Why we do field exercises
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Hub Practice Sessions
It’s a lot of work to do a hub practice session, getting out the field and practicing for a disaster. There’s time spent creating the scenario and exercise design itself, and there’s a huge investment of people time and energy on the day of the exercise. Why do we bother?
Well, because we think muscle memory is an important thing, and that we will only get better by trying what we think will be effective and then adjusting for what the practice shows us.
Practice Communicating Effectively
While each hub is a little different, we know our key mission is to help communicate information to our communities and to facilitate the sharing of needs and resources. We all have basically the same concept of how we would set up, collect and display that information, but it takes a field exercise to reveal realities. How much tape will it take to keep paper forms from blowing away – and that will rocks make good paperweights. What happens when there’s too much information, how can it be consolidated but still helpful? What happens if 500 people show up at your hub, or more…? Actually, we don’t know the answer to that question, as to date our practices have been pretty small in scale. That’s where your help is so essential. If a hub has only have a few “citizen actors” for the drill, in some ways that’s nice, especially for hubs doing their first exercise; you have time to walk through things at a slower pace and talk about it as you go. But we’ve never gotten to a point where a hub is flooded with information, offers of help and requests; and someday that would be nice to test out. So if you can help us, we’d really like to approach a disaster scale level in our exercises. Otherwise we might not learn the lessons we need to before a disaster actually happens.
See our front page for more information about the April 28 field exercise.
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