The growing complexity of man-made and natural emergency events poses significant challenges to emergency responders and civilian managers alike as they are forced to deal with multi-domain incidents that require responses beyond the traditional construct. Gone are the days when police, fire, and EMS are called upon to handle incidents that pertain only to their specific skill sets. Limited resources at both the local and state levels, and dwindling federal grants and funding, have forced many agencies to adopt a joint operational approach to successfully mitigate life-threatening events.
While significant technological tools have been introduced over the last decade, and continue to proliferate, to help enhance the capabilities of First Responders, the ability to provide a “sandbox” environment for effective and realistic multi-agency training, as well as creating “what-if” scenarios that can be run thousands of times, have yet to be widely adopted. Experiencing scenarios that allow incident commanders and individual units to participate and respond to the same incident, gathering information in real time, identifying threats, while tracking and managing resources, and developing an Incident Action Plan (IAP) is the pinnacle of what commanders and their forces must coordinate and master.
When you consider the sheer amount of information available to responding units and incident commanders today, the challenge now is how to manage and prioritize that information to effectively mitigate the incident. From intelligence information gathered pre-incident, enroute intelligence gathered from in E911 systems and civilian smart phone apps, to drones streaming live video feeds to responding units, officers and commanders can become quickly overwhelmed. Providing responders with plenty of reps and sets to practice the consumption, processing, and dissemination of information to quickly develop their IAPs can best be accomplished in simulated environments. Instructors can develop scenarios that replicate the operating environment to challenge the target training audience with varying layers of complexity.
One of the many advantages of simulated training environments is the taking of catastrophic events that do not occur on a regular basis and make them available as many times as needed to help responders practice decision making. The results of the simulated incidents can also inform the agency on how best to better prepare for such events. Greater risk-taking in the virtual environment can help with the development of contingency planning. Scheduled live training that is impacted by weather conditions can be easily switched to virtual environments.
While the virtual environment cannot fully replicate the emotions, stresses, and dangers of a real incident, it can replicate the stresses and time pressures to immerse the participants into the scenarios to provide similar conditions for decision making and the execution of necessary actions. Common interfaces are now making it possible to combine different virtual systems, creating collaborative training environments that allow for the consequences of decisions made to be consumed in real-time, based on the success or failures of the participants in carrying out the commanders IAP. Constant practice utilizing highly portable, easy to use simulations will help responders build their experiential knowledge that would otherwise require actual responses and events that would take years to compile.