Chapter 7

Ongoing Management and Maintenance

This chapter defines training requirements for faculty and staff, and details methods of testing the functionality of the PPMRR strategies through seminars, workshops, games, tabletop exercises, drills, functional, and full-scale exercises.

Training is a critical component that ensures compliance with all applicable federal, state, and local laws pertaining to National Incident Management System (NIMS) and provides guidance to the faculty, staff, and students regarding their role in the PPMRR strategy. The scheduling and coordinating of training is an important function of the PPMRR team. Typically, it falls under duties of the person who holds the lead PPMRR position, such as the Emergency Manager. But as the composition of the teams vary from campus to campus so will the position whose task it is to schedule and track training.

In addition to identifying who will be scheduling and tracking training, a timeline too must be set. For example, stating in the PPMRR that all personnel will complete their annual training by October 15 each year, and that all new hires will complete the level of NIMS training commensurate with their position within 30 days of their start date of employment. The Emergency Manager ensures that a system is in place to notify employees of their upcoming training events and notifies new hires when they come on board of their PPMRR role and ensures that they receive training. At some campuses, it might be the Human Resources Director that takes on the tracking of training responsibilities. Each campus will coordinate these activities as it best fits into the campus PPMRR organizational structure.

Sample PPMRR Training Policy

The PPMRR team oversees and ensures compliance with all applicable federal, state, and local laws pertaining to National Incident Management System (NIMS) requirements. All personnel will complete their annual training by October 15 each year, and all new hires will complete the level of NIMS training commensurate with their position within 30 days of their start date of employment. The training tracking database is maintained by the Director of Emergency Management.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the NIMS Integration Center (NIC), and the U.S. Department of Education (ED) recommend that all key personnel involved in school emergency management and incident response to take the National Incident Management System (NIMS), incident command system (ICS), and National Response Framework (NRF) training courses.

When making determinations for training, based on the ICS format, staff can be organized into two levels: Leadership, which includes the Incident Commander, the Public Information Officer (PIO), Safety Officer (SO), Liaison Officer (LNO), and Section Chiefs; General Staff, which consists of personnel who represent the five functional areas.

Training Courses
Course #	Course Title	Leadership	General
100.HE	An Introduction to ICS for Higher Education	X	X
200.b	ICS for Single Resources and Initial Action Incidents	X	X
300	Intermediate ICS for Expanding Incidents	X
400	Advanced Incident Command	X
700.a	An Introduction to NIMS	X	X
800.b	An Introduction to the National Response Framework (NRF)	X	X

Course Descriptions

IS-100.HE: Introduction to Incident Command System for Higher Education

This course introduces the incident command system (ICS) and provides the foundation for higher level ICS training. This course describes the history, features, and principles, and organizational structure of the ICS. It also explains the relationship between ICS and the National Incident Management System.

IS-200.b: ICS for Single Resource and Initial Action Incidents

This course is designed to enable personnel to operate efficiently during an incident or event within the incident command system. ICS-200 provides training on and resources for personnel who are likely to assume a supervisory position within the ICS.

ICS-300: Intermediate ICS for Expanding Incidents

ICS-300 is designed for responders and personnel who will be in leadership positions during a major incident. Topics include unified command, assessment and objectives, incident action planning process, incident resource management, demobilization, transfer of command, and closeout. Prerequisites: I-100, 200, 700, 800.

ICS-400: Advanced ICS, Command, and General Staff for Complex Incidents

ICS-400 is designed for personnel who will be directing emergency response during a major incident. Topics include major/complex incident or event management, area command, complexes, and multiagency coordination. Prerequisites: I-100, 200, 300, 700, 800.

IS-700.a: National Incident Management System (NIMS)—An Introduction

This course introduces and overviews the National Incident Management System (NIMS). The NIMS provides a consistent nationwide template to enable all government, private-sector, and nongovernment organizations to work together during domestic incidents.

