Handbook of exercises for transportation sector personnel

Guidance

This document describes the pathways to creating an emergency management program that involves all the sectors in a community. It emphasizes lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina and stakeholder conferences, embodied in Strategic Themes: understand community complexity, recognize community capabilities and needs, foster relationships with community leaders, build and maintain partnerships, empower local action, and leverage and strengthen social infrastructure, networks, and assets.

This is a series of Checklists for by entity for earthquake preparedness that emphasizes the importance of updating and exercising transportation and transit emergency plans. It includes suggestions for employees, transit and transportation agencies and various elements of the whole community. These Checklists for are beneficial in designing drills on specific items or cross-agency exercises that evaluate the linkages within preparedness plans.

This manual pre-dates the HSEEP program, and was prepared specifically for radiological issues anticipated to occur by the Department of Energy. It is radiological-centric. The terminology is inconsistent with current usage, a violation of ICS/NIMS requirements. It does provide a good reference for radiological transportation issues, with possible application for other hazardous materials transportation issues.

This manual provides a comprehensive view and generic template of ICS. It is applicable to any organization operating at the field level. ICS is the NIMS-mandated method for organizing all field response in the country. This manual explains the relationships of various actors at a disaster or emergency event.

This served as the base document for exercise design and evaluation in the United States. It is based on a military training model that does not translate well into civilian training programs. Most mass transit agencies viewed the requirements as onerous. Its principal purpose was to provide a common framework for exercise development for multiple disciplines. It fulfilled the ICS/NIMS requirement for clear, common terminology, and offered a framework for the development of an exercise program, but it required formal training to understand the overall process. Personnel with prior military experience will find the material very familiar. The program is in a continuous state of development, resulting in a new two-volume version issued in 2013. Its main application is to fulfill requirements for federal grants to various public agencies. FEMA exercise guidance that preceded it, and is still in use, is more user friendly for civilian agencies.

Volume 4 functioned as a library with sample exercise materials, such as documents, format and policy guidance. After years of being password protected, the volume is now under revision and will be accessible to anyone on the internet.

HSEEP. 2013. DHS, April 2013.

This is a simplified guide that addresses the core of HSEEP and partially follows a project management-based approach. This revision was developed to comply with the 2011 National Preparedness Goal and the 2011 National Preparedness System. It includes best practices and stakeholder involvement. It superseded the 2007 HSEEP volumes.

DHS. National Preparedness Goal, 2011. September 2011.

This document replaces the Interim National Preparedness Goal of 2005, and implements the Presidential Policy Directive-8: National Preparedness order. It introduces the new five core capability mission areas: prevention, protection, mitigation, response and recovery. It also introduces the 31 new core capabilities that replace the Target Capability List’s (TCL) 37 items. A crosswalk to compare and replace the TCL is available at the FEMA website, http://www.fema.gov/library/viewRecord.do?fromSearch=&id=6510.

DHS. 2011. National Preparedness System. November 2011.

Quoting from Introduction on page 1:

This document includes a detailed list of exercise elements that closely parallels the HSEEP documentation. While it does not mention HSEEP it does refer to the NFPA 1600 standard and the Canadian exercise requirements. The examples focus on hospitals, but much of the guidance would be useful to American transportation agencies.

Project Management Institute. 2008. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), 4th edition. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

This is the American National Standard for project management used by engineers and project managers, developed through a consensus process. It provides a common framework for managing all phases of a project, from start to close. It is used as a framework for developing and implementing exercises because it is a well-known system in the transportation maintenance and operations profession, where emergency management activities are often housed in the transportation sector.

This document includes a description of how a tabletop exercise could be used in a planned event to bring together stakeholders, test the training of the participants, and ensure that the event’s traffic management plan is appropriate for the complexity of the event. The document includes a useful Checklists for organizing a tabletop exercise.

This document is not directly related to exercises. It does, however, provide the critical framework necessary to understand the Incident Command System as it relates to transit assets. It enables tracking of information flow and decision-making, so that monitoring at critical points for evaluation purposes can be established.

This document offers a comprehensive approach to the development, implementation and evaluation of a tabletop exercise using the HSEEP guidance. Its focus is terrorism exercises, but it does offer some transportation accident and natural hazards scenarios for use in planning tabletop exercises.