Conducting an Emergency Action Plan Tabletop Exercise

Murphy’s Laws of Combat states (somewhat tongue in cheek) that no plan survives initial contact with the enemy. Plans look good until a crisis happens and then one finds out that all the rest of the emergency responders use a different communication system and you can’t talk to them. All emergency plans should be tested to see if they really hold up and everyone can respond like the plan presumes they should. This presentation will look at how to conduct a tabletop exercise and what tools are available to assist the planning and running of an exercise.
Emergency managers are now required to conduct, or be involved in, three emergency exercises per year in order to be compliant with state’s emergency response plans. Emergency managers have more incentive to set up and run tabletop exercises for dams, however, they need dam safety personnel to set up the scenario(s) and to be present at the exercise in order to evaluate the response, especially to the failure itself.
The thought of running a tabletop exercise may be a daunting one to dam safety personnel as it usually lies outside of their expertise. There are tools and principles that are available to the dam safety community to make their task easier.
By planning and conducting a tabletop exercise of the emergency action plan those involved can begin to see if the plan will survive initial contact with a real crisis.