 Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for the webinar today. My name is Jessica Unger, and I'm the Emergency Programs Coordinator of the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation. We're so pleased to be able to offer today's program as a part of a webinar series that addresses the needs of Alliance for Response communities as well as other cooperative disaster networks nationwide. These programs are made possible through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I see many familiar names in the attendee list today, and I hope that many of you will be able to likewise join us for the final two webinars of this series. Those sessions will address two key topics that are essential to cooperative disaster networks, how to communicate effectively during an emergency, and how to successfully seek funding for your projects. Before we dive into the presentations, a couple of brief technical notes. On your screen, you'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left-hand side of your screen, one labeled web links, and one labeled files on the bottom. Use the chat box to say hello, ask questions, and share information. If you post a question, you'll receive a response either from me or my colleague, Tiffany Emmig. Any questions will be noted, collected, and then I will ask them of the presenter following their talk. To use the web links box, click on the link that you want to see and highlight it in blue. Then click the Browse 2 button to go to that site. In the Files box, click on the file you want to download and highlight it in blue, then hit the Download File button. If you are unable to attend any of these upcoming sessions or missed a past program, don't fret. We've been recording all programs, and we're hosting these sessions on AIC's YouTube channel, which is available at youtube.com backslash, user AI conservation. An easier way to do that is to just click on the web links box, the AIC's YouTube channel, which will actually take you to a direct page with all of the archived AFR webinars. We're aiming to get all of the sessions up within a week of their recording time. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Alliance for Response Initiative, I just wanted to begin by giving a bit of context about the history and goals of the program. Alliance for Response began almost 15 years ago with a key mission in mind to help communities more effectively protect their cultural and historic resources. The immediate objectives are two. One, build relationships, initiating an ongoing dialogue between cultural institutions and emergency managers and first responders. Two, to educate cultural heritage and emergency management professionals, working to raise awareness of the need to protect cultural and historic resources within communities, encouraging disaster planning and mitigation at archives, historic sites, libraries, museums. And finally, to develop strong, ongoing networks to facilitate effective local response. Many of you might be familiar with Alliance for Response as an initiative of heritage preservation. In May of 2015, Heritage Preservation closed its doors, but fortunately many of its programs transferred to the foundation of the American Institute for Conservation at that time. Alliance for Response and other emergency initiatives at Heritage Preservation joined forces with the emergency initiatives currently underway at FAIC, including the National Heritage Responders, formerly known as AIC CERT. A team of trained collections of care professionals who can provide on-the-ground support for impacted cultural heritage institutions. You can find out more information about the National Alliance for Response Initiative and the existing networks by visiting our website at heritageemergency.org slash AFR. Again, listed in the web links box below. Before I turn things over, we just wanted to get a sense of who's on the webinar today, and for those of you who have been on the program before, you're familiar with some of these questions. So just a few quick poll questions that I'm going to pull over. Are you currently involved with an Alliance for Response Network? Please go ahead and share your answers. Great, so I'm seeing about 50-50 here. So about half of you are currently involved with the network, and several of you aren't. So it's great to know that we're reaching out to those who aren't as familiar with Alliance for Response. Hopefully you can get more people online. Next question. If you are involved with AFR, are you connected to people outside of your network? We're curious to know how much collaboration there is between the existing networks nationwide. In the past programs, we've seen that there is quite a bit of conversation happening, and I think the results today are reflecting that as well, which is exactly what we want to see, and of course is one of the goals of this webinar series. Wonderful. Okay, and then final question. We're just curious about what region you're coming from, and we have changed this question a little bit from the past webinar, so please take note. We have different regions identified here, and your states will be listed next to those, so if you're unsure, you can use that as a reference. Great, so a lot of Minutelanic folks, like myself, a few from the Southeast, and we've got a little bit of representation from the West Coast today, which is great. Wonderful. Thank you all so much for that. It's just helpful for me and for our presenters to get a sense of who is on the program today. So today, we're so fortunate to be joined by our fantastic presenter, David Carmichael, and our discussant, Chief Joe Boney, a bit about our speakers today. David Carmichael is a state archivist of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Pennsylvania in 2014, he directed the Georgia Archives from 2000 to 2012, during which time he oversaw the design and construction of the state archiving Georgia Archives building, and helped lead national efforts in emergency management, particularly for the protection of essential government records. Before becoming state archivist of Georgia, he was director of records and archives for Westchester County, New York, for more than 16 years. He received his master's degree in history and archives from Western Michigan University, and he is a fellow of the Society of American Archivists. Our discussant, Chief Joe Boney, started his career with the Biloxi Fire Department in 1984. He worked his way up through the ranks, and in July 2013, he was appointed by the mayor to his current position as director of fire. He is the founder and currently serves on the board of the West End Hose Company No. 3 Museum and Fire Education Center. He is a state director for the Southeastern Association of Fire Chiefs, a member of the Mississippi Fire Chiefs Association and the International Association of Fire Chiefs. Chief Boney has received the Medal of Valor for his service during Hurricane Katrina and was a Biloxi Lions Club outstanding citizen for 2015. Most recently, he was named Fire Chief of the Year by the Mississippi Burn Foundation's 2016 Hearts for Heroes. We're so lucky to be joined by these two wonderful speakers today, and with that, I'm pleased to turn things over to David Carmichael. Thank you very much, Jess. I appreciate what you and AIC are doing, and it's great to be here again today to talk about tabletop exercises. I love the idea of exercising without leaving my seat, as my wife will tell you. So that's really what we want to talk about today, but we're going to talk about a number of things around testing, and as you mentioned earlier, we'll talk a little bit about the internet command system, but mainly we're going to talk about tabletop exercises. I want to suggest five steps in the process of testing, and these are not original with me, they come really from FEMA for the most part, and we want to consider different types of things that you might test and the different kinds of tests you want to do. So the very first thing to decide is