This presentation is a starting point for how to anticipate the unexpected, how to plan for those misfortunes, how to prevent or mitigate them, and how to respond when the world outside of the event wants to know what happened and why your response was (or was not!) effective.

We will go over how to look at your event site for vulnerabilities, both inherent and participant-created, threats that may impinge on those vulnerabilities, and the risks created by the combination of particular threats attacking particular vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities, threats, and risks are much more wide-ranging topics than you think they are.

This is loosely based on the IS-15 “Special Events Contingency Planning for Public Safety Agencies” course at FEMA’s National Training and Education Division (go to the National Preparedness Course Catalog, and search for IS0015.b). If you have an interest in specializing in this kind of planning and management, please consider taking the class before coming to Burn After Meeting.

The presentation will take between 45 minutes and an hour. We’ll spend the remainder of the time discussing scenarios and recent events, including the return of Lake Lahontan in September.

Slide deck here.

Ejecting participants is a challenging, multi part process. Many regional burns may benefit from building knowledge and competence in these areas: too often it falls to the same usual suspects, and we aren’t building a deeper bench. We’ll get in to basics and more advanced issues, in a dynamic and interactive workshop.

007 session materials (PDF)

Learn about the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP), a set of publicly available federally supported systems and best practices for emergency response training and organizational improvement planning. More importantly, learn how to steal from it like an artist and adapt it to help your event train volunteers and improve emergency operations plans and procedures.

This presentation will introduce concepts beneficial for conducting exercises and for building a cohesive long term exercise and improvement plan for Safety teams.