Simulating Disasters with ADRA
Interesting news from Gregg Swanson of Humaninet, who recently attended a simulation exercise held by ADRA in Indonesia. (Incidentally, the ADRA Indonesia home page is funny as hell for all the wrong reasons, mainly due to the font.) Gregg has written a series of blog posts about the experience on the Humaninet blog, as well as an accompanying article at their ICT Features page. It sounds as if the exercise went really well, so congratulations to all involved!
On another page Gregg has written 12 reasons why relief organisations should conduct simulations. There’s some useful ICT-related findings on that page, but I was more interested in those 12 reasons, because we’re discussing a similar project for the ECB agencies - to do an inter-agency simulation either at HQ or field levels. I’m going to quote all 12 reasons here, and not just to pad out this blog post either - they’re genuinely useful:
| 1. | Preparedness – only by practice and training can teams and individuals gain and practice the skills needed in a very demanding environment. |
| 2. | Does your plan work? Only by testing your plan will you know. |
| 3. | Identify gaps, weaknesses, and needs – you won’t find them out without a field exercise or an actual response, and it is easier to determine and record these findings in a field exercise. |
| 4. | Teambuilding – there is no better way. |
| 5. | Motivation – just ask the ADRA Asia team members. As one told me: “If there is a disaster, that is where we want to be – that is our job.” |
| 6. | Evaluate your personnel – managers need to know who is good at this, and who is a top performer. |
| 7. | Try out new processes and procedures – an exercise is a great laboratory for testing new concepts. |
| 8. | Try out new enabling capabilities, including ICT equipment. Providers of services and equipment are often delighted to loan their newest products for field testing by “real relief workers.” |
| 9. | Acquaint your senior management (and other internal management) with your plan, your capabilities, your people. They may not know how challenging it is. |
| 10. | Show external organizations, including government and U.N. agencies, what you can do. |
| 11. | Show your donors what you can do. They want to know, and they will probably be impressed. Invite key donors as observers. |
| 12. | Publicity of your simulation is healthy and should be welcomed by all employees, volunteers, donors, and other supporters. The press and the public are very interested – and this is not only at home. The press and public in countries like Indonesia are very aware of the dangers of natural disasters, and they have a stake in relief capabilities. |
That’s it right there. The military do exercises literally all the time (when they’re not actually fighting, that is); civilian response agencies also carry out simulation exercises on a regular basis. It’s about time that the NGO community started doing the same, and stop relying on excuses that we don’t have the resources (staff, time or money).
We all agree that preparedness is better than response, and carrying out this sort of exercise is a critical part of that preparedness. We’ve persuaded ourselves that it’s not practical, and so we often don’t even seek funding for these exercises. But the UN seems to manage to do simulations - for example, the annual Triplex exercise - and Strong Angel managed to get funding (DoD, ahem), so there must be some opportunities out there.
I think the problem is that nobody has yet proven the concept to the big agencies, the ones that could field the resources to make a full simulation work. But as ADRA have demonstrated in Indonesia, it is possible to do this kind of thing on a small scale and learn valuable lessons in the process.
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Thank you for the kind words - glad you liked the articles and the \”12 reasons.\” I do my best writing in airplanes, and on the long flight back it\’s a good thing it didn\’t come out as \”42 reasons.\”
You\’re very right about the value of small scale exercises. In the ADRA debriefing, we talked about the possibility of even smaller events, at the country office level, perhaps with 3 - 5 qualified augmentees joining local staff. One of the greatest needs is to involve local staff, since they will be in the center of the vortex when something happens in their country.
When I meet NGO people in the field, three things are evident: (1) they don\’t have much formal IT training, (2) some of them are very good with the apps and software they need - they are self taught, actually using the Help resources, and (3) if someone can show them, they\’ll learn fast. The easy explanation is that they are isolated and on the move a lot, and have no office support system like the folks in headquarters or the corporate world.
Gregg Swanson
3 Dec 06 at 23:14