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Testing your disaster plan
So you wrote your disaster plan, now what? Test your
plan!
Try these exercises for testing your disaster plan:
Phone tree drill
Fire drill
Tabletop exercise
Hands-on recovery
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Phone tree drill
• Activate the phone tree in your disaster plan
• Communicate a test message through the whole tree
• Check with staff after the drill to ensure the message was
received
• Update your communications plan to include anyone who did
not receive the message
• Consider including text messaging into your communication,
it can be more reliable than voice communication in regional
disasters
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Fire drill
• Conduct a fire drill while staff, researchers, visitors are in
your institution to get the most realistic sense of an actual fire
or evacuation that could happen at any time
• Practice before the real thing
• Improve procedures for evacuation for any reason, not just
fire
• Ensure that all procedures for accounting for all staff in an
evacuation are in place and followed
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Tabletop exercise
• Gather stakeholders in disaster plan
• Administration
• Emergency responders (or someone to represent emergency
responders like police, fire)
• Facilities
• Staff from all levels
• Others that have a role in your disaster plan
• Create an imaginary disaster scenario
• Hurricane
• Earthquake
• Tornado
• Whatever is most likely regional event in your area
• Or focus on local event such as sprinkler malfunction, or plumbing leak
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Tabletop exercise
• Walk through the first event of the emergency situation
• i.e. tornado watch is issued for your area
• Ask everyone around the table to respond with what they are
doing at that point
• i.e. communicating to patrons where to seek shelter
• Walk through all the subsequent steps of the incident, asking
participants how they are responding throughout, following
the disaster plan
• Tornado hits, building damaged, collections affected, recovery process
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Tabletop exercise
• Sample exercises from National Network Libraries of
Medicine (NN/LM)
• http://nnlm.gov/ep/table-top-exercises/
• FEMA Emergency Planning Exercises
• https://www.fema.gov/emergency-planning-exercises
• PrepareAthon! Flood exercise, FEMA
• http://www.fema.gov/media-library/resources-
documents/collections/372
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Hands-on disaster recovery
• Participate in or organize a hands-on disaster recovery
workshop
• Hands-on workshops allow participants to work with wet
materials to understand how books, papers, photographs,
objects, or other cultural heritage collections behave when
they are wet
• Materials what will be discarded anyways are used, and
participants can practice recovery before using any
techniques on important collections in a real emergency
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Hands-on disaster recovery
• Use your disaster plan to guide your hands-on recovery in
the exercise
• Discover what’s missing from your plan, what additional information
you needed in the recovery process
• Determine what supplies would improve the recovery process and
improve your disaster supplies
• Look for a workshop in your area, or get in touch with
LYRASIS at preservation@lyrasis.org to talk about
organizing a workshop
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Conclusion
• Debrief with key players after training exercises or real
disaster event
• Revisit your plan after training or a real event to ensure it has
been updated according to what you learned
• These are just some of the ways that you might prepare your
institution to respond to an emergency situation. Drills for
other types of incidents beyond fire, instruction sessions,
hands-on training, and coordinating and learning fro local
emergency managers are all additional approaches to
consider.
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Resources
• LYRASIS Disaster Resources
• https://www.lyrasis.org/LYRASIS%20Digital/Pages/Preservation%20Services/Disaster-
Resources.aspx
• Disaster plan templates, Society of American Archivists
• http://www2.archivists.org/initiatives/mayday-saving-our-archives/annotated-
resources#templates
• Developing a Disaster Preparedness / Emergency Response Plan,
American Alliance of Museums
• http://www.aam-us.org/docs/default-source/continuum/developing-a-disaster-
plan-final.pdf?sfvrsn=4
• “Building an Emergency Plan: A Guide for Museums and Other Cultural
Institutions”
• https://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pdf_publications/pdf/emergen
cy_plan.pdf
• Sample disaster plans, Conservation online
• http://cool.conservation-us.org/bytopic/disasters/plans/