what are we going to test? The way we test is going to be determined, will determine in some part what we test. Now, let me say that the other way around. Let's get this straight here. What we test will determine how we test. All right, that's a better way to say it. So what might you test related to disaster planning? The first thing, of course, is the disaster plan itself. Hopefully everybody on this webinar has a disaster plan in place, and it's a very good idea, at least annually, to test the disaster plan and make certain that you know how you're going to deal with it. That can be as simple as testing what happens if you discover a water leak during business hours, or it could be as complex as how are you going to react to a hurricane that's coming, or perhaps a hurricane that has already occurred. You need to be able to test your disaster plan. You might test your continuity of operations plan, having trouble saying these words today. You might test your continuity of operations plan unless you don't have one. Hopefully everyone, in addition to having a disaster plan, has some sort of plan that tells them how they will continue operating in the event of a disaster and how they will continue performing essential functions. Everyone should identify whether they have essential functions and how they would continue those. Here is FEMA's definition of essential functions. I'm going to read these to you sometimes from the screen just in case you're not able to see the screen, but essential functions are functions that cannot be deferred during a crisis because they must be performed to provide vital services, exercise civil authority, maintain the health and safety of the public, or sustain the industrial economic base. Essential functions are those that are both important and urgent. So do you have essential functions? And if you do, your coop would tell you how you would continue performing those. Where would you do it? Do you have a second location? Everyone would report to out of the disaster zone where they would continue, would they work from home? It really depends on your situation. Now you may not have essential functions in the definition that FEMA has given. This is a very government based definition of essential functions. But you may have essential functions within your own context. Maybe you're the archives of a university, for instance, and you need to be able to provide continuing access to records even if there's a disaster that keeps people away for a week or two. So you need to go through and think about what your essential functions are. And you also need to think about the fact that you may have functions that are extremely important but are not necessarily urgent. They can be discontinued for a week or two without major consequences in which case technically they're not essential functions. So you need to test your coop plan. You can test the incident command system as well. And we've had some training on this in earlier webinars how you might use the incident command system within your own institution, for instance, to respond to a disaster or to recover from a disaster. You might test this with outside responders, for instance, just to see how the ICS works in your area. And so that is one of the things you can test. In the incident command system, as I'm sure most of you know by now, we've done a lot of training on this, people assume different roles for the duration of the crisis. An incident commander, a logistics chief, and things like that to help get through the crisis. And you sort of throw out your day-to-day management system and you have a new management system under the incident command system. And so if you are planning to do that or you might be involved in that in some way, then you need to test it. You might test external cooperation and I'll be interested later to hear what Chief Boney has to say about this because he's got a lot of hands-on experience, I suspect, that the rest of us don't have and I'll be interested to hear his comments on testing with external responders. But you could actually do a test where you do a test with emergency responders with other agencies. Some people even test with vendors. If you have a vendor contract for freeze-drying records or for recovering artifacts, you might do a test with those vendors. You might be part of a larger institution and need to do a test with people within that institution. So that's just another kind of test that you can do. There's a lot to test. You can't test everything at once. Just the list that I've given you right now is not probably complete. But you can see that there's an awful lot to be tested. So FEMA recommends a testing cycle where you conduct tests in a multi-year cycle, maybe a three-year cycle or a four-year cycle. And that way you don't get discouraged that you can't test everything at once, but you plan it out and you go through the tests over a period of years. And FEMA divides these test cycles into the sections that you see right here. Program management is sort of assessing whether the current training is adequate. The strategy planning is where the leadership lays out what should be tested. What needs to be tested this year? What can we wait until next year to test? Then there's project management where you design and develop the tests that are going to be conducted. You actually conduct the tests and evaluate them then. And then you start that cycle all over again because now that you've conducted some tests and you've evaluated them, you put them back into your testing cycle maybe sooner, maybe later depending on how your testing went. That is the first step. It was a long first step, wasn't it? So once you've decided what to test, the next question is to decide how to test it. And as I said earlier and didn't say very well, what you are testing will help you determine how to test it. If you're testing an internal response, for example, you'll probably use a different kind of test than if you're cooperating with outside agencies and running a test. So again, going back to FEMA's approach to this, FEMA discusses seven different types of exercises that you can do. And again, there are probably many other kinds, but we'll just look at these seven. The first four are discussion based exercises. The last three will be operations based exercises. So discussion based exercises, as you can imagine, involve talking more than doing. And the first one that FEMA suggests is a seminar. A seminar is basically just a lecture or a presentation. And you normally use it if you are trying to orient people to an existing plan. So you have a plan, you need to come on it. You use a seminar type of exercise. We wouldn't often think of that as an exercise, but it fits within that discussion based category. The second is workshops. Workshops are distinguished from seminars in that there's usually a lot more participant discussion in a workshop than in a seminar. So it might include, for instance, breakout sessions. It's often used to develop a plan. If a few minutes ago, you realized oh, we don't have a continuity of operations plan. Here's what you might do to develop one. You would hold a workshop where you could have some breakout sessions and you could begin to develop this plan and then you might use a seminar to socialize that plan with all the people who need to know about it. So the workshop is just a little bit more interactive than the seminar. The third type is table top exercise. A table top is a group discussion that is based on a hypothetical scenario. We're going to spend a lot of time in a few minutes talking about that, and you use it to test existing plans. So you've got to have a plan in place first and people trained to that plan before you begin doing table top exercises. So we'll come back to that in just a moment. The fourth kind of discussion based exercise is actually a game. Here a game is a model or a simulation where you're testing strategies and you explore the consequences of making various decisions. Now I have never done a disaster