Following up on Tuesday’s Security and Resilience Post on emergency planning, the next step in the security process is to exercise those plans. As WaterISAC has previously emphasized, exercises are an important part of a preparedness program, helping organizations build, improve, and validate their plans, policies, and procedures while strengthening their operational resilience.
To help organizations conduct effective exercise programs, WaterISAC is sharing free exercise guidance resources from FEMA, CISA, and the EPA.
FEMA
FEMA offers exercise starter kits that can help with planning, design, scenario development, conduct, and evaluation. The Exercise Starter Kits are designed to provide a set of sample materials and templates that can be customized to create a discussion-based exercise to help organizations validate their plans and policies. Each kit contains a sample exercise facilitator and evaluator guide, sample conduct slides, a sample situation manual, and a customizable placemat.
The exercise kits are available in the Emergency Management Toolkit section of FEMA’s Preparedness Toolkit website. This online portal provides stakeholders across the community with multiple tools for implementing preparedness and resilience efforts. Access the exercise starter kits here.
CISA
CISA has created Tabletop Exercise Packages (CTEPs) to assist stakeholders in conducting their own exercises. Utilities can use CTEPs to initiate discussions within their organizations about their ability to address a variety of threat scenarios.
According to CISA, “each package is customizable and includes template exercise objectives, scenarios, and discussion questions as well as a collection of references and resources. Available scenarios cover a broad array of physical security and cybersecurity topics, such as natural disasters, pandemics, civil disturbances, industrial control systems, election security, ransomware, vehicle ramming, insider threats, active assailants, and unmanned aerial systems.” CTEPs also offer scenario and module questions to discuss pre-incident information and intelligence sharing, incident response, and post-incident recovery. Access the CTEP resources here.
EPA
Lastly, EPA has a whole website to help utilities design and conduct tabletop exercises (TTX). According to EPA, its TTX tool provides users with the resources to plan, conduct and evaluate tabletop exercises. It offers multiple threat scenarios stemming from hazards across the all-hazards threat environment, such as cyber attacks, flooding, earthquakes, acts of vandalism, and more. Access EPA’s TTX tool page here.
