CAT2: Water Buffaloes Exercising and EXPLOSIONS
What if disaster were to strike tomorrow? Would you be prepared? The Vermont Department of Health would be, and if you live in Vermont you should feel in good hands. In early June 2014, they conducted an Emergency Preparedness exercise that was two years in the making. I was voluntold to participate, even though I do not normally work in that division. It was a tiring, stressful, fun, and highly educational experience.
The biggest part of my education was essentially learning a foreign language. It probably doesn’t surprise you that the government—or any business—uses a wide assortment of acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations. It felt like alphabet soup! But I acclimated, and soon I was spouting off sentences that included such soup as HOC, SEOC, CAT2, DLAN, CWD, GI, Epi, EPA, DMAT, SNS, and more; not to mention all the initialisms for all the hospitals’ names. When we talked about improvements for next time, I definitely suggested a translation document!
When you hear or see one of those abbreviations, you can instantly tell that it’s an abbreviation, even if you may not know what that abbreviation means. What really throws you off is when someone uses a term for which you thought you already knew the meaning. That’s what the title of this post is about: water buffaloes.
To back up a little bit and explain the first part of the title, CAT2 was the name of the exercise: it stands for Catastrophic Exercise 2. This was a statewide event; many agencies, departments, and organizations were participating. Our section at the Health Department was the HOC: the Health Operations Center, which is what gets activated in an incident. The HOC has pre-planned roles for people to fill, and instructions for how to fill those roles. That’s part of what this exercise was about: how to refine and perfect those instructions.
They worked pretty awesomely, actually, because I got to be the “Planning Section Assistant” and thanks to my instructions and the help of some friendly people it was really easy to work with everyone and do my assigned work even though the team, the work, and everything was all new to me. More training would have helped, certainly, but I was super impressed with how well it went!
This is how it went down: we worked twelve hour shifts, 7am-7pm Wednesday through Friday, and then a shorter shift on Saturday (woo overtime). I was on all the shifts except for the one overnight shift that was 7pm-7am Friday night. (Those poor souls.) There were about fifty people in the HOC room each shift. While we were there, it was our job to respond to all the pretend emergencies that kept happening.
And what an assortment of [pretend] emergencies it was! Note: everything I describe here was pretend. We pretend responded to all the pretend things. It was as real as we could make it, but we had to preface and close EVERYTHING with “THIS IS AN EXERCISE.” First, there was an outbreak of norovirus, which began to fill up the hospitals. We had to start thinking about how to increase hospital beds available for the sick people. We also worked to inform the public of the importance of hand washing to prevent the spread of the sickness. That would be complicated later, though. (Dun dun dunnnnn…)
Then we got a report about an [exercise] explosion that caused the state emergency operations center to move to their backup location. Firefighters responded to the scene to fight the fire. Later, we got reports of residents complaining about their tap water coming out all foamy. It was determined that there had been a [pretend] valve failure in the water district, and firefighting foam—many gallons of it—had contaminated the drinking water supply for much of the county! Oh noes!
Thus, we had to issue a “Do Not Use” edict for the water in the area, which included not using it for washing hands. Great; so everyone had norovirus and couldn’t wash their hands now. Or, you know, drink water. So of course we had to find a way to get people water.
It was around this time that I started hearing people giggling about water buffaloes. I assumed they were joking around. Then on an official pretend conference call, I heard someone say “water buffaloes” in a presumably serious context, and I was super confused. We’re getting water buffaloes to all the affected towns? What? Do these animals somehow provide water? Do they store water like camels and have the magical ability to give that water to people? How do you even transport that many large animals? Googling “water buffaloes” doesn’t help, by the way. You get a lot of pictures of animals. I finally learned that a water buffalo, in this context, means a big truck that delivers potable (drinkable) water. Ohhh.
Of course, this did not prevent me from having the Veggie Tales Water Buffalo song stuck in my head. All day. The entire exercise. :D
Another piece of the exercise involved a [pretend] train leaking some sort of dangerous chemical that was making animals sick along its path as it traveled from Swanton toward Montpelier. The train was finally stopped in Montpelier, and while they were determining what the chemical was and what to do, one of the train cars EXPLODED. And while fire trucks were fighting the ensuing fire, one of the fire trucks EXPLODED. (Oddly this did not happen on an EXPLOSION Wednesday. But that’s not a thing anyway.)
There was so much going on; much more than I’m describing here. The writer in me kept looking for clues to relate the emergencies. Was it a plot? Who could be behind all of these disastrous events? Unfortunately, most of them were unrelated. The exercise planners had wanted this to be as real as possible. It was designed to train, not to entertain. Still, had I been planning it…
Had I been planning it, I would have at least developed some sort of entertaining story to tie it all together after the fact. Even if it wasn’t part of the hours of the exercise, it could have been some sort of an epilogue, given at the final meeting. A fake newspaper story handed around, or, while we’re dreaming big, a fake news video!
I got really into it. That was the stressful part, actually, because I am really good at pretending and I was pretending that all these emergencies were going on. I wanted to know if people were okay, how the average citizen was doing, how this was being perceived from the outside. The planners and controllers called it exercise “play.” I was definitely playing, and I had a great time.