scenario game I must admit. I'm too old maybe to get into games too much. But if you google the phrase FEMA games you're going to find online games that FEMA has developed including a zombie game, believe it or not. I was very tempted to try it and I didn't do it, but I urge you to go out and try it. There are even zombie games that you can use. Alright, I'm not planning for the zombie apocalypse, but maybe others are. So those are all the discussion based types of exercises. The other three types of exercises are operations based and operations based exercises involve actually deploying resources and personnel. Needless to say, they're much more expensive to do than a discussion based exercise. And the drill is the first kind of operations based exercise where you test a very specific operation in a single agency. Every person listening to me has participated probably many many times in drills. We all do fire drills from the time we're small children we do fire drills where you're actually testing and you're deploying the resources to test your response to a fire drill. You may do tornado drills and things like that. So drills are very important kinds of exercises that we're very familiar with. Functional exercises are a bit bigger than drills. They're smaller than a full-scale test, which we're going to talk about in a second. But within a functional exercise, normally you are evaluating multiple functions within a single agency or across many agencies. So you're not just testing one function, which is escape to fire, but you are testing multiple functions and usually you simulate the deployment of resources. You might not actually deploy resources but you simulate that. And functional exercises are often used to test the emergency operations center. For example, many agencies come together and they test how the EOC is going to work during an actual disaster. So functional exercises are very important. And then finally, the major operations-based exercise is a full-scale exercise. It is highly unlikely that in archives or a museum or library will initiate a full-scale exercise. They are big they're expensive but you may, if you're lucky, get invited to participate in such an exercise even if you don't initiate one, which is another good reason to get to know your emergency responders because they might allow you to participate in the exercise just to see how they operate during a full-scale exercise. Full-scale exercises are always multi-agency. They're normally multi-jurisdictional. They cross boundaries and they actually deploy resources in a coordinated response of some sort. One example that FEMA includes online you can google it and see includes a severe storm response test. And it actually takes place in a local park and they test the incident command system with many different people responding. They test search techniques. They test medical triage and splinting and bandaging and things like that. So a lot of interesting things going on at a full-scale exercise and of course FEMA itself sponsors a national capstone exercise every two years I think is what they do and that is for federal government agencies but that is a major major undertaking. So these are the types of exercises you can conduct or participate in and the type you conduct will depend on what you're trying to test. So the third step, once you know what you're going to test and how you're going to test it is to actually plan the test. Now, quite often you will want to have an exercise planning team of some sort to plan the test, especially if you're going to do a fairly large test involving quite a few people. And here is a place where you could organize your planning team according to the incident command system if you wanted to and those of you who have been through some of the discussions about that know that the hierarchy is very different from what you use in a day-to-day test or a day-to-day situation. When you are implementing the incident command system you're throwing out your day-to-day sort of management structure and you're imposing this very top-down military type of structure. So if you have a fairly large exercise planning team you could actually organize it around the ICS in a way to plan organize things to plan. And so you would have a command structure of some sort, an incident commander who would establish the objectives and the strategies and such or at least sign off on what those are and you might have a logistics section and a logistics section chief who would secure the location and the equipment you're going to use for the exercise and might set up the room and do things like that. You might have an operations section chief who would determine how to achieve the objectives and might direct the exercise. If it's a really large exercise you might have an administration finance section chief who would be responsible for monitoring the costs of the exercise and helping to pay for it. And then a planning chief would collect and analyze information maintain all the documentation around the exercise which is very important and would oversee the after-action report that you might do. Now I'm not suggesting you would need to do this every time you have an exercise but if you're doing a large enough exercise it's a great opportunity to use the ICS just to become more familiar with it. And so for larger exercises you might want to take that into account. So the first thing the exercise planning team is going to do is determine the objectives. Now I'm going to walk you through just some examples from a tabletop that I am planning right this moment. The State Archives in Pennsylvania is part of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission which is five different departments under one executive director and I am planning a tabletop exercise for PHMC because we're supposed to be testing our continuity of operations plan. Now I do notice that one of my staff is in the room right now and I can't tell anyone anything you see here because this is all supposed to be a surprise to them so I'll swear you to secrecy in this. So the objective for the COOP tabletop that I'm doing right now is very simple at the end of this exercise participants should have identified gaps in the PHMC continuity of operations plan and in their own bureau's disaster plan since we have five different departments we each have our own disaster plan and so we need through this exercise to see where there are gaps and you notice it's not a very high blown objective it's a fairly simple objective and that's really important to success. So the exercise planning team will also I just hit the wrong button so give me a second here we go will write the scenario that is going to be used in the exercise. Now the scenario itself addresses certain questions and I'm going to show you a sample scenario in a few minutes but it addresses certain questions like where does the initial event take place how dangerous is the emergency how persistent is it is a quick one time it's over or is it a long emergency that will last maybe for days or weeks or longer what is the impact of the incident this is all part of the scenario what time of day does the event take place what's the sequence of the events and what other factors might influence the response to the emergency this scenario can actually get very complicated but it doesn't have to be for a tabletop certainly for a full scale exercise the scenario could get complicated indeed but not so much for a tabletop the exercise planning team will also create any other documents that are needed so for instance you may need a participant handbook or a handout or a guide a guide for the facilitator to have more information than the participants have for instance and you might want an evaluation form you might want other sorts of documents and you really only create the documents you need but you've got to have all the documents you require larger exercises obviously will require a lot more documents than small exercises so once the planning team has done their work then you