EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

DRILLS, EXERCISES AND TRAININGS

With the support of the Los Angeles County Operational Area partners, including Federal, State, County, local municipality departments, and non-government agencies, the County of Los Angeles Chief Executive Office, Office of Emergency Management (LAC OEM) coordinates and conducts disaster preparedness drills, exercises and trainings utilizing a variety of scenarios. These drills, exercises, and trainings serve to test plans, reinforce response and recovery management protocols and procedures in identifying areas of strength and improvement, as well as promote better interagency collaboration.

Exercise

Exercises are conducted to test the following:

  • Plans
  • Procedures
  • Equipment
  • Facilities
  • Training

Exercises are evaluated to determine what went right and what needs improvement. Deficiencies noted during the exercise are documented and discussed in an After Action Report (AAR) and a Corrective Action Plan (CAP) is developed to identify problems that need to be corrected as well as who is responsible for correcting them. The CAP thus leads to the following changes including plans, procedures, equipment, facilities, and trainings, which are again tested during the next scheduled exercise.

Types of Exercises

  • Tabletop (TTX)
  • Functional Exercise
  • Full-Scale Exercise

Functional Exercise

A Functional Exercise is designed to test and evaluate selected emergency functions and the interaction of various levels of government, response organizations, volunteer groups, and industry in a simulated emergency environment. This type of exercise usually involves key decision makers, the local Emergency Operations Center, and representatives from response and support organizations. Field response units are not normally activated and deployed during a functional exercise. Controllers and simulators initiate exercise events, may simulate certain field response activities, and also represent external organizations pertinent to the exercise scenario that are not participating in the exercise, for example such as Federal departments and agencies.

Tabletop (TTX)

The purpose of a Tabletop (TTX) Exercise is to facilitate a learning environment where response departments and agencies can come together, face-to-face, to understand and talk through an integrated response to a specific emergency situation. During TTX, emergency facilities are not activated and emergency response resources are not deployed. Tabletop Exercises provide an ideal environment for learning, discussing, and identifying issues that may not be as obvious when participants or players are physically separated as they are during drills and other exercises. Tabletop Exercises provide an opportunity to compare what participants or players actually expect to do and they plan to do it with what is written in local emergency plan, highlighting changes that may need to be made in the plan. TTXs are frequently conducted as part of the preparation for a later functional or full-scale exercise.

Full-Scale Exercise

A Full-Scale Exercise includes all of the components of the Functional Exercise plus activation of an incident command post and actual deployment of response personnel and equipment to respond to a simulated emergency situation. Full-Scale Exercises may also involve participation by mutual aid resources from other jurisdictions and Federal and State coordination and response elements. A Full-Scale Exercise is intended to test and evaluate the operational capability of the overall emergency management organization to respond to a realistic scenario. Since Full-Scale Exercises involve deployment and employment of actual response resources, they are often fairly costly to conduct.

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