When I was at the Department of Transportation …
It occurs to me that a lot of my writing starts with that phrase. I haven’t yet decided if I use it because I learned a lot there or because I think people will be more likely to listen if I start a discussion with it.
Regardless, when I was at the Department of Transportation we would do emergency training. What if there was another 9/11 attack, what if there was a cybersecurity attack, and so forth. Some of us got to go to semi-secret locations and stay underground, walk down long corridors with lights along the top casting shadows, lots of clacking of shoes on the floor, eating together in the cafeteria, periodically getting messages of incident updates, doing reports, watching the pretend (or real) Secretary, talking to the (always) pretend President, and so on. It was pretty cool, like getting to go back to camp for a day. Some of the exercises were pretty extensive involving multiple Government agencies including in some cases State and Local governments.
I was reminded of that recently when the great Washington Earthquake of 2011 hit. Many Federal agencies and departments practice implementing their COOP training. For the uninitiated, COOP stands for Continuity of Operations. COOP planning is actually pretty serious stuff dealing with how to ensure an organization can keep its essential functions running in an emergency. When the organization is one that many citizens depend on, COOP planning is very important.
In any event, at one Government agency, when the actual emergency happened, the earthquake, everyone scattered to leave their building.
On a side note it was only when some of us were outside, like me, that we learned that we had done exactly the wrong thing according to FEMA. Evidently I was to fling myself under a heavy table or find a load bearing door or something similar and stand there, so as the ceiling fell in, it would not fall on me. My instinctive reaction of getting off the second floor before the building collapsed was completely wrong, thus proving once again that no one should pay attention to me when an earthquake occurs.
Back to the agency in question, when all of the IT staff involved in COOP support tried to get to their COOP places, the building guards, who evidently weren’t involved in the emergency practices, and also evidently were not staying under a table, would not let them do so. After some argument, the IT staff gave up and left. So much for COOP training.
So what are the lessons to be learned here. I have two (of course).
First, in my opinion, emergency training is, as are most things, upside down. We spend all our time practicing the procedures we have set up to deal with an emergency. While this is useful and should continue to be part of emergency training, in a real emergency it is the unexpected that happens. It is, in fact, because of the almost certainty of unexpected circumstances that an event becomes an emergency.
Instead in my opinion, the major focus of emergency training should be to help people figure out what to do when they do not know what to do.
In true emergencies, everything breaks down. The expected leadership doesn’t show up and/or isn’t able to communicate effectively to the people who need advice and leadership. The congregation point where people are to meet becomes inaccessible. Something happens that is not in the plan at all. Chains of command fall apart because many of the links are gone.
In all of these cases, actions still need to be taken; collective behavior implemented; goals defined; and problems solved. People who are not prepared to deal with what to do when they do not know what to do, panic or take what often in retrospect are irrational paths of action. It is these issues that emergency training needs to focus on more than it does currently.
My second lesson is that much of this training requires some kind of virtual environment. One of the biggest problems when an emergency hits is problems with communications. However with almost all emergency training if you kill the communications, the training exercise would just stop. The training participants, and the people providing direction for the exercise, would not be able to interact.
In a virtual environment on the other hand you can do almost anything. If a major part of such training is to get individuals used to situations where they have to improvise as a stated goal, virtual environments become a much more plausible way to accomplish this.