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Hurricane season is upon us. This and other weather and events throughout the year  that can cause damage and disruptions are good reminders to think about overall emergency preparedness for your utility.

The Environmental Protection Agency has its new Emergency Response Tabletop Exercises for Drinking Water and Wastewater Systems to help you think and prepare in an organized way.

The new tool, which is available on CD, was developed by the EPA to assist local water and wastewater utility staff in preparing and conducting incident response training via “tabletop exercises.” A tabletop exercise, according to FEMA, is a “facilitated analysis of an emergency situation in an informal, stress-free environment.” Tabletop exercises can be thought of as an interactive game for the workplace that places the participants in a simulated situation, requiring them to make choices that would be expected of them in a real emergency.

If your utility hasn’t made any preparations for an emergency, at least start with a conversation with your staff, board, elected officials, or all of these.

Consider these scenarios (adapted from EPA’s Tabletop Exercises):

• What would you do if a biological agent was intentionally introduced to contaminate your town’s water-distribution center? Do you know where all the closest hospitals are and what their capacities and capabilities are?
• What would happen if a severe March storm caused widespread damage in your area, including flooding, power outages, communication disruptions and water main breaks? Do you have alternatives for all of these situations – alternative transportation routes, power backups, ways of communicating, etc.?
• Do you know how to handle a water tank security breach discovered by a water utility employee? Do you have a plan for restoring water?

If you decide to do some more formal emergency planning, consider setting aside a day to utilize EPA’s Tabletop Exercises.

How the Tabletop Exercises work

To help small utilities train in emergency preparedness, the EPA invites workers to the fictional Zenith City to engage in a simulation of twelve different emergency events, allowing users to choose from five types of security incidents: intentional contamination, security breach, cyber security, physical attack, and interdependency. Once an event is chosen, the CD will guide users to the appropriate materials for the exercise.

The tabletop exercises on the CD were developed mainly to train water and wastewater utility workers in how to exercise their emergency response plans and use the Response Protocol Toolbox and other guidance documents in the planning process. Additionally, the exercises include secondary roles for local health officials, fire, police, emergency medical services, and local officials to provide a comprehensive understanding of a community in crisis.

You can also customize the exercises and adapt them to your own town or community. You can even substitute real things like maps of your area in the exercises.

The CD contains many other resources. The EPA includes several other documents and toolkits that will be of great value to small water and wastewater utilities. These additional resources include presentations on:

• Vulnerability Assessment (VA) and Emergency Response Plan (ERP) requirements
• The National Incident Management System
• The Incident Command System
• The Response Protocol Toolbox

Completing these training simulations in full is essential not only for preparing small water utilities to react to possible emergency situations, but also for sharpening your staff’s thinking and problem-solving capabilities. After mastering the exercises, you and your staff will be confident in the knowledge that your water utility can handle the worst possible scenarios.

Additional Resources
EPA Useful Water Security Documents: www.epa.gov/safewater/watersecurity/tools/trainingcd/Pages/ws-documents.html
EPA Useful Water Security Links: www.epa.gov/safewater/watersecurity/tools/trainingcd/Pages/web-links.html
Page to order the Emergency Response Tabletop Exercises: http://yosemite.epa.gov/water/owrccatalog.nsf/70db6110b88e068285256c1a005a2a49/9963da7b59b4cbc985256fbe004a7ecd?OpenDocument&CartID=7579-010140