Command-Level Decision Making for Transportation Emergency Managers (2022)

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Page 20 CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS General Findings TERA has value, but must be promoted, enhanced, upgraded, maintained, and funded to achieve its fullest objectives. The General Recommendations in Chapter 4, build upon this in a variety of ways, specifically with regard to the sunsetting of the Adobe Flash platform, and the manner by which TERA can remain at the forefront of emergency operations response training. Without such ongoing support, much of the value of the investment made to-date will be lost. The value is significant, and is noted, as follows. Finding Related to Program Value 3.1 Purpose of Program The value of TERA to transportation emergency organizations may be described in three parts. First, the web-based user interface simulates an “emergency operations center” environment – a common reference to a place where a trained emergency team meets to coordinate enterprise-wide policy, information handling, and resource allocation during an emergency. The TERA interface simulates phone calls, radio calls, social media messages, emergency alerts, email, in-person visitors, and other “channels of exercise inject input” to approximate a realistic environment in which emergency personnel may practice emergency response and recovery activity. Second, detailed, enabling scenarios available for use within TERA (the content of TERA) allows users to focus on different hazards and threats (e.g., flood, wildland fire, earthquake), and each is comprised of a number of injects that reach users through interface channels and may require users to complete one or more specific tasks. By altering the complexity, number, and frequency of injects within TERA, emergency teams of any proficiency can experience realistic approximations of, for example, emergency calls, urgent resource requests, inquiries from media reporters, and to practice the steps required to adequately resolve such injects. Several levels of customization available to users also allow them to add local context (i.e., reference a nearby intersection or automatically insert the names of local agencies into exercise injects), change the names of default roles (i.e., changing “dispatch” to “control”) or add, change, or delete any inject. Third, deliberate engineering of the TERA interface and scenarios now allow users and their transportation agencies to dramatically reduce the duration of exercise design (i.e., by reducing the need for exercise planners, multiple design meetings, and documents) and to minimize the costs of traditional exercise conduct (i.e., time of controllers, simulators, and evaluators). For example, traditional U.S. Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP)-compliant exercises often require months to develop when a TERA exercise can be developed and started within 10 minutes. The resulting efficiency of TERA during exercise design and conduct thus removes a critical and common obstacle to training, exercise, and emergency preparedness. 3.2 General Result of Program TERA provides an effective user interface, engaging content, and efficient process helpful in both orienting new transportation emergency personnel and teams to the EOC environment and allowing established teams to practice their skills as individual and team players working in an EOC environment. For those agencies that wish to use it, TERA also contains a method of after-action reporting that monitors the achievement of tasks and produces a report of individual and team task completion. 3.3 Current Status The COVID-19 climate impeded some TERA engagements, but with much of the project being in a virtual, online, environment, such efforts continued to proceed. The challenges of the current environment should not be restrictive to the ongoing and long-term success of this 10-year program.