Massive public safety drills in Boston Saturday

[redcolumbine.livejournal.com]

On Saturday, the area will host Urban Shield: Boston, a 24-hour training exercise that simulates large-scale public safety incidents in the metro-Boston area. Urban Shield: Boston will begin at 8 a.m. Saturday and conclude at 8 a.m. Sunday. It will include personnel from the City of Boston, (including Boston Police, Fire, and EMS) Metro-Boston Homeland Security Region, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), the Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals and UMass Boston, and the United States Coast Guard. This exercise will assess each team’s ability to successfully respond to, and manage, public safety events and other emergencies occurring simultaneously throughout the Boston area.

Full details here.

(Insert requisite grumbling about costly security theatre here)

Comments

[ron_newman]

Given the catastrophe that New York and New Jersey just underwent, I think there's some value to emergency preparedness drills.

[tikva.livejournal.com]

Agreed wholeheartedly.

[dphilli1.livejournal.com]

hopefully it will be more useful and informative than the Operation Posiden exercise we went thru 5 yrs ago...

[tikva.livejournal.com]

Was that the thing at the Galleria? I found it pretty eye-opening. Of course, I was the only one who brought a dog, so my experience might have been a little different. ;)

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

This.

[redcolumbine.livejournal.com]

Have a look at the link. This one isn't about hurricanes - it's terrorist scare stuff.

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

Actually, no, it's about any kind of public safety emergency:

“Training is vital for our first responders. They are on the frontlines when an emergency occurs, and we want them trained in the best ways possible to handle any situation,” Mayor Thomas M. Menino said. “Urban Shield: Boston displays the steps the metro-Boston region takes to prepare for all-hazards and sets a national example for cities around the country to create a coordinated full-scale training exercise.”

The following locations will host exercises:

· USS Salem (Quincy) for “maritime interdiction”

· The former B-2 Police Station (Boston) for simulated SWAT exercises (Fenced-off area of station grounds only)

· The former Circle Cinemas (Brookline) for a simulated bank robbery and hostage situation

· Bowdoin MBTA Station (Boston) for a simulated HazMat incident

· Boston Harbor Anchorage #1 (Boston) for simulated maritime operations and a ferry boat HazMat scenario

· UMass Boston Campus (Boston) for a culminating exercise involving all agencies and a variety of exercises.

· Eight hospitals throughout Boston for simulation of HazMat decontaminations, management of simulated victims, and activation of a Medical Intelligence Center.

[ringrose.livejournal.com]

Security theater consists of persistent security measures which only make people think they are more secure, which this is not. It's training for jobs which have to be done right the first time, and for which you can't otherwise check that people will do the right things.

i don't like security theater either but be careful how big and cynical a brush you use.

[redcolumbine.livejournal.com]

Security theater, as I understand it, is designed to make people think they are LESS secure than they really are, to facilitate the abrogation of rights.

That said, I understand that these things need to be done in real spacetime and not simulation to find and work out all the potential bugs.

[ringrose.livejournal.com]

I see the problem. We have different definitions of security theater. From Wikipedia: "Security theater is the practice of investing in countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually achieve it."

dcltdw has much better examples of how real-space tests of multiple department integration is useful, and the benefits of practicing crisis management.

In my opinion, this exercise does not impact enough people long enough to have the effects you fear.

[dcltdw]

This is not security theatre. Or rather, it's not inherently security theatre -- that aspect could always be (needlessly) injected, of course.

When I went through EMS training, I read about how some forward-thinking hospitals would do MCI (mass casualty incident) training at the drop of a hat. If I'm remembering correctly, the trigger was "did more than one ambulance respond back with patients?". Because it happened fairly frequently (it's likely that if you have 2+ cars involved in a highway crash, because of the speeds involved, you'll have multiple patients), the first unit arriving on scene, be it PD/FD/EMS, would declare an MCI and everyone would shift to an MCI footing. As a result, the system was well-prepared when a jet did a crash-landing at an airport a few years later. (I wish I could remember when/where this was. "Somewhere in the Midwest" is all I can recall.)

It's hard to test if things will work without actually trying to do them. Exhibit A: communication. PD, FD, and EMS are generally using different radio frequencies. Do the command centers have the right radios? Does inter-agency communication actually work? Does it work at all stages of managing the scene (triage, treatment, transport)? Just from an EMS perspective: the different ambulance services use different frequencies as well. How the heck do you get trucks from the staging area to the transport area? You don't want 100 trucks in a very small patient loading zone, because space at the scene is at a premium -- plus, roadway use is limited (if empty trucks are generating traffic congestion, that's bad). By the same token, you don't want 0 trucks at the transport area and 100 trucks idling empty at the staging area, because no one told them "hey, next 5 trucks, come on in".

So sure, there could be security theatre involved (I know! Let's bring in APCs into the hazmat scene that's already been cleared, because, uh, well, because it'll look cool in photos!!1eleventyone!), but that's hard to tell.

It's kinda like the earthquake drills that I think Los Angeles is starting to run annually. They're a really good idea, but dang if they aren't hard to do, and large-scale drills aren't cheap. But so in being unprepared, unfortunately. :/

[siderea]

Well put!

Something I find fascinating about the scheduling is that, well, to quote the press release: On Saturday, the area will host Urban Shield: Boston, a 24-hour training exercise that simulates large-scale public safety incidents in the metro-Boston area. Urban Shield: Boston will begin at 8 a.m. Saturday and conclude at 8 a.m. Sunday.

But that's not 24 hours. I hope I'm not spoilering their exercise, but they've scheduled their exercise on the one 25hr day of the year.

So, 2:15am EST, a triage nurse is looking a a heap of charts, and one patient came in to the facility at 1:55am. How long has the patient actually been there?

This could be fascinating.

[ringrose.livejournal.com]

It is an exercise. Your goal is to trigger as many bugs as you can. I'd really rather their tracking/scheduling/whatever system is discovered not to handle daylight saving time changes in an exercise too.
It's possible this day was chosen on purpose.