Virtual emergencies: can technology replace live exercising?
Jennifer Cole believes emerging technology can find a perfect fit with the training needs of tomorrow's responders.
Everyone agrees that the value of live exercising cannot be underestimated. Large-scale, multiagency exercises such as FloodEx in 2009, Exercise Orion in 2010 and Watermark in 2011 give responder agencies from across the UK the opportunity to train and work together in situations as realistic as possible.
In some cases, they have even been able to work alongside colleagues from overseas to test the UK's ability to deploy international aid, to receive support into the UK, and to fit into the multinational response to large-scale international incidents. Like the military philosophy of 'train hard, fight easy', regular live exercising can ensure that when responders encounter situations for real, they are as well prepared as is humanly possible.
Unfortunately, however, large scale live exercises are extremely expensive and when the dust settles from the Comprehensive Spending Review, organisations may find that such events become early victims of constrained training budgets. This was certainly the view of those interviewed by RUSI last year as part of a research project that lead to the publication of Interoperability in a Crisis 2: Human Factors and Operational Processes.
This research showed that UK emergency planners and responders see training and exercising as the best way to improve multiagency working - 90 per cent listed live/field exercises as a useful method for understanding major incident interoperability, with the score only slightly lower - at 82 per cent - for tabletop exercises.
This relatively small gap was due largely to the advantages participants gained from each: in live exercises, individuals worked alongside and saw each other's equipment and training in use, whereas tabletop exercises gave them the opportunity to talk through scenarios, to ask questions, and to pause if need be for further discussion on particular issues, something that cannot be done as easily on the ground.
Further questioning revealed that, in live exercises, many responders felt that by the time the different agencies had arrived, set up their equipment, tested it and were ready to go, there was little time left to enact the scenario itself - and yet is it during the scenario phase that the majority of multiagency lessons are practiced and learned. Some felt that live exercises may well see different agencies exercising alongside one another, but not necessarily together.
This is where an increased use in virtual training environments, such as the triage training provided by TruSim, a division of Blitz Games Studios (as pictured below), and the firefighting training provided by Dutch company VSTEP's RescueSim comes into their own. Such environments can create terrorist attacks, flood scenarios, CBRN events and major fires using cutting-edge technology from the Gaming industry, complete with casualties who really 'die' if they are not triaged and treated correctly, secondary devices that explode if they are not anticipated; crowds who evacuate realistically, and debris that blocks roads and escape routes.
Ensuring that such scenarios are as realistic and appropriate as possible involves a delicate balancing act that brings together the work of a number of different disciplines: psychologists study the effects of training in virtual environment on responders, as well as on how individuals and crowds would really act in a crisis. This ensures that the simulation portrays events accurately - for instance, crowds tend to panic much less in such situations than one might think. Self-preservation ensures that people will move quickly away from a known or perceived danger, but they will generally help one another rather than push weaker members of the crowd aside as they barge past; therefore, a virtual environment in which the crowd panicked, causing additional casualties and requiring responders to call in reinforcements to control the crowd may add little training value as it would not mirror the experience of an actual event. A mass casualty event in a virtual environment needs input from medical experts on the type of injuries that would be encountered, the symptoms victims would display, and how their condition would improve or deteriorate depending on the assistance they receive. Such scenarios are now so realistic that paramedics can take virtual pulses and administer virtual medicine.
In taking such technology forward, it's important for emergency responders and technology developers to share knowledge. Games developers need to know how responders operate and what they need the technology to do, while emergency responders need to see what is in development, as well as what is already on the market, so that they can help to shape new technology to their needs. By working together with psychologists, geospatial experts, meteorologists and existing users, emerging technology can find a perfect fit with the training needs of tomorrow's responders.
This is why RUSI is bringing experts from all sides to share knowledge and discuss the current use of such technology and future developments, including how technology can be used to simulate and model the spread of a flood, pandemic flu, a chemical plume or evacuation. The aim is to add value and efficiency to the training and exercising currently undertaken by emergency planners and responders across the UK. Anyone interested in joining the debate can find more information on RUSI's website at http://www.rusi.org/virtualemergencies
Jennifer Cole is Head of Emergency Management, Royal United Services Institute www.rusi.org
