man-caused, employees and responders must react effectively and efficiently, according to www.emergency-response-planning.com blog. We concur with this approach yet we also caution that all exercises must be realistic and tailored to your campus to be most effective.
When life, environmental or businesses are impacted the scenarios you design to use in exercising them requires strategic planning, response training and practice, practice, practice. Tabletop exercises should be realistic and tailored to your campus.
A threat or vulnerability assessment examines threats in terms of probability, likelihood, and magnitude of impact. Once threats are identified, every attempt should be made to mitigate the potential impacts. Mitigation measures can include establishing procedures that would decrease the identified risk and/or recovery time. By completing a threat assessment and risk mitigation, companies can potentially limit their losses in the event of an incident.
Exercising with site-specific and applicable emergency scenarios allows responders to effectively combat threats and efficiently respond to specific emergencies. With continuously changing and evolving threats, it is vital to build flexible response capabilities that will enable a company, to prevent, respond to, and recover from a range of major events.
Exercises should reflect the results of identified threats. Coordinated exercises with probable site-specific scenarios reduce the possibility of conflicting response and restoration methods. Non-coordinated exercises may lead to vastly different preparedness expectations and methodology, communication gaps, and redundancy, which extend reaction time and recovery.
An exercise should reflect a realistic potential scenario, such as a pipeline segment in close proximity to a major waterway or populated area. While challenging exaggerations can be injected into a scenario, unrealistic scenarios can reduce credibility with participants, and diminish the value placed on thoroughly exercising response procedures and actions.
Scenarios must remain site-specific, credible, and test capabilities necessary to respond to the incident(s). Exercises should reflect the possibility that multiple incidents can occur simultaneously or sequentially. Severe weather, earthquakes, and fires are examples of initial threats that can create additional hazards and potential incidents.
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