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Table 4 The five types of emergency management exercises, as described by MCDEM ( 2009a )

From: Enhancing scientific response in a crisis: evidence-based approaches from emergency management in New Zealand

What

Details

Example

Orientation exercise

A ‘walk through’. It puts people in a place where they would work during an event, or uses them as participants in a demonstration of an activity. This type of exercise is used to familiarise the players with the activity

Setting up a mock welfare centre, and walking staff through how it is organised.

Drill exercise

Players physically handle specific equipment or perform a specific procedure. The exercise usually has a time frame element and is used to test the procedures.

Activating an emergency operations centre or using alternative communications (such as radios).

Tabletop or Discussion exercise

Participants are presented with a problem that they are required to discuss and formulate the appropriate response or solution. Can be:

Participants discuss their response to a tsunami threat to a particular area, where the only injects are Tsunami Bulletins, Watches or Warnings from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii, describing the nature of the threat.

Facilitated: where the exercise controller actually facilitates the discussion through a series of questions in a stress free, relaxed environment, designed to identify gaps or problems in procedures or resources

Inject driven: where the personnel are provided a scenario and prewritten exercise injects, to practice problem solving and co-ordination of services – with or without time pressures

In both of these, there is no actual deployment or use of equipment or resources.

Functional exercise

Can also be called an operational or tactical exercise, it takes place in an operational environment and requires participants to actually perform the functions of their roles. A normally complex response activity is simulated, which lacks only the people “on the ground” to create a full-scale exercise.

A multi-agency response to extensive flooding, where evacuation of a settlement is required. Messages and injects are provided by exercise control and are handled by the participants in the way described in appropriate plans and procedures. Outcomes are generated that would be expected in a real situation.

Participants interact within a simulated environment through an exercise control group who provide prewritten injects and respond to questions and tasks developing out of the exercise.

Functional exercises normally involve multi-agency participation (real or simulated) and it can focus on one or many geographical areas.

This type of exercise is used to practice multiple emergency functions e.g. direction and control, resource management and communications.

Full-scale exercise

Sometimes also called a ‘practical’ or ‘field’ exercise. These include the movement or deployment of people and resources to include physical response ‘on the ground’ to a simulated situation.

Deployment of a small team to a simulated car crash or industrial rescue by a single agency, using real rescue equipment.

They can be ‘ground’ focused only or may include the higher level response structures, and they can be simple (single agency) or complex (multi agency).

Or, coordinated multi-agency response to a tsunami warning involving actual evacuations and actors portraying the public.

These exercises are typically used to test all aspects of a component of emergency management.

Can be simple single agency, or complex multi-agency.

  1. Similar definitions are provided by the US Department of Homeland Security, with further types including Seminars, Games and Drills (HSEEP 2007a; HSEEP 2007b).