Federal Emergency Drill Had Appropriate Scale
It’s good to see the Federal Government conducting extensive emergency drills – or Continuity of Operations (COOP) exercises – in light of what it learned from its overwhelmed response to Hurricane Katrina.
Earlier this month there was a COOP exercise that’s described on the GovGab blog. GovGab itself is a neat innovation. It’s maintained by seven employees of the Office of Citizen Services and Communications at the U.S. General Services Administration. It provides a close-up and personal view of government operations.
The May exercise, advises the GovGab blogger for Mondays (Jake) involved (simulated) terrorist attacks in the Pacific Northwest, a hurricane in the Mid-Atlantic area and a potential terrorist attack in the District of Columbia. “…so I was busy,” Jake advises, “But I wasn’t as busy as I was during Hurricane Katrina.”
That’s a comment that points up the value – indeed the necessity for any organization concerned about its security – of holding periodic emergency drills, learning from them and making improvements. A real emergency can actually be worse than a paper scenario. That, indeed, ought to be an underlying assumption.
Read Jake’s report on the federal drill and the candid comments that follow it.