The incident had “a lot more complexity than just neutralizing a threat, which is what they’re focused on,” said Kelle Landavazo, emergency management coordinator for Gresham.
Reuniting students with panicked parents who are arriving at a campus — while keeping track of who has been picked up, and by whom — is a major logistical challenge. So is coordinating the efforts of everyone who is responding.
“In any kind of school incident, you have a school who is in their own way an incident commander,” in addition to the fire and police personnel, Landavazo said. And with the advent of social media, “the public information piece is now just enormous.”
Landavazo’s team decided to create an exercise that would help responders learn to better coordinate all these parts of the response. They turned to the Homeland Security Simulation Center at Concordia University in Portland, Ore.
“We wanted to do something that was more than a tabletop but not a full-scale exercise,” Landavazo said.
The simulation center, part of Concordia’s Center for Homeland Security Studies, offers specific training on disaster preparedness and response for the university’s students and for outside groups. The centerpiece is the Advanced Disaster Management Simulator virtual reality platform.
During an exercise, the simulator allows first responders to progress through a scene using avatars. Others are down the hall at a command post, receiving information through a computer feed and being interviewed periodically by actors pretending to be reporters.
This strategic messaging piece is critical, said Cliff Gyves, director of the Homeland Security Simulation Center. “We give them a sense of information chaos through our fake newscasts,” he said. “The kids all have phones. You can tell them not to post, but they will, and it’s going to get picked up by the regular media.”
Clients from the local area as well as other states have used the simulator, often at the end of a one- or two-day training session. Although schools wanting to simulate their response to an active shooter are frequent clients, other scenarios involve situations such as a disaster at a large construction site, or a biohazard. The center has a mobile version of the lab that can do smaller simulations too.
“We can take a client’s existing plan, develop a scenario around that, and have them run through the simulation to recognize any gaps,” said Scott Winegar, director of Concordia’s Center for Homeland Security Studies. They can then modify the plan to correct the problems and do a final exercise to see if the modifications worked.
The simulator, which has been operational for about six months, took several months to develop and install. It is currently being used on average at least once a week. For most services that include a simulation — normally formal classroom training with a capstone simulation — the rate is $2,000 for four hours and $3,500 for a full eight-hour day, Gyves said.
For Landavazo’s team, the exercise pinpointed gaps in their operations. First responders used the simulator while a police sergeant and a fire battalion chief worked in the control room. They had subject-matter experts injecting information into the exercise as it went along.
“In the first exercise, they didn’t have the media in a secure location, so the controllers had the media truck go all the way up onto the scene and the responders had to deal with that,” Landavazo said. “This reinforced the issue that they hadn’t secured where the media was going to be located.”
Landavazo said there were several advantages to using the simulator as opposed to doing a tabletop exercise:
- Neutral location. “It worked out extremely well, and I think the biggest reason for that is that it was on neutral ground,” said Landavazo. Exercises that take place at work can feel more like evaluations, where people are worried about making mistakes. Because this was part of a university, she said it felt more like a learning experience, where mistakes are part of the process.
- Active engagement. “When you’re in the sim lab and you’re playing out your exercise, you have no choice but to participate,” Landavazo said. Sometimes during exercises, “if a group is feeling less comfortable, they don’t really engage.” Engagement is easier because of the all-encompassing nature of the lab.
- Ability to run two identical exercises. The lab made it easy to run the simulation twice, with different people participating each time.
- Ability to pause the exercise. This is critical to make the exercise more of a learning experience. The simulator can be paused so participants can regroup — for example, so an early mistake doesn’t doom the entire exercise.
Other clients have found the ability to pause the exercise to be helpful as well, Gyves said. For example, if partway through the exercise it’s clear that the responders should have sent police to stop traffic — but they didn’t, and now the other responders can’t get to the scene — it’s possible to stop the exercise and go back to let the participants correct the mistake.
“When you get to a point where you’ve backed yourself into a corner and no further learning is going to occur, we can pause it,” said Winegar. “We can go back in the scenario, start it again and allow them to make different decisions to see how it turns out.”
The simulator allows for highly customized exercises — even using video backdrops of particular locations, for example.
The simulator also illustrates how different parts of a scene keep progressing as responders focus on other areas. For example, it’s easy to say during a tabletop exercise that you plan to put out the fire on the east side of a building first, then move to the fire on the west side.
“The way the simulator works is in real time,” Gyves said. “The commander is driving all the fire trucks to the east side but gets stuck in traffic because you didn’t manage the traffic flow. Then actually putting out the fire takes time. As they’re putting out the first on the east side, the fire on the other side grows. Eventually it gets dark, and now they have to deal with putting lights up. The simulator keeps you honest.”