Training and Exercises

Working with Training Staff and Exercise planners allows organizations to augment these activities with visual and mapping support.

Crawl

GIS is ideally suited to support both Training and Excercises within a Public Safety Agency. The first step in developing this capability in your organization is to use paper maps that visualize the scenario you are training or excercising on. Floods, wildfires, floorplans for active shooters, etc give participants visuals by which to orient to the situation and respond. This is an excellent way to provide different groups subsets of information they might have during an actual event. These maps can also be presented as slides allowing training staff to progress through an event and provide injects into the scenario that need to be emphasized.

Walk

Creating and referencing the scenario information in an online format allows participants to ‘touch’ the information directly. Zooming and panning lets the group focus on the portion of the event they need to focus on. It allows them (or the coordinator) to highlight information or areas that require the focus of the group. This is also an excellent way to walk through an After Action Review of real-life events that can be used as training for the entire organization and/or community. In this way, Public Safety Agencies can excercise and train together visualizing how each of their actions contributes to desired outcomes.

Run

Ideally, the use of online/mobile GIS for training and excercising will happen in the same system First Responders and Emergency Managers will use on the day of the actual event. Training through scenarios – where field units can edit the scenario (drawing fire perimeters, setting road blocks, etc) creates situational awareness and safety. Training on a system like this creates strong incident coordination and avoids the inevitable delays that come when Public Safety Agencies use systems that they expect only to use during emergencies.

Example: Flood Planning at ArcGIS Online

Example: Special Event Planning at ArcGIS Online

Example: National Interagency Fire Enterprise Geospatial Portal