IS-800.b: National Response Framework—An Introduction

This course introduces participants to the concepts and principles for the National Response Framework. This course is intended for government executives, private sector and nongovernmental organization (NGO) leaders, and emergency management practitioners. This includes senior elected and appointed leaders, such as Federal department or agency heads, State governors, mayors, tribal leaders, and city or county officials—those who have a responsibility to provide for effective response.

The FEMA Emergency Management Institute offers no cost online training for the following courses at: www.training.fema.gov/IS/crslist.

IS-100.HE: Introduction to the Incident Command System for Higher Education

IS-200.b: ICS for Single Resource and Initial Action Incidents

IS-700.a: National Incident Management System (NIMS)—An Introduction

IS-800.b: National Response Framework—An Introduction

The following courses are available via classroom delivery only:

ICS-300: Intermediate ICS for Expanding Incidents

ICS-400: Advanced ICS, Command and General Staff for Complex Incidents

Discussion-Based and Operational Exercises

It is critically important that every college and university exercise its emergency preparedness plans. It is not enough to have a written plan on the shelf that is unknown to anyone except the PPMRR team. Reading the words, whether from a circulated document or from a website, pales in comparison to exercising. Exercising brings life to the written strategies, providing an opportunity to see what works and where vulnerabilities still exist. Well-developed and implemented exercises will enable the campus to take corrective actions to the PPMRR.

While the PPMRR strategies are developed for campus-specific identified threats and hazards, this does not mean that a college or university has a scripted response for every possible event that could occur at the campus. Because that is an impossibility, the PPMRR must have flexibility built into it. This means that the campus community must know that while there are policies in place and recommended strategies to be followed, it allows for individual decision making when faced with an adverse situation. Training and exercising result in an increase in individual capabilities to make those decisions with confidence.

Exercise Design

Now that you recognize the benefits of incorporating exercising into your campus preparedness plan, how do you create the exercises? There are a multitude of resources and consultants available for assistance in developing college and university emergency preparedness exercises. However, the scope of this chapter is to assist the campus emergency preparedness team in the creation of its own exercises or at least recognizing a well-developed exercise. When designing or evaluating exercise plans, take into account all four phases of the campus emergency preparedness plan: preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. Each exercise can focus on the individual components of the plan or incorporate multiple phases.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (2003) organizes the development of an emergency exercise into eight steps:

1. 1. Needs Assessment focuses on determining which emergency events or hazards the campus has a likely probability of encountering, such as natural hazards: floods, tornadoes, fires, or man-made hazards: an active shooter or a power outage.
2. 2. Scope sets the stage with the type of exercise being conducted, the type of emergency, where it is occurring, functions to be exercised, and who will be participating in the exercise.
3. 3. Purpose Statement defines what the campus is looking to achieve by conducting this particular exercise.
4. 4. Narrative is the story provided to the players to provide general context, technical details, and conditions for assessing the situation.
5. 5. Objectives should directly link to the needs assessment, scope, and purpose as well as be SMART: Simple to understand, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Task-oriented.
6. 6. Major and Detailed Events refers to the list of predetermined actions and details that the players need to achieve in order for the exercise to be considered to have met its objectives.
7. 7. Expected Actions are the anticipated results of the exercise objective. For instance, raising elevators to a higher floor will contribute to saving it from the effects of floodwaters.
8. 8. Prepare Messages is achieved by the compilation of the seven previous steps.

FEMA recommends that organizations use a 2-year progressive series of exercises, starting with a discussion-based tabletop and culminating with a full-scale exercise. The Multiyear Training and Exercise Plan, a series of multiple connected exercises with a continuous theme, is the premise of the FEMA building block approach to exercising using seminars, workshops, tabletops, games, drills, functional, and full-scale exercises in a progressive order over time. External partners, such as the police, fire, and utility company, should participate in exercises as appropriate and the campus should also participate, as appropriate, in all community (city, regional, and state) exercises.

