Talking Stick - November/December 2011 - 34

The detailed objectives contained specific evaluations like determining operational aspects such as power surge capacity, the triage of injured train passengers, and time response to the event. The tabletop examples used at Webster focused on retaining pertinent details, and the outcome goals drove the direction of the

are preparing for the same type of emergency, officials often borrow from others’ tabletop designs and share experiences. “There’s a fair amount of plagiarism going on. You have a tabletop or storyline that’s kind of yours,” Kujat says. “It’s a small community; you use theirs, and they use yours.” Andy Plumley, the assistant vice chancellor at the University of CaliforniaRiverside, emphasizes that an effective tabletop exercise must be specific and applicable. When a disaster strikes, the range of its effects can be vast and extremely difficult to predict. Therefore, a tabletop training that simply asks the housing department to do something general in response to a disaster – such as house and feed the entire campus – will not yield productive results. To be productive, situations must be more specific. For example, a relatively simple response to “house and feed students after the disaster” might be to rely on the school’s food provider or nearby hotels. But what if the disaster is an earthquake and the roads are destroyed? The food provider cannot transport trucks to the campus. What if the local hotels do not have electrical power? Then what do you do? “In any certain circumstance, that’s where the fluidity comes in. The details are where it’s at,” Plumley explains. Once a scenario is designed, the next step is to develop a list of exercise participants. When doing this, Wilson says that bringing different backgrounds of experience together allows for a full understanding of the required preparation and response to an emergency: “Getting people to the table with different experience, expertise, and knowledge is key to the success of the exercise.” At Central Michigan University, the Crisis Response Team takes part in small tabletop exercises every month. The team is made up of 15 members, including the chief of the campus police, director of the counseling center, dean of students, and director of health services. Having senior management involved in the team fosters engagement and emphasizes the need for each exercise, according to Kujat, who explains that “People will lose focus because
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simulation. “We have made use of scenarios that range from fires, suicidal ideation, public health emergencies, and others. Sometimes, the best scenarios are ones constructed from actual previous experiences because the level of detail and knowledge of real outcomes adds a depth to the overall experience,” Buck says. When deciding on a disaster topic for a tabletop exercise, it’s important to analyze the potential – yet still plausible – emergencies. As an example, if a campus has had only one earthquake in the past 30 years, the emergency management team doesn’t need to exert effort to prepare for earthquakes every year. Jon Kujat, Central Michigan’s manager of risk management, environmental health, and safety/emergency management, notes that picking a topic and designing the tabletop isn’t a scientific process; he bases many of his scenarios on current or topical events, such as the tornadoes that ravaged the southeast United States in 2011. Ideas can also come from other sources. When many institutions
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Talking Stick - November/December 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Talking Stick - November/December 2011