Incident Command System (ICS)
One of the most difficult elements of teaching Incident Command System (ICS) is creating interesting and insightful exercises relevant to participants.
Current training courses include examples from fictional places such as "Fairwinds Airport" which lies in a densely populated area. These exercises are critical for participants to learn key points yet are not necessarily relevant nor engaging for students. Simtable is focused on bringing examples to life for participants, allowing them to acquire ICS concepts and learning how to apply them to real threats in their own towns and neighborhoods.
Simtable is able to accurately simulate wildfire, and is currently developing flood and chemical plume models. These models run in actual places so key information such as existing factories, schools, offices, homes, rail lines, and streets can be overlaid. We also layer on critical data, such as power lines, buried natural gas pipelines, fire hydrants etc. House locations, densities of people and street networks are used to plan evacuations. Land ownership overlays such as federal, state and private allow users to plan and prepare for unified incident command staff for multi-jurisdiction incidents. This allows responders to understand the dynamics of their situation with real data in their own backyard.
The first exercise brings students through an ICS briefing form 201. Utilizing actual GIS maps, participants will be able to denote incident location, perimeter, facilities and summary of action. An organization chart is also developed and easily modified on a third screen with the ability to easily position names and pictures in each box of the chart, in addition to span of control statistics. A resource summary with geo-locatable links allows participants to place resources on the table. Simtable calculates key statistics in the emergency perimeter such as number of houses, miles of road and number of exits/entrances that need to be blocked. These statistics can be used to estimate time and or resources required and organization layers to maintain spans.
There is not a more engaging and relevant way to teach ICS than Simtable.