Most institutions begin with discussion-based exercises such as seminars and workshops, then move into tabletops and sometimes games. Discussion-based exercises focus on policies and procedures incorporated in the campus emergency plan. They are led by a facilitator whose role is to set the stage for the team, identify the objective of the exercise, explain the process that will be followed, and keep the conversation on track. No resources are deployed in discussion-based exercises.

A seminar is typically used to provide the campus with information regarding policies, plans, or procedures.

A workshop typically provides an opportunity for two-way communication. It could be a meeting of the PPMRR team and a community partner group where both parties are working out processes and procedures that will be incorporated into a working mutual aid plan. It is led by a facilitator, to keep the group on track. The parties share and collect information, obtain consensus, and develop a written procedural guide.

A tabletop provides an opportunity for the campus to test a policy, plan, or procedure. It provides the PPMRR team an opportunity to react to a situation presented to them by a facilitator in scenario format with injects at specific intervals. The scenarios are typically a probable event that may affect the campus community. The “players,” which could be the PPMRR team, all sit together and talk through the scenario and injects taking guidance for their actions from the already developed PPMRR strategies. There may be an evaluator/recorder who observes the activities, takes minutes, and then reports his/her observations back to the group. As the exercise focuses on the roles, procedures, and responsibilities of the PPMRR team and the campus community, the end result could be a revision of policies and procedures to improve the PPMRR policy, plan, procedure, and strategy tested.

For an active shooter tabletop, the players are provided with a scenario by the facilitator. The players react to the situation from their job titles. The exercise could have multiple identifiable attainable exercise objectives such as testing response time of the campus and/or local police, and testing the campus communications system to alert campus members to shelter-in-place through an “All Clear” message.

A game is a simulation of operations using the PPMRR strategies to work through a potential threat or hazardous situation. Differing from a tabletop where the players work as one team, in a game the players are divided into two or more groups where each group works together to resolve the scenario with a “what-if” analysis. Like the tabletop, the end result could be a revision of policies and procedures to improve the PPMRR policy, plan, procedure, and strategy tested.

What-if

• The active shooter was engaged in conversation by a faculty member/student/staff
• Campus police stormed the building where the shooting was taking place
• Tear gas was used to subdue shooter
• Classrooms were able to be locked from inside and shooter was unable to access classrooms

Once the campus has exercised its policies, plans, procedures, and strategies using discussion-based methods, it may choose to move to operations-based exercises such as drill, functional, and full-scale exercises. Operations-based exercises require a coordination of resources deployed from either other campus units and/or off-campus organizations such as fire, police, and hospitals.

A drill is used to measure the capabilities of the campus resources: people, facilities, and equipment focused on a specific task of the PPMRR. The drill uses a scenario relayed by an evaluator. It requires the player(s) to react at their duty station. The player is expected to react in accordance with what they learned in a training venue such as a seminar or workshop.

Drill Example: An evaluator approaches unannounced to the front desk of a residence hall and informs the security person sitting at the entrance desk that they have been selected to participate in this unannounced drill. The evaluator tells the residence hall security person, who depending on your campus, may be a student worker, an unarmed guard, or an armed police officer, to imagine that they just heard what he/she believes to be gunshots. The evaluator asks the “player” to think out loud as to what steps he or she would take in reaction to hearing what they think are gunshots.

Other items that a campus may consider when drilling include: communications systems, evacuation plans, or shelter-in place for individual buildings.

Functional exercises are designed to test capabilities of an event that requires problem solving, typically of the Command Staff. It involves players, simulators, a controller, and an evaluator. As the players, responding in their PPMRR role, receive the exercise message, they try to figure out what is happening and what needs to be done to remedy the situation.

Building on previous exercise’s capacity, the functional exercise is put into play with the addition of the Command Staff. Using the active shooter scenario for the functional exercise, additional “players” would be included in the exercise. The Director of Campus Police, the college President, the Communications Department Director, and Residence Life Director could all be components of the Command Staff.