are actually ready to conduct the test we're going to talk very specifically about conducting tabletop exercises and there are some reasons for this the advantage of a tabletop it's one of the easiest and cheapest kinds of tests that you can undertake obviously a fire drill is pretty easy but a tabletop is really quite simple to put together and it doesn't take a lot of money to put it together so it's a great thing to use as an exercise but it can still be very effective just because it's easy and cheap does not mean that it's not effective you can learn a lot from a tabletop and identify a lot of gaps a tabletop can be used internally and that is how it is most likely to be used in archives libraries, museums because we tend to want to exercise our own plan what's going to happen if something happens in my archives building I need to know and my staff need to know how they're going to respond but it can also be used with external partners you can invite the fire department the police department you can invite other agencies within your parent agency for instance local emergency management officials other repositories if you are part of Alliance for Response then you are in theory planning to do a joint response to a disaster so you could do a tabletop with all the people who are in your Alliance for Response network and you could all talk about how you would deal with a particular situation so they're really good for both internal and external partners to talk about how they would respond to a disaster so here's how they work as you might imagine participants sit in a room usually around a table that's where they get their name tabletop exercises if you are part of a larger organization sometimes people are sitting at multiple tables so for instance let's say you're part of a library in a university and you're doing a tabletop exercise that is a campus wide tabletop in your room you might have a table for administration you might have a table for campus police a table for the library whatever tables you need and the people at those tables will discuss their responses and then give them often in a tabletop though you just have all the people sitting around one table about what happens so a presenter then explains what's going to happen in the exercise and hopefully before the exercise has happened all the participants have received some sort of heads up about what's going to happen they've gotten a briefing that says we're going to be doing a tabletop and you need to come prepared to talk about how you would respond to a disaster in the tabletop if you're doing for PHMC we will have people bring their coop plan and bring their disaster plan and anything else that they would use during an emergency a call list for instance a pocket response plan things like that so you want the people to come prepared the presenter explains the ground rules of the exercise which is really that people need to stay focused on the exercise and the presenter introduces the exercise scenario so here is the scenario that is the introductory scenario to the exercise I'm writing for PHMC again I'm going to read it to you just in case you can't see the screen well enough and I don't mean to read slides to you the scenario is Wednesday at 12.30pm the result of heavy rainfall the national weather service issues a flood warning for Harrisburg and estimates that major flooding will occur within 12 hours areas around the capital complex are experiencing minor flooding including the garage and main entrances of the archives and state museum there are reports from the maintenance staff of leaks in the archeology lab in Keystone the fifth floor reception area of the state museum and on levels 3 and 9 the state archives tower traffic is beginning to back up on I-81 and I-83 and many local schools and child care facilities are closing early as a result many employees are asking to leave early the executive director is in Italy and is due to return Sunday afternoon okay I'm going to give you a little better explanation of that scenario in just a few minutes but you can see that's just setting the stage that we've got a flood coming about it there are lots of little details in there I'll share with you in just a few minutes because this is very specific to our office so after the scenario is introduced then the participants simply discuss how they would respond to that scenario as presented if people are seated in functional groups like all the police together and the library together and that sort of thing then each group would discuss their response and then report back to the entire group all right normally in a small exercise though everyone simply sits around the table and talks about how they would respond to this particular scenario the facilitator leads the discussion and answers questions as appropriate basically the people only know what the scenario tells them and so the facilitator does not make up information to give to them they can only know what the scenario tells them but if the participants need clarification then the facilitator clarifies situations so somebody might say how are we supposed to respond are we supposed to respond based on our current responsibilities or our role within the incident command system for instance if you happen to use that in your facility so then the facilitator would answer those kinds of questions you could have other people in the room it's always a good idea to have a recorder to collect data and to capture questions and capture sort of parking lot items that need to be discussed later and you can also have observers who don't participate often those are the VIPs who want to see what's going on but are not really involved in the response to it and so you have a different they don't really participate in the scenario but they're there just to watch so let's go back to this scenario for a moment and here I've highlighted a few of the points and I didn't highlight at the first that it's Wednesday at 12.30pm now what's going to happen in this exercise is the people who are participating will know it's a Wednesday so we're open to the public we're not open on Monday and Tuesday so that would be a different scenario so they're going to know we're open to the public and it's 12.30pm obviously lots of people are at lunch at 12.30pm so there is a factor that's going to come in to this scenario notice that it deals with major flooding this is a very very common occurrence in Harrisburg we don't have a lot of earthquakes or tornadoes and so I didn't use that in the scenario I use something that's very realistic to our particular situation I then talk about the leaks that are in archaeology lab fifth floor reception and level three and nine of the state archives tower now the people who are participating in this exercise are going to be bureau directors who will each have a different priority when they read this if you're the museum director the archaeology lab is going to be very important to you if you're the state archives director the archaeology lab is not nearly as important as the leaks on three and nine in the state archives tower and even there I will know others who are participating will know that level three happens to be where we keep William Penn's original charter from 1681 it's where we keep the provincial records and the constitutions of the state and things like that level nine I don't know what's on there but it's not as important as level three I know that the reception area on the fifth floor of the state museum now I threw that in there and this is another area where Josh is really going to have to be quiet and not tell anybody what I said the fifth floor of the state museum is where the executive director of PHMC lives and well his office is there and in the past year and a half he has had all of the reception area furniture lovingly restored and he loves it and it's it's beautiful but he's going to see that as his highest priority probably not really I'm kidding on that but he certainly is going to see this as a priority because he spent