CBP Officer George Pizzo was fresh from participating in a program that teaches CBP officers and Border Patrol agents to design, develop, deliver and evaluate simulated emergency incidents so they will know how to handle a real one. Pizzo was implementing his list of actions when this “real-life” situation turned out to be a false alarm.

Photo Credit: Lowell Ezersky, FEMA

CBP officer gives instructions to a colleague during a functional exercise held in May at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Operations Center in Birmingham, Ala.

Pizzo had learned and practiced his terrorism countermeasures during “Master Exercise Practitioner” training. Initially developed by CBP for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the regimen teaches participants how to respond in case of a real terrorist attack. FEMA experts, the “masters of disasters,” quell all kinds of catastrophes—fires, riots, explosions, floods, tornados and hazardous and toxic materials incidents—and have built up a wealth of knowledge doing so. Consequently, in 2003, CBP’s Office of Training and Development partnered with FEMA to modify its master practitioner program and adapt it for anti-terrorism training to strengthen emergency preparedness at CBP’s ports and sectors.

Three components

The training involves three forms of exercise: tabletop, functional and full-scale. Tabletop exercises, which originated as military drills for tactical planning, take place in a conference-room setting with colleagues from the state, local, tribal and federal agencies that would participate in a real emergency.

Participants confront a crisis scenario—a bomb is reported on the Bridge of the Americas between Texas and Mexico, for example. They analyze what each of the various specialties would do in a genuine, full-scale deployment and how they would work with CBP to solve or mitigate the problems. In this example, some of the agencies involved with CBP might be the local bomb squad, the state or local police departments, the fire department, or perhaps the local chapter of the Red Cross.

A functional exercise is a dry run for the real thing: a rehearsal without costumes or scenery. It happens in “real time,” as a real emergency would, with CBP managers and supervisors orchestrating the same resources that participated in tabletop exercises, but stopping just short of actually deploying assets.

A full-scale exercise is equivalent to a dress rehearsal, a simulated emergency exercise in which multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional participants conduct emergency-management activities, complete with equipment and assets that would be required in an actual emergency or attack.

The Master Exercise Practitioner training program lasts three weeks and is divided into two segments. The first involves classroom instruction on topics like risk assessment or the details of conducting a specific emergency exercise. This instruction is followed by breakout sessions in which the participants divide into teams to devise their own scenarios and exercises.

Important homework

Armed with these skills, participants return to their home ports or sectors for a few weeks to conduct practice sessions and exercises with their colleagues. Then they return for the second, weeklong session, where they report on the results. After evaluation, FEMA certifies students as “master exercise practitioners.”

FEMA has conducted Master Exercise Practitioner training programs for CBP officers and agents since the partnership started in 2003. Previous participants have called it some of the best training they’ve attended. Officer Pizzo said, “… [The] training really helped me assist the incident commander during this event…. I felt useful and safe because of the practice in handling emergency events like these.” Pizzo’s experience, which in effect turned out to be a full dress rehearsal, was even more effective because the head of his port’s incident command center had attended training for hazardous materials coordinators a few years earlier. That training was a natural complement to Pizzo’s.

Currently, CBP has a cadre of 143 Master Exercise Practitioners around the country who can plan and conduct emergency exercises, working closely with their federal, state, local and tribal counterparts to ensure an integrated response. CBP is now better prepared by having experts able to help their colleagues plan and prepared for the unexpected.