We were told that the evaluators thought we did a great job. Rest easy, Vermonters; the HOC has you covered.
This is an exercise. ;)
Here's a post from the Vermont Department of Health Facebook page. I think that's me in the purple shirt standing up wayyy back in the middle:
The biggest part of my education was essentially learning a foreign language. It probably doesn’t surprise you that the government—or any business—uses a wide assortment of acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations. It felt like alphabet soup! But I acclimated, and soon I was spouting off sentences that included such soup as HOC, SEOC, CAT2, DLAN, CWD, GI, Epi, EPA, DMAT, SNS, and more; not to mention all the initialisms for all the hospitals’ names. When we talked about improvements for next time, I definitely suggested a translation document!
When you hear or see one of those abbreviations, you can instantly tell that it’s an abbreviation, even if you may not know what that abbreviation means. What really throws you off is when someone uses a term for which you thought you already knew the meaning. That’s what the title of this post is about: water buffaloes.
To back up a little bit and explain the first part of the title, CAT2 was the name of the exercise: it stands for Catastrophic Exercise 2. This was a statewide event; many agencies, departments, and organizations were participating. Our section at the Health Department was the HOC: the Health Operations Center, which is what gets activated in an incident. The HOC has pre-planned roles for people to fill, and instructions for how to fill those roles. That’s part of what this exercise was about: how to refine and perfect those instructions.
They worked pretty awesomely, actually, because I got to be the “Planning Section Assistant” and thanks to my instructions and the help of some friendly people it was really easy to work with everyone and do my assigned work even though the team, the work, and everything was all new to me. More training would have helped, certainly, but I was super impressed with how well it went!
This is how it went down: we worked twelve hour shifts, 7am-7pm Wednesday through Friday, and then a shorter shift on Saturday (woo overtime). I was on all the shifts except for the one overnight shift that was 7pm-7am Friday night. (Those poor souls.) There were about fifty people in the HOC room each shift. While we were there, it was our job to respond to all the pretend emergencies that kept happening.
And what an assortment of [pretend] emergencies it was! Note: everything I describe here was pretend. We pretend responded to all the pretend things. It was as real as we could make it, but we had to preface and close EVERYTHING with “THIS IS AN EXERCISE.” First, there was an outbreak of norovirus, which began to fill up the hospitals. We had to start thinking about how to increase hospital beds available for the sick people. We also worked to inform the public of the importance of hand washing to prevent the spread of the sickness. That would be complicated later, though. (Dun dun dunnnnn…)
Then we got a report about an [exercise] explosion that caused the state emergency operations center to move to their backup location. Firefighters responded to the scene to fight the fire. Later, we got reports of residents complaining about their tap water coming out all foamy. It was determined that there had been a [pretend] valve failure in the water district, and firefighting foam—many gallons of it—had contaminated the drinking water supply for much of the county! Oh noes!
Thus, we had to issue a “Do Not Use” edict for the water in the area, which included not using it for washing hands. Great; so everyone had norovirus and couldn’t wash their hands now. Or, you know, drink water. So of course we had to find a way to get people water.
It was around this time that I started hearing people giggling about water buffaloes. I assumed they were joking around. Then on an official pretend conference call, I heard someone say “water buffaloes” in a presumably serious context, and I was super confused. We’re getting water buffaloes to all the affected towns? What? Do these animals somehow provide water? Do they store water like camels and have the magical ability to give that water to people? How do you even transport that many large animals? Googling “water buffaloes” doesn’t help, by the way. You get a lot of pictures of animals. I finally learned that a water buffalo, in this context, means a big truck that delivers potable (drinkable) water. Ohhh.
Of course, this did not prevent me from having the Veggie Tales Water Buffalo song stuck in my head. All day. The entire exercise. :D
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| This screenshot is actually from the Song of the Cebu, wherein the water buffalo makes a cameo. |
There was so much going on; much more than I’m describing here. The writer in me kept looking for clues to relate the emergencies. Was it a plot? Who could be behind all of these disastrous events? Unfortunately, most of them were unrelated. The exercise planners had wanted this to be as real as possible. It was designed to train, not to entertain. Still, had I been planning it…
Had I been planning it, I would have at least developed some sort of entertaining story to tie it all together after the fact. Even if it wasn’t part of the hours of the exercise, it could have been some sort of an epilogue, given at the final meeting. A fake newspaper story handed around, or, while we’re dreaming big, a fake news video!
I got really into it. That was the stressful part, actually, because I am really good at pretending and I was pretending that all these emergencies were going on. I wanted to know if people were okay, how the average citizen was doing, how this was being perceived from the outside. The planners and controllers called it exercise “play.” I was definitely playing, and I had a great time.
We were told that the evaluators thought we did a great job. Rest easy, Vermonters; the HOC has you covered.
This is an exercise. ;)
Here's a post from the Vermont Department of Health Facebook page. I think that's me in the purple shirt standing up wayyy back in the middle:
Hi Bailey, We train for this stuff all the time at the hospital(s) where I work(ed). Glad it went well for ya'll!
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