a lot of money getting that furniture restored and so he's going to say well what are we going to do about the fifth floor reception area and so we're going to have to think about that many employees are asking to leave early notice I've highlighted that that's important because we're going to have five different bureau directors sitting in the room and if someone of my staff comes and asks can I leave early my answer might be a little different from the museum director's answer and such and so we need to reconcile that in our discussion and that might prove to be a gap in our planning because we want to be very consistent about what we do across all the departments and then of course I put that the executive director is in Italy our executive director tends to take a two week vacation once a year and last time he was in Italy and when we have problems it's very important to know who is in charge when he's not there so I threw that in as a realistic sort of situation if he's not there what are we going to be doing and who's going to be in charge and how do we address this so you can see that scenario that maybe seemed a little confusing when you first heard it I hope makes a little more sense to you and if you are writing a tabletop scenario you want to sort of build in these little things and say what am I trying to test here I don't want to make this too easy so let's put some things in that I know are going to shake some people up as they talk about it so the facilitator after everybody reads the scenario is going to start asking questions such as what is your bureau's very first priority and what's the first action you're going to take and what are you going to tell the staff if they want to leave these are just suggested questions and sample questions but as you're writing a tabletop exercise you want to come up with questions that the facilitator will use to sort of draw out the discussion and I think what often happens is once the discussion starts you don't need a lot of questions because people will really get talking and you'll identify gaps and you'll need to talk about those you don't really want to get way off on solving the gaps right that moment but you certainly want to note them and say we need to come back and resolve that gap in our planning after this exercise ends now that in itself is interesting enough I think but throughout the exercise the facilitator also introduces what are called INJECS INJECS and I'm going to explain this one I have in the tabletop that I'm planning for PHMC I think I have five INJECS and this one I believe was number four and it assumes that the state record center is the primary alternate site for the COOP plan and yes this is the fourth INJECS and you will notice at 10 45 a.m. the state record center loses all connection to the state's computer networks so what the scenario has said up to this point is there's this flood coming you saw all of that the first INJECS takes us to the next day where everything is closed down in Harrisburg and we need to maintain essential services so where are we going to do that now I happen to know what most other people at our tabletop exercise will not know is I've looked at the COOP plans of all the departments and every one of them has named the state record center as their primary alternate site so we have five departments that think they're going to go to the state record center which by the way I manage I happen to know that we have one extra computer at state record center we have no additional computer drops we have no wi-fi and I get this picture of 40 people descending on this building thinking that they're going to sit down at computers and start working nobody knows that that's not going to happen it's not going to work so that's going to be a major gap in our COOP plan and we're going to have to talk about that but we won't try to resolve that that moment we will set that in the parking lot and we'll say we're going to have to resolve that after the exercise is over let's go on with the exercise and just assume that we are at the state record center and we're all happily working to maintain essential functions and now by the time we get to the fourth inject we're going to lose all computer network and it could happen so then the discussion is going to be what do we do now if we don't have computers do we actually hit a brick wall at some point where we simply can't maintain essential services and then what's that going to mean so we need to be to be very careful by the way one of the other injects that I have in here the first inject since I am planning it for people I know and a situation I know the first inject is that there are about four people who went out to lunch and can't get back to the building because of flooding and I name the people and I happen to know that these are the four people or five people in the archives and the museum to the response when we when we find a leak in the stacks or something and so then the question is ok if these people aren't in the building what are we going to do who's going to step up and take over from there so all of these injects sort of lead new twists to the scenario to help you expose gaps in your planning which is really what the key is as those gaps are identified you don't want to spend a lot of time you want to write them down keep moving you'll come back after the exercise is over over the next couple weeks and figure out how to deal with those gaps and the exercise basically concludes at a predetermined time so normally you don't want to go beyond about two hours because it can get too tiresome to go that long so after a couple of hours you've exhausted the conversation or exhausted the participants if nothing else and you end the exercise so there are some keys and there's going to be another step after the exercise but let's look at some keys to success in the exercise the first is simplicity you can't try to test everything at once now the scenario I gave you may sound complex to you but it's not really to me and it won't be to the people who are seated in the room because they know the context and so you want the the exercise scenario to be simple based on your context you want the proper setup of the room you don't really want to try doing this theater style if you can help it don't have people sitting face in the front you want people sitting around a table or tables if possible you want flip charts or white boards or something that you can park things on so that you don't get bogged down I think proper setup also includes snacks even in two hours it helps to have snacks and so that'll keep people sort of engaged a little bit you want a very realistic scenario and I hope I've demonstrated in the scenario I showed you it is very realistic to our situation our context and as you're planning yours you want to think about what is our context and plan a realistic scenario you also want realistic injects it is entirely possible that the five key people could be out to lunch and not able to get back to the building and so we try to use injects that are really quite realistic it is entirely possible that we could use lose connection to our computers and so that is realistic you want a limited time you don't want it to stretch on and on the discussion can stretch on because it becomes very interesting after a while about what are we going to do about this and so you really want to set a time limit you can always come back and do another exercise later on if you run out of time and you also want prepared participants people who have been trained to their roles I think this is really important it assumes that you have a disaster plan that you have a continuity of operations plan or whatever else you're trying to test and it assumes that people have been trained to that plan train first then test otherwise it's just confusing to people I don't know if you've ever heard an alarm go off and you have no idea what the alarm is my wife and I last week were at a park and we had just crossed a dam and we heard we saw this big