When dam emergencies happen, the Emergency Action Plan (EAP) is your community’s first line of defense. Whether a dam is regulated by a State Agency or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), you must exercise your EAP. A lot happens behind the scenes before any EAP exercise, but you don’t have to be an event planner to host a successful exercise.
As a compliance specialist with 54 EAP exercises under my belt, here are my top tips for planning a successful EAP exercise.
Start Planning Early
Planning for an EAP exercise can take several months, even for the most seasoned event planners. Give yourself at least six months lead time—even more if you have not planned for or conducted an exercise before.
- Identify your planning team. Will you plan the exercise internally or solicit outside expertise? How often will planning meetings be scheduled?
- Determine when to conduct the exercise. When will your hydro personnel be available? Is there a maintenance project on the schedule?
- Identify your exercise objective(s). Do you want to check the regulatory requirement box? Do you want to learn how hydro personnel and emergency response agencies work together during a dam emergency so you can maintain and improve your EAP? Hint: It’s the latter.
Guest List and Invitations
Expand your guest list beyond the personnel and agencies included on your notification flowcharts (e.g., dam operator and emergency management agency representatives). Consider inviting the following relevant stakeholders who may have a role in an actual emergency:
- Chief Dam Safety Engineer
- Dam owner maintenance, technician, communications, and management personnel
- Representatives from the sheriff’s offices, emergency dispatch, police and fire departments, and emergency medical services
- Downstream utility companies, highway commissioners, public works departments, community leaders, and business owners
- Disaster preparedness and relief organizations (i.e., American Red Cross, Salvation Army)
Pro tip: Send the invitations eight weeks before the event. Follow up with non-responders and send reminders as the date approaches.
Exercise Objectives and Scenario
Determine and refine the objectives of your EAP exercise early on. Fine-tuning your goals will take time and will help guide the scenario. You need to consider:
- Your testing objective. Are you testing notification timing, decision-making protocol, coordination of emergency information or misinformation, clarity of roles and responsibilities during an emergency, or all the above?
- Roles and expectations. Who will be doing what, what should be happening, to what standard, and in what amount of time?
- Attendee names and titles. Do you want to use table tents, name tags, or incident command vests to identify who’s in the room?
- Communication method. Will you use landlines, cell phones, written notes, face-to-face, or radios for the exercise?
- Handouts and visuals. Will you provide copies of inundation maps and notification flowcharts, situation manuals, and/or incident report forms?
Lesson learned: Know your objectives and every participant’s role. You can spend a lot of time planning around a particular agency. If that agency cannot attend at the last minute, someone else must step into that role for the exercise, and sometimes that someone is you.
Seek Feedback
Obtain feedback from all participants after completing your exercise while everyone is still at the event. If feedback is “this was a good exercise” or the conversation does not flow naturally, ask facilitated questions related to the exercise objectives.
Discussion may include:
- Strengths and weaknesses of the EAP
- Deficiencies in resources and information available
- Coordination efforts between all responsible parties
- Roles and responsibilities of responsible parties
- Performances of those who respond to dam failures or other emergency conditions
- Public awareness of the EAP
Feedback is vital to maintaining and improving your EAP.
From Planning to Performance: A Successful EAP Exercise
An effective EAP exercise is integral to your community’s disaster planning and recovery. With the details taken care of, you’ll be on the way to a successful EAP experience.
