Responding to incidents like Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 requires a level of training that is normally beyond the reach of local communities. If the emergency services are going to meet the challenges of the next major disaster, they'll have to train for them.

It's not enough to have meetings and develop plans. Throwing various emergency response organizations together into an emergency operations center to solve problems with few easy answers and without training is a recipe for less-than-optimal performance. Each of the participants has very different organizational cultures. Without the opportunity to train together and develop these diverse organizations into a cohesive team, fast-moving events will lead to misunderstandings and confusion at a time when such mistakes can't be tolerated.

These are community-wide and larger events requiring an unprecedented level of response at the local, state and federal levels. These responders must have a way to realistically train together before an event if we are going to improve our performance.

War games

The model for this type of preparation exists in the military branches, which know how to plan for large-scale, infrequent events. They regularly prepare for future wars using a type of tool not generally available to the civilian emergency response sector. War games provide the opportunity to work through the challenges associated with future battles. By using war games, the outcomes of tactics and decisions can be captured and analyzed. Commanders and their staffs can be trained to manage the problems they will face together as a team, providing experience that's directly applicable to the battleground.

Given the military's performance in the Gulf War and most recently in the initial Iraq invasion, it's obvious that war game training works. Our profession can adapt and make use of the same technology to meet the challenge of future large-scale incidents. If we as a profession are going to meet the challenges of such events, we need the same type of simulation training to test and plan with our incident commanders and community leaders.

Days before Sept. 11, 2001, the National Guard Bureau began a project to build the first civilian emergency response war game. This system would be a computer-based simulation of WMD incidents, containing a variety of CBRNE scenarios. The simulation would follow the military model of a war game, providing exercises designed to help train, plan and assess a community's WMD response capability.

The result of the project is the Automated Exercise and Assessment System, or AEAS. In the development of AEAS, representatives from many national organizations were asked to participate. Computer programmers and emergency response professionals comprised a development team. Each month the development team went before stakeholders to discuss progress and gather additional input to integrate into the software. Stakeholders included the International Association of Fire Chiefs; National Sheriffs Association; FEMA; the Department of Justice's Office of Domestic Preparedness and the FBI; National Guard Bureau; National Hospital Association; and other national, state, county and city emergency response agencies. The scenarios were designed by a group of nationally recognized CBRNE experts. The stakeholders group vetted each scenario as it was completed. This process of development and vetting was completed for each step of the software scenario design and development. The next step was to develop a beta version of the software to be tested in field trails by stakeholder jurisdictions.

AEAS can be used for training, tabletop and functional exercises. In a training class or tabletop exercise, a map of the event is projected for the class. Decisions are discussed and made by the group and entered into AEAS by a designated exercise facilitator, who controls the pace at which the exercise unfolds. This configuration allows AEAS to be used in ICS and EOC interface or operations classes. Running AEAS in a tabletop mode is ideal for command-level exercises or for exposure to a particular type of incident prior to a functional or full-scale exercise.

In a functional exercise, which typically runs from one to four hours, each participant sits at an AEAS player station. As a scenario begins, participants are given background information and a map with unit and resource locations. They begin receiving simulated radio and e-mail messages about the incident. The participants position equipment, use available resources, request additional resources and coordinate their actions with the other organizations in the community. All behaviors by the “units” within the simulation are based on actual response times; for example, mutual aid units will take time to reach the scene. In the mean time, the simulation continues to evolve until the mutual aid resources reach the “scene.”

To provide the best training experience, a jurisdiction must be able to respond to the simulated incident with the resources and capabilities that they normally would have available. AEAS uses a capabilities-based approach to gathering resource information, which allows communities to accurately describe their unique set of resources and capabilities and use them during a training exercise to respond to the effects of the WMD incident. AEAS allows individual emergency response agencies to input information about their resources (engine company, patrol car, ambulance), the resource's capabilities (hazmat, ALS, BLS), the resource's supplies, and agency facilities (fire station, law enforcement station, ambulance locations), as well as some additional details about each such as call signs. The resulting resource set is used in the simulation. Participants are restricted to only the resources available in their jurisdiction or through their own mutual aid pacts.