siren and we heard it go off and we said hmm whatever that means and then my wife were walking down toward the river and my wife says oh there's a big light flashing on top of the dam I wonder what that means and so we continued cautiously toward the river and then we saw this huge sign finally that said if you hear a siren and you see a light on top of the dam leave the area because apparently water is being released from the dam and the river can become very dangerous like well that's good to know so you don't want to set people up for failure you don't want to bring them in and say we're going to test our coop plan and no one's ever seen the coop before that's really a disaster waiting to happen so do the training and then do the testing and make sure people are prepared now once you've done your training you could do an unannounced exercise certainly and then have everybody come in and say surprise we trained you on the coop and now we're going to actually do an exercise about it but you don't want to just bring them in without any training because I think that's a disaster prescription for a disaster shall we say finally no test is complete until you evaluate the test it doesn't really do any good unless you see how the test went and look for gaps in the testing so the first thing normally you would do is called a hot wash and a hot wash is basically getting the participant feedback immediately following the exercise while it's still very fresh in their minds it could just be verbal feedback what did you all think of the exercise what do you want us to do differently next time what did you really like that you'd like us to keep doing it could be a survey a written survey a quick one not long but just a quick hot wash as the name applies it's a rapid sort of thing after that you want to do a more formal written analysis of the exercise especially if you've done a fairly complex exercise you don't waste the lessons learned so you want to do an after action report of some sort and if you've set everything up by the ICS then your planning section chief would be responsible for making sure that the after action report actually gets done and the after action report describes what happened in the exercise it calls out what worked what was really excellent practice it calls out any issues both with the exercise but also if you're identified during the exercise it recommends improvements both for the exercise and also for the gaps that have been identified and if you're going to list the gaps and what needs to happen to fill them you have to list who is responsible to fill that gap there has to be one party or one person who is ultimately responsible for making sure that that gap gets filled and there should be a due date for the action a deadline to say Josh is going to get this done no later than February 15 of this year so that's all in the after action report and then you share that with everyone who participated and perhaps those who didn't participate who need to know that sort of thing and then lastly your evaluation includes implementation don't just evaluate my wife and I lived in New York a long time and we used to cross the Tappan Z bridge and there was a couple of years where they were doing construction on the bridge and there was this big electronic sign that was always on and it would say to avoid delays consider alternate routes and my wife and I would always laugh about that and we'd say if all it took to avoid a delay was just to consider an alternate route we would never get delayed it's not enough to consider an alternate route you actually have to take the alternate route and then you might avoid the delays and it's the same thing here don't just evaluate you have to implement the recommendations or you're not really getting to the heart of your exercise which is to improve your practice in the long run then you want to of course incorporate what you've learned into your testing cycle remember it's a cycle three year maybe or five year cycle and you want to begin your cycle all over again this time hopefully improved based on what you have learned in your first exercise so it's a cycle figure out what to test how to test it plan the test hold the test evaluate it and then start your cycle all over again I want to put up here some credits because as I've said this is not all original with me obviously most of it is not and there's some good sites here from FEMA and another PowerPoint that was put out by Alan Evans some years ago and so I urge you to look at those if you have time to look at them and I thank the people who put all of those together for information that I was able to use in this I think at this point if we have questions that I can answer it would be a good time but I want to thank all of you for listening and appreciate it great thank you so much David that was a wonderful presentation and I just want to remind folks if you have any questions specific to the content that David just went over do feel free to go ahead and add those to the chat window there on the left hand side of your screen and at this point we'd love to welcome Chief Joe into the conversation here as I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation Chief Pony is with the Biloxi Fire Department and has quite a bit of experience with doing these kinds of exercises so Chief did you want to perhaps talk a little bit about some of your experiences well first I'd like to say thank you Jessica and Mr. Carl Michael that was a wonderful exercise great presentation it really hits all the key points that I think you're looking for for your organizations ours is a little bit different I was trying to liken what we do here to this exercise and it's quite remarkable about I guess I should say quite remarkable of how it mirrors what we do in the next three weeks I'll be doing all of the operational exercise that Mr. Carl Michael explained there our department will be participating in these as they come the main thing that I would like to make sure everybody understands is that in the exercise the tabletop is probably one of the best from my experience because it allows it has allowed us to sit down in a timely manner and discuss key points we're going to be going into one actually tomorrow on high rise response tabletop exercise and it's important to place the key players around the table and to put your people with that work with that keep player right behind them and let them feed off of each other we try very hard to tabletop any of these types of scenarios mainly hurricanes down here on the coast and one of the key things that we never considered we thought we had everything covered but through Katrina one of the key things that we never considered was as simple as an employees vehicle we had 42 employees lost their vehicles due to flooding because they were required to report to the fire station during that storm and the stations went underwater and fortunately we didn't lose employees however they did lose their vehicles so that prompted us to change our response plan now we have identified and it's as simple as this we've identified a high rise parking garage where our employees will park their vehicles and a shuttle vehicle will pick them up and bring them to the station so it's simple things that you can identify through these but it's not something like you were saying about the large scale exercises we do do that after the tabletop exercise in our profession but this allows us the time to discuss the what ifs and what should we do if this happens you know a big obviously a big a big problem is going to be with your employees like in your scenario Mr. Carl Michael the employees want to go home everyone wants to go home we don't have that luxury in the fire department so that's not an incident that we we concern ourselves with but it doesn't mean we don't have other issues you know I can tell you during Katrina we went to the ICS system the day Katrina hit and we were in that mode for 60 days before we went back to our normal operations it took us that long