A comprehensive emergency management training tool for local, state, and federal government, law enforcement, fire service, emergency medical services, emergency management, public health, healthcare (hospital) systems, and the commercial nuclear industry.
Realistic exercises and drills are the best way to test preparedness and response capabilities. Our team is highly experienced with a wide range of hazards and deeply familiar with advanced exercise strategies. By providing virtual, tabletop, function, or full-scale exercise platforms, we support scenario development, news media and social media simulation, planning, evaluation, and follow-up to ensure maximum value for participants.
Training is a crucial element of emergency preparedness, and scenario-based exercises provide a realistic environment for emergency responders to practice decisionmaking. ETN provides and multi-faceted platform that addresses several exercise and training needs:
ETN integrates advanced approaches within exercises to support a comprehensive emergency management program. News media simulation is a crucial element of training and emergency preparedness exercies. Testing public information capabilities by simulating interactions with the news media provides a means to evaluate responses in a controlled environment. Scenario-based news stories create a realistic environment in which to practice decision-making and improve implementation of response plans.
ETN simulates radio, print, and broadcast news stories. An experienced team of news reporters and multimedia professionals with expertise in emergency communication provide realistic, simulated news media productions. The secure exercise platform can be customized for agency needs. Exercise participants (players) are presented with real-time news media stories including live field reports, on-camera interviews, briefings, and news conferences.
Scenario-based media simulations add realism to training activities. ETN develops mock newscasts and narrative videos that establish a scenario and help drive the action, allowing participants to work in a realistic, multimedia-driven exercise videos for a broad range of local, state, and federal sponsors, covering all kinds of hazards and emergency events.
The effective use of social media is an essential element of a comprehensive emergency public information program. It is critical that social media plans and procedures be regularly tested in a robust and realistic exercise environment, with the goal of identifying what works well and what improvements may be necessary. As with all elements of an excerise, social media play occurs in a safe, controlled manner, to ensure that exercise communications are not mistaken for a real-world situation.
Simulated social media posts are generated by our highly-experienced team to simulate what the public and media would publish on social media during an actual incident. The pre-scripted and ad hoc messages are disseminated in realtime throughout the exercise using real-world social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). The social media accounts are set up in advance as a "closed loop" so that only exercise participants are able to view and respond to the messages, allowing play to occur in a safe, controlled environment.
There are several benefits to using real social media platforms in exercises rather than proprietary software tools that only mimic existing sites. These benefits include: unparalleled realism, universal accessibility, not cost, valuable, hands-on experience with real-world tools, and the ability to easily introduce new platforms as they gain currency within the emergency management community. Once established, these accounts can continue to be used on their own by agencies for future drills, exercises, and training events.
The Virtual Studio is a customizable platform that can be pushed out through the video conferencing app of your choice. This enhances presentations with added graphics and lower thirds showing the names of presenters and locations, slide presentations, or videos and virtually anything else you would like to add to the mix. Using this approach keeps viewers of the exercise interested and engaged.
The Virtual SimCell is a proprietary application that enables exercise controllers to run emergency preparedness exercises more efficiently by establishing simulation cells of "SimCells" through a computer newtork. The Virtual SimCell provides a cost-effective and efficient approach for participants to interact globally. By allowing controllers to operate through a single, networked software application, the Virtual SimCell emulates a physical working location, allowing the same or similar functions to be performed as though all controllers were gathered in one place.
The Virtual SimCell allows exercise planners to cost-effectively prepare and conduct exercises. SimCell Controllers can:
There are several benefits to using real social media platforms in exercises rather than proprietary software tools that mimic existing sites. These benefits include: These benefits include: unparalleled realism, universal accessibility, not cost, valuable, hands-on experience with real-world tools, and the ability to easily introduce new platforms as they gain currency within the emergency management community. Once established, these accounts can continue to be used on their own by agencies for future drills, exercises, and training events.
Contact Argonne National Laboratory's PAST Fusion Academy for more information about custom courses/exercises/drills that reinforce your planning, preparedness and training for any type of incident.