Full-scale exercises are real-time events that deploy resources, and test reactions by the campus to a probable threat or hazard. This is the culminating event in the Multi-Year Training and Exercise Program. There are no scripts. The decisions made by the players are driven by the action that is taking place around them.

To efficiently execute the delivery of these operational-based exercises requires the use of a facilitator, controller, and evaluator. FEMA lists the duties of the facilitator, controller, and evaluator as follows.

Facilitator	Controller	Evaluator
Introduces the discussion topic or narrative	Ensures that the simulators and evaluators are properly trained before the exercise	Tracks action relative to the evaluation objectives
Facilitates problem solving	Orients the participants to the exercise and presents the narrative	Identifies any resolved and unresolved issues
Controls the pace and flow of the exercise	Monitors the sequence of events and supervises the input of messages	Helps analyze the exercise results
Distributes the messages or injects	Makes decisions in the event of unanticipated actions or resource requirements	Participates in postexercise meetings and critiques
Draws answers and solutions from the players	Adjusts the pace of the exercise when needed—inserting more messages when it drags and discarding messages when the pace is too frantic	Does not interfere with the exercise flow

Exercise Materials

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recommends the following documents to be used to assist with the implementation of exercises.

A Situation Manual (SITMAN) is the participant handbook for discussion-based exercises. It provides background information on the scope, schedule, and objectives of the exercise. It also presents the scenario narrative for participant discussions during the exercise.

The Exercise Plan (EXPLAN) is the participant handbook for operations-based exercises. The EXPLAN provides controllers, evaluators, players, and observers with information such as the purpose, scope, objectives, and logistical information of the exercise.

Controller Evaluator (C/E) Handbooks supplement EXPLANs for operations-based exercises. The C/E Handbook contains more detailed information about the exercise scenario and guides controllers and evaluators in their roles and responsibilities.

The Master Scenario Events List (MSEL) contains a chronological listing of the events and injects that drive operations-based exercise play.

Exercise Evaluation Guides (EEGs) provide evaluators with a checklist of critical tasks to be completed by participants during an exercise. EEGs contain the information to be discussed by participants, space to record evaluator observations, and questions to consider after the exercise, such as: Was the exercise a success?

After each exercise, a Hot Wash is completed to detail the strengths and weaknesses revealed by the exercise. These findings are incorporated into an After Action Plan that details what happened during the exercise as well as recommendations for modifications of the PPMRR policies, plans, procedures, and strategies.

Recommended HSEEP AFTER ACTION PLAN (AAP) Format

Executive Summary

Exercise Overview

Includes background information: Participating organizations; the date, time, and location of the exercise that was conducted; the type of exercise; the hazard, and the evaluation methodology.

Exercise Goals and Objectives

Exercise Events Synopsis: A chronological synopsis of major events and actions.

Analysis of Mission Outcomes: Summarizes how the performance or nonperformance of tasks and interactions affected the achievement of the mission outcomes.

Analysis of Critical Task Performance: Summarizes and addresses issues regarding each task in terms of consequences, analysis, recommendations, and improvement actions.

Conclusion

Appendix: Improvement Plan Matrix: Provides a task list of recommendations, due dates, and responsible organizations.

Information in this chapter comes directly from the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP). Exercise evaluation templates and customizable job aids are available at https://www.Fema.gov/exercise.

References

FEMA. (2003). Building a disaster-resistant university. Retrieved from http://www.fema.gov/institution/dru.shtm

FEMA. (2015). National exercise program. Retrieved from https://www.fema.gov/exercise.

FEMA Emergency Management Institute. (2015). Online course catalog. Retrieved from https://www.training.fema.gov.

National Incident Management System (NIMS). (2015). NIMS implementation. Retrieved from http://rems.ed.gov/K12NIMSImplementation.aspx