and we were very fortunate we had one employee who lost family members during that scenario but we had over 60 employees who lost everything their homes and everything and so it's hard to keep them focused and on their job when this is happening and they know that they cannot go and you know take care of their homes but these are the kind of things that if you prepare and you train for you may not agree with it and why you're doing these things so it's very important that we train and prepare for any type of scenario Chief Boney I'm curious to know on average in any I don't know if a year is too long of a time period to look at but how many different training exercises will you typically do in the fire department we train every day except on weekends so that means Monday through Friday we have some type of training going on I know like I said we have a high rise scenario coming up that will start tomorrow next week we're going to be working on one of these large scale incidents with we actually have an Air Force base here in Biloxi that we work closely with and we will be working with them on a joint disaster area involving a derailment of a train and release of hazardous materials so we'll have them the Air Force ourselves and the CSX railroad will be working with us on it we do that about three times a year the large scale incidents but we plan and we also have instead of a hot wash we call them critiques any time we have a structure fire it is critiqued immediately afterwards and I say immediately two days afterwards that incident is critiqued by every member that was involved with the incident and we go through and discuss engine company by engine company and then we go to ladder companies incident commander everyone is involved in the discussion and we discuss what went right, what went wrong what we can do to change it and then these are taken and incorporated into our SOGs annually to help us keep our SOGs current and so I would tell you every day we do it but the actual tabletop scenarios we probably do it at least once a month that's great and have you ever had an invitation from a cultural institution to come in and do an exercise with them? We have not we are anticipating that with one of our local museums the is it the maritime seafood industry? Right the seafood maritime industry we are anticipating being able to sit in with them we started a partnership with them after our initial AFR meeting that we had there and we've had two meetings with them since we've had a plan where we went in and taught all the employees CPR we taught them how to use an AED and a few other medical skills as well as evacuation plans what to look for and evacuation and that was more important to them immediately so we felt like we would accommodate them in that way and they brought us in and asked us what we wanted so we sat down with them and told them this is how we respond and this is what we need to know initially because we found traditionally that 90% of the time during an incident they're not going to be there it's going to be at night or on a weekend that we have to respond and mitigate an incident in their facility so we need to know the key things that we need to be looking for when we go into these facilities and that really helped us out tremendously we actually had a fire at the Oral Keith Museum down the road about three months ago and it was huge for us to be able to go in and like I said it was early and it was like 4.30 in the morning we were able to go in we could identify where the fire was and what the artifacts where the artifacts were located we found we knew that they were not in the actual fire building but we were able to mitigate the fire with that concern and that really helped us out tremendously so I see we have a question here from Yan and I think that this question could go to David and to Chief Boney and starting that tabletops can be most effective when participants are from a similar cultural background so wondering if you have experience or suggestions for tabletops or other scenarios with mixed participant groups with diverse cultural backgrounds or when using a tabletop or scenario format where participants may not be used to speaking up joining in etc so how would you work to facilitate that for people who are coming from different areas I think one important point on that question it's a very good question is the preparation of the participants because in theory you are bringing participants to a tabletop who have a vested interest in being there because they're part of the response team or they're part of the decision making team and so getting the right participants there is important and if you have your entire staff there then it's going to be a very different kind of exercise because you're going to have people who perhaps are not used to participating but I think if you prepare people in advance to say this is a very participatory exercise we're going to do we want you to come prepared to contribute and then a lot of it depends on the facilitator the facilitator needs to get across the point that you all have been selected to be here because of what you bring to the situation and so we need to hear from you about how you would respond to this and I would personally be very correct about that if I see someone who's not participating I would try to coax them out to say you know George what are you thinking about all of this and try to get them to participate I think it's really important to have diversity in the exercise because you're going to you're going to think some people are going to think of things that no one else has ever thought of because we have different approaches to it so that is the challenge of a diverse exercise but it's also sort of the glory of the diverse exercise and I would agree with Mr. Carmichael on that you need that diversity to draw out the real questions that are going to arise because a lot of times in one profession you don't you don't look at a scenario from a different point of view I guess is what I'm saying you're kind of within a box because you know what you're looking to do but if you bring in people say we do this every day in the fire service so it's normal to us but if you bring in a group from say a cultural or historical society and talk to them they have completely different needs and objectives that need to be considered so yeah I would agree I want to go back for a second if I can to something to keep saying about participating in exercises and I'm going to guess just based on what he said that he would welcome invitations to be involved in tabletop cultural institutions my experience certainly has been that when I invite emergency responders to participate they're always very willing to do that and for many years and I hope this isn't true anymore but for many years in a profession the fire department the enemy if they came through your building they were going to cite you for doing things that you shouldn't be doing and that is just the complete reverse of the truth and I'm always trying to get the fire department to come through the building we did this in Georgia at the state archives just repeatedly throughout the year for the very reason that chief Boney said so that if we were not there and they responded to something they knew something about what we did and what was important in the building and I know in Pennsylvania I don't have as much control over my building here but we do have the fire department come through in shifts and it's extremely important I remember one day in Georgia I arrived at work and when I pulled into my parking place the county fire chief and the county police chief were standing there waiting for me to arrive and I said to myself this is not going to be a good day when they're standing there waiting for you to arrive at work but I knew them both because they had been through my many times and it made the situation just so much less stressful to have that relationship I would agree and yes I welcome any opportunity to go into and not just the cultural