WebEOC® and Exercise Orion in the UK

Orion orion Exercise Orion was the UK’s first and largest, European Union civil protection live exercise, which looked at how the UK and Europe would respond to a mid sized earthquake striking the UK. It was designed to overwhelm the UK’s ability to respond and therefore to activate the European Civil Protection Mechanism and receive assistance from Europe. Hanover Associates (UK) Ltd were asked to assist the UK National Assurance Resilience Team with using WebEOC for both operations during the exercise and by the Orion project team to control the exercise injects as well.

WebEOC is already used by the Communities and Local Government Emergency Room and the National Resilience Assurance Team within the UK to manage the response resources and assets required to respond to local and national incidents. Hanover, who are the UK referrers for WebEOC, were chosen to assist in expanding WebEOC’s current role. Information from the two live exercise sites in Hampshire and Merseyside was fed via WebEOC at ‘Exercise Control’ to the simulated exercises. This required reconfiguring the NRAT system used before the Exercise and retraining personnel. The training that the Hanover administrators received at the WebEOC user conference in Augusta earlier this year proved invaluable to make the necessary changes to the system.

The exercise ran for 3 days at Fort Widley in Hampshire and during that time more than 800 crew and support staff simulated the devastation and chaos resulting should an earthquake strike the UK. In addition a second ‘live’ site was used in Merseyside and data from both sites was used in WebEOC to run tabletop exercises in Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire. Orion was a true multi agency exercise and involved teams from across the UK and Europe, included Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, plus the United Arab Emirates. It was designed to look at how international teams would work together to overcome obvious barriers such as language and different working practices. Overseeing the exercise were assessors from the USA and at least one representative from nearly every European Union nation. The evaluators were also using WebEOC as a reporting tool.

On Thursday 9th September there was a VIP conference attended by 26 different countries and most of the UK Fire and Rescue Services. The WebEOC simulator was used to demonstrate to the delegates how WebEOC had collated and shared information from the many different teams, agencies, sources and locations to give a clear picture of events. Following the conference WebEOC sponsored a dinner hosted by Lord Howie of Troon at the House of Lords.

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