The UN reports that the incidence of calamitous natural disasters and climate events has increased five-fold over the past 50 years. And the situation gets more dire every year: According to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), 2023 was a record year for natural disasters. In the United States alone, twenty-eight separate weather and climate disasters struck communities, including floods, tornadoes, droughts, killing heat waves, tropical cyclones, hurricanes, catastrophic winter storms, wildfires, and other severe weather events. All told, these emergencies claimed at least 490 lives and cost at least $93 billion in damages. Disaster recovery efforts were lengthy and rebuilding slow. Entire regions suffered the disruption of business continuity.

And that is just one year, in one country.

The Challenge: Meeting Learning Objectives in Disaster Recovery Training

Clearly, emergency and disaster preparedness planning is increasingly fundamental for every community. Organizational objectives for managing an ongoing disaster recovery effort require robust training and implementation of policies and procedures to ensure best practices.

Many disaster recovery training and certification programs rely on tabletop exercises. That’s for good reason: tabletop exercises are minimally disruptive, while giving trainees an opportunity to discuss implementation and execution of processes, and build resilience more broadly. They also give communities an opportunity to identify potential gaps and vulnerabilities in response plans that warrant further examination and action.

However, while certainly useful, such exercises have notable shortcomings.

A tabletop exercise lacks the intensity of realism, resulting in a fairly superficial evaluation. These are inherently discussion-only, cerebral exercises, not unlike a high-stakes board game. It’s hard to feel much urgency during a tabletop exercise, let alone replicate the sense of overwhelm when fielding calls from multiple agencies and shouted questions from desperate families and eager reporters. The scripted nature and relatively narrow scope of these exercises doesn’t really stress-test any manager’s expertise implementing an ongoing disaster recovery plan when time is of the essence. Organizational over reliance on crisis management tabletop exercises can develop into a false sense of security.

Using Simulation Technology To Level Up Your Disaster Recovery Course

High-fidelity simulation training exercises, on the other hand, allow for emotionally intense, customizable, multi-party exercises that evolve in response to the participants’ decisions. It’s like a custom tabletop exercises expanded along several dimensions.

FAAC’s InCommand simulators are developed for comprehensive, customized training. FAAC Public Safety Business Manager Bill Martin says, “For example, our software development is currently focusing on the crisis of widespread wildland fires. Canada, California, Texas, New Mexico—all of these places have recently suffered the devastating effects of large-scale fires, affecting huge land masses, and disaster recovery managers need to understand how to channel the resources to help those affected. But if a community or agency approaches us and says they need to train for a coastal disaster damaging bridge infrastructure, we can pivot to developing that, and add it to the library.”

More importantly, training simulators like inCommand can accommodate a scenario that is constantly evolving. Participants are immersed in the action, and have the opportunity to practice not just hewing to policy, following procedure, and sticking to the plan, but also honing their powers of observation, critical thinking, and situational awareness.

Experiencing the dynamics of a scenario are essential to understanding the rapid escalation of an emergency. Says Martin, “Tabletop exercises simply don’t give you a sense of the dynamics. With simulators, participants can see a fire spread, burn vegetation, and travel across the land face. We can model that for communities vulnerable to wildfires.”

Reap the Benefits of Real-Feel Simulator Training in a Group Setting

With InCommand simulators, groups can experience the immersive scenario together. Group simulations can include role-playing to foster communication, reporting, and scene assessment skills. Screen-based simulators offer emotionally realistic training to facilitate the teamwork necessary for emergency response, and give participants practice keeping a cool and level head amidst the chaos of individuals all heading in different directions. To elevate the experience even further, virtual reality headsets can be added to InCommand to give participants a fully immersive, first-person perspective.

FAAC’s InCommand is built to accomplish your learning objectives for disaster recovery procedures. The system already includes scenarios for a wide variety of emergencies and disasters. These include large-scale structural fires, bridge strikes by ships, airport disasters, and weather events. FAAC is eager to work with clients and agencies to develop custom scenarios to meet the relevant demands and conditions of your community.

Every FAAC simulator comes with after-action review tools, so managers can assess learning every step of the way—from initial calls, to reconnaissance, to deployment and resource distribution. Participants will have the opportunity to practice skills for stabilization and coordination across the many agencies that respond to disasters. This is essential not only in the hours and days after an incident— communities can experience long-term consequences of hazardous conditions for months and even years.

Contact us today to get started on a disaster recovery plan specific to your needs and certify your team to act when emergencies strike.