historical places either it's any place but as these as you work and operate these buildings you have to understand there is a specific firehouse in your district that protects that property that you have and it would be who of you to contact them people and invite them in it's as simple as calling the fire department and telling them where you are and who you are and telling you would like to invite the closest fire station to come and that protects your facility to come and talk to you and they would these guys absolutely love getting out and talking to the community and it's a great relationship you can build a great relationship with these fire departments the firehouse that's closest to you by simply calling and inviting them to come and sit down and talk to you it's a great opportunity and I see we have a note here in the chat window from Ann Frelson just saying that when David was still down in Georgia he hosted a meeting with the alliance for response group down there called Hera and he invited the county fire police and local cultural heritage sites and that it was a good experience so that's a great model we have there and then Julie Page just pointed out that the suggestion that it's worthwhile to draw out non-participating folks is essential and she was saying that she had done an exercise where a key member of the disaster team was incredibly quiet and then afterward he noted that it was just all going so fast so it's important to keep in mind that when David pointed this out the importance of preparing your folks before they go into the exercises but you know make sure that people are aware of some of these things and she said that his future job was in to slow everyone down when they're going through those kinds of exercises so it's important to keep in mind it's something that everyone should consider before they go into this kind of exercise. It points to the importance of having a good facilitator for the exercise. Definitely. And just a couple other notes here Samantha Forskos saying that they've been working on putting together dual training with emergency responders and people on their cultural response team they have there in Pennsylvania. I'm happy to share more info and Anne Felsen again just saying that cultural heritage site staff should not only invite their first responders but host a family day and this is actually something that we've encouraged Alliance for Response Networks to do so another great way to build that relationship with your first responder community is to invite them to come in with their families and become familiar with the site that way. And I'm just seeing a couple other folks sharing some things so Nora is saying that when a disaster strikes without forewarning you'll have a mix of constituents some folks who are familiar with an instant command system and some who are not and she's pointing out that those who are doing tabletops with that kind of background will be easier to work with but how do you work with or bring up to speed those who have been managing ad hoc responses and if they're needing to implement ICS in a new branch? Well I'll give you an answer but I think the captain may be better off answering that than I I think if a disaster strikes without warning if you're in an archives or library or museum it's very unlikely that you're going to be participating in the immediate response that's going to be in the hands of the professionals who come and who are concerned about life safety and stabilizing the incident and that's the first thing they have to do and then property damage and trying to mitigate that comes third and that's really often where collections come in and so often and if I'm not here to pitch a book but in the implementing the incident command system book I talk about the fact that you're most likely to use ICS in a long recovery from something or use it as a planning tool if you're in a long recovery you're going to have to prepare people who are coming to help and if they're not familiar with the ICS there you may need to have a handout or something or a 15 minute orientation for newcomers coming into the response and teach them quickly about the ICS and how they need to receive orders from one person and one person only they report back to one person only and understand the hierarchy that they're working in so that they can meld in very seamlessly but again I think Captain Bloney probably has a better perspective on that than I will ever have well I would answer that I would agree with you if you do not use ICS on a regular basis you're not going to remember to stay fluid with it it's a good tool to have if you're going to use it in an emergency situation and certainly you could apply this like you're saying in the arts and historical cultural community but you have to use it constantly we're trained to use it whether we have a dumpster fire or trash can on fire all the way up into a high-rise fire we're trained to use it constantly and so we stay fluid with it but it is it's a great tool but if you don't continuously use it it's not really not going to do a whole lot of good to the normal people just play it you know working in these scenarios it's a great tool and it's great to learn and you should learn it it gives you a lot of insight on how the emergency service community works but I would tell you that if you don't use it regularly you're not going to use it you're not going to be fluid with it don't let it scare you ICS is something that a lot of people outside of the emergency services community shy away from because of the complexity that it is but it can be as simple like I said we use it simply as dumps to fire we establish command we tell them what we're doing and how we're going to do it and that's as simple as it goes from you know the incident commander but it can be it can go all the way up to multi-jurisdictional incidences like like 9-11 and stuff so don't let it scare you at the level at which you would be using it I would highly suggest that you learn how to use it but don't worry about being proficient in using it yeah I think there's a tendency to be a little intimidated by ICS but you know as you said it's manageable and certainly encourage everyone to take as many opportunities as you can to learn about it as part of your preparedness process as well well I would like to just remind folks that there are questions to go ahead and add those to the chat box but a reminder that this presentation will be available to view again in our YouTube channel so you can come back and check out some of this info and I imagine that David and Joe might also be willing to answer some questions offline as well so I just wanted to take the opportunity once again to just remind people about the other upcoming programs that we have the final two of this series and a reminder that in the files box you can download the promotional flyer that has all of the info and again although this program was designed with AFR networks in mind we do welcome anyone who is interested in these topics so feel free to share far and wide I'm going to go ahead and pull over a link to a survey evaluation so just to take a few moments to fill out this brief 10 question survey the information is incredibly valuable to us as we look to shape future programming and you'll note that we'll have a question at the end that asks about other topics that you'd like to have covered so we really appreciate that I want to thank everyone for taking the time to join us today with a special thanks to our wonderful presenter David Carmichael and our discussant chief Joe Boney you guys have so many wonderful insights into this topic and I hope everyone's feeling energized to go and conduct some of their own exercises after this of course we're so grateful to the National Diamond for the Humanities as well for making this series possible and I just want to tell everyone to have a wonderful Thursday and we hope to see you at our next session on Tuesday of next week, the 24th again 1pm same time, same place thanks so much