Multiple scenarios

With the emergency response resources entered into the program, an exercise ground zero can be chosen. The program provides three geo-typical locations to choose from: a rural county, a suburban city or an urban landscape. Each of the locations has the infrastructure and facilities appropriate for a community of that type and size, allowing participants to experience an exercise response that is as near to their own jurisdictions as possible.

Now that the stage has been set, the local jurisdiction has a choice of 12 different WMD scenarios for their exercises, with each scaled to fit the location selected so that the consequences, number of casualties and types of problems will fit the community.

AEAS exercises key ICS objectives and offers an automated, unbiased assessment of individual and team actions taken to mitigate the incident's effects. There are two tiers of response represented in the war game:

1. “On scene” commander and staff.
2. Emergency manager and EOC staff.

The scene commander and are in direct control of their resources. They are able to position and direct the actions of any specific engine company, ladder company, rescue squad, squad car, SWAT team, ambulance and other units. The EOC coordinates with the on-scene commander to provide the type of support and resources needed. The EOC portion of the program has available the types of communication normally found in an EOC. Agencies that normally would be able to monitor field radio transmissions can do so in AEAS.

Once the scenario has been loaded, the players then take their local resources and use them in the chosen scenario. A map with the scene and the unit locations is part of each player's screen. The map has representations of emergency response vehicle locations, hospitals, fire stations and police sub-stations. The participants use local resources, request mutual aid and carry out the myriad actions required to respond to a WMD incident.

This is a true simulation; no two exercises of the same scenario will have the same outcome. The ultimate outcome is completely dependent on the decisions made by the participants. If their decisions are untimely, then the situation will get worse. If they're correct, the situation will begin to improve. This capability allows a community to test different response plans and have measurable outcomes by which to gauge their success or shortcomings. AEAS gives the exercise facilitator the ability to speed up or slow down the exercise as needed for training effectiveness. The facilitator can stop and then restart the exercise if they wish to correct an action or make a teaching point.

Once the exercise is completed, an after-action report is produced that contains all of the radio traffic, e-mails and other communications generated during the exercise. It notes the important decision-making points, the decisions made and the resource circumstances at the time of each decision. It also compares the expected actions of each role with actions taken by the participants.

Time to take charge

AEAS is the tool that emergency responders need to begin the transformation required to face the challenges of the future. But AEAS is not the only answer. There needs to be a whole family of simulations to help prepare communities across the country for disasters. There needs to be simulations that allow communities, regions and states to practice together. There needs to be simulations that allow local, state and federal response agencies to practice together. The military has a range of simulations to meet a variety of training needs. The civilian emergency response community needs the same. AEAS should be just the beginning of a transformation in how communities prepare themselves for disasters.

There's a saying in the military that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. While drawing up plans is difficult, what's even more difficult is the execution of that plan in the midst of confusion and rapidly changing events. Too much emphasis has been placed on the drafting of plans and not nearly enough time and effort has been spent on the training of those who must execute them.

The military, in an effort to better design its training simulations, needed to identify a group of people who made decisions under the stress of time with lives at stake so the decision-making process could be studied. After much investigation, they determined that fire service incident commanders were the best group of people to study.

With that in mind, it would seem that the fire service should be the organization that begins the push for better training for community leaders. AEAS provides the tool for the fire service to take the lead in communities around the country. If emergency response professionals are going to face the challenges of the future, they must have the right training to prepare for them. It's now up to the fire chiefs of this country to make use of their leadership and use AEAS to begin the transformation.

Any community can request a free copy of AEAS from the National Guard by going to https://firstmuster.ngb.army.mil/aeas/ and registering. Much credit must go to the National Guard, which had the foresight to fund and develop AEAS at precisely the right moment.

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Roger C. Huder is an emergency response consultant with over 30 years of experience in fire, EMS and emergency management. He can be reached at rhuder@cfl.rr.com.