The Resilience Team at RAB provide a wide range of incident planning and exercising services for public and private sector clients. These are often long-standing relationships, with RAB testing and reviewing procedures on an annual basis (often as part of an ongoing retainer along with other resilience services).
One recent example was an annual control post exercise for a public sector client (this was our 4th exercise with them). Control post exercises involve positioning participants where they would normally be during an incident and running a live exercise. This tests communication arrangements, information flows, roles and responsibilities.
This particular scenario was based on a chemical incident and used artificial intelligence news reports to bring the scenario to life for participants.
For this exercise we activated the Strategic and Tactical command levels. Strategic personnel are generally Senior leadership within an organisation who set objectives for the response and recovery, and provide strategic decision making for ‘big ticket’ items such as site-wide closures, evacuations, business continuity, reputation management etc. Tactical personnel then coordinate operational resources following the directions set by Strategic team.
The full day exercise was split into 3 sessions:
1) Incident notification and activation of the Emergency Plan.
2) Incident Response.
3) Recovery discussion session.
Participants applied the principles of their response plan and demonstrated that a key lesson, identified in a previous exercise, had been implemented. This was working as one team to respond to the incident rather than working in team silos in the Tactical Command Centre. Highlighting that collaboration is key!
Feedback from the client has been very positive, and additional lessons from this exercise will be integrated into their response plan and tested again in the future. See a photo from the exercise session below.
RAB deliver a wide range of emergency planning and exercising services for both public and private sector organisations. More information is available here on our website, or you can get in touch for an informal discussion on your specific project by contacting Bryan Nelson bryan.nelson@rabconsultants.co.uk or call our head office in Lichfield on 0330 223 6475.