After Action Reports provide a summary of the event, the role of our organization in the emergency response, and detailed lessons learned from that response. After Action Reports provide a detailed examination of successes and problem areas, many of them procedural, and the level of the critique should not be taken as an indication of the success or failure of the response. Even an exceptionally well managed event should result in many lessons that, when addressed, will result in a more effective response on the next disaster. After Action Reports on this site include both exercise and actual disaster events.

1. OVERVIEW: Coastal HURREX 2000 was initiated on 16 July 2000 in response to the development of a simulated tropical depression in the Atlantic. Over the next six days this storm developed into simulated Hurricane Archie, which tracked through the Turks and Caicos and Bahamas Islands, north along the Atlantic coast to make landfall near Wilmington, North Carolina. The storm then reentered the Atlantic after tracking across eastern North Carolina and Virginia to make final landfall on Long Island. The exercise terminated at 1400 on 22 July.

2. THE VIRTUAL EOC ROLE: The Virtual Emergency Operations Center was activated simulating the support normally provided to supported government and voluntary agencies.

3. THE VIRTUAL EOC MISSION OBJECTIVES: Operate The Virtual Emergency Operations Center to:

a. Test the ability to develop a situation briefing from information fused form a variety of sources over a prolonged operational period - met.

b. Test the ability to receive and integrate situation inputs from other organizations - met.

4. LEVEL OF EFFORT: Total period of activation - 16 July through 22 July 2000. Total person hours worked on the exercise - 44. Total staff days on event - 22. Total personnel on duty during the event - 4. Total documents released - 21 including 1 Warning Order, 1 Mission Order, 5 Incident Action Plans, 7 Situation Briefings, and 7 Situation Reports. Total log entries - 119.

5. LESSONS LEARNED:

a. This was the first time The Virtual Emergency Operations Center operated with direct participation from an outside agency, in this case a voluntary agency in New York. To facilitate future participation in similar events, the following should be considered:

(1) Provide the participating agency with detailed descriptive material and allow them to prepare and make their own inputs based on the material provided. This will provide practice in report development for the other parties to the exercise.

(2) The development of a way to input data by outside organizations is a priority. In this case security issues had to be considered, delaying to some degree clearance of an agency representative to participate directly by entering information in the incident log.

(3) We informally provided a help desk function to assist the other participating organization, but this was not part of planning for the exercise. Identification of a duty liaison officer to assist other organizations in using the facility should be considered for the future.

(4) An earlier distribution of invitations to participate in future exercises may be of assistance to potential partners by allowing better scheduling of their activities.

b. The incident log based on a bulletin board system worked very well and closes comment 6.f. from the Hurricane Floyd After Action review. The following observations require follow-up:

(1) Posting using the correct paragraph numbers worked well, considerably better than in previous exercises this year (SERTEX 2000 and ERTEX 00-01). However, continued attention to this issue and training in proper log format is required to ensure we maintain this level of performance.

(2) The new feature on the log that allows an operator to generate an e-mail message to call the attention of others to a log entry requires further experimentation to determine if this is potentially useful. Although it does not appear to replicate the text of the entry is does serve to highlight that there is something worth reading in the log for those who are off duty.

(3) Use of the log as a way to record all information exchanges worked very well and dramatically cut down the number of required e-mail messages. We need to ensure that future time reporting is included in this process.

c. In previous operations we have provided information that was provided to us in essentially the same format as we received it. In developing a fused situation briefing it became obvious that potential users may need more information in a variety of formats. For example, hurricane tracking software in use in New York required inputs in miles per hour and barometric pressure. Therefore the new Situation briefing requires content and format refinement in:

(1) Identification of standard contents for each paragraph for each likely type of disaster and the provision of a detailed description of these in a standard operating procedure.

(2) Consistent use of confidence measures to identify our assessment of information and source reliability.

(3) Incorporation of both versions of measurements when there are two possible ways for data to be reported.

(4) Review of the flow of Situation Briefing paragraphs to ensure they depict the situation in the most logical sequence.

(5) Establishment of a policy as to how long information should be retained in the Situation Brief.

(6) Determination of whether we post and retain all situation briefings for the entire event, or just the most current briefing.

d. The development of the Situation Briefing highlighted the need to identify accessible information sources that can be used during ongoing events. Essentially we need an easy access list of weather, news media (including major newspapers that serve possible impact areas), state and local emergency management agency, local government, and other sites from which information could be developed as the event is in progress.

e. Staffing remains inadequate to meet the needs of a prolonged real event. In this exercise an average of eight exercise inputs were provided for each day's play. This volume was easily handled by a single individual assigned to develop the Briefing. In an actual hurricane event it may be reasonable to expect that the input would be in the vicinity of 100 or more information items. This requires that we assign individuals to monitor specific areas of interest (weather, government, news media) and possibly different geographical areas. Development of the Situation Briefing may reasonably be expected to require a staff of five or more people.

f. For the first time in this exercise the Incident Action Plan performed a useful function in tracking assignments of products to individuals by noting this beside their names on the VICS 203. We need to reassess the Incident Action Plan and its contents and determine how to best use the document. As this is intended as an internal document it should be possible to reduce some content and tailor that which we do prepare to better assist in managing our operations.

g. The use of just-in-time training topics distributed by e-mail appeared to provide refresher training in a timely manner. We should develop a complete packet of on disk these that can be used in the activation for any event.

6. FOLLOW UP: Items 5.b. through 5.d. and 5.f. and 5.g. will be reviewed and assigned for action at the August staff meeting.