Perth Petroleum Services Oil & Chemical Spill Equipment

The importance of tabletop exercises

It’s a common belief that a big exercise is the best way to train the response team. Within the spill industry, I don’t necessarily believe this is always the case.

Earlier this year at the International Oil Spill Conference in Savannah, I was able to discuss this exact point with a response coordinator for the Arctic region. Exercises are difficult to run in such a remote and hostile environment as the Arctic, therefore tabletop exercises are often used to effectively train spill response teams.

To quickly summarise the conversation, I’ve listed below some advantages of tabletop exercises over larger exercises.

• Tabletop exercises allow teams to focus on issues relevant to specific situations. An example could be the issue of moving spill equipment from Perth to Dampier.
• Evaluating issues at the strategic level
• Training or testing complex issues
• Establishes clarity of roles and responsibilities
• Cost-wise, tabletop exercises are less expensive in dollars and man-hours to both prepare and conduct.
• Workshops can be used prior to an exercise to educate participants. The learnings can then be tested with the tabletop exercise.
• Often there are rich learning to be gained by stopping or changing an exercise however it is difficult to do so on a large exercise with many participants. These learning are then often lost in the moment if not discussed or attended to.

In summary, I believe tabletop exercises have a place and should not be dismissed as the poor cousin of a larger exercise. They can be used to improve preparedness, strengthen planning and enhance inter-company co-ordination without the cost and stress of a larger exercise.