State Exercise Program

Exercises play a vital role in national preparedness by enabling whole community stakeholders to test and validate plans and capabilities, and identify both capability gaps and areas for improvement. A well-designed exercise provides a low-risk environment to test capabilities, familiarize personnel with roles and responsibilities, and foster meaningful interaction and communication across organizations. Exercises bring together and strengthen the whole community in its efforts to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to and recover from all hazards. Overall, exercises are cost-effective and useful tools that help the nation practice and refine our collective capacity to achieve the core capabilities in the National Preparedness Goal.

HSEEP Program Image

The exercise program in Oregon follows the federal Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) model and is intended to provide a solid base for state, local, and tribal partners to evaluate their policies, plans, and procedures, as well as meet the requirements of the Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) and the Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP).

Your Exercise Program should be tightly linked to your Training Program. For information about training, please see our State Training Program.

Information on HSEEP, including current templates can be found on FEMA Prep Toolkit Website: https://preptoolkit.fema.gov/web/hseep-resources

For a list of related State Exercise Program forms and templates, click here.

Exercise reporting requirements for the State of Oregon are specified in the following documents.

Emergency Management Exercise and Actual Occurrence Report (EMER) Virtual Form. This form is offered as an alternative to the word document format. Follow this link to access a Microsoft Forms survey that mirrors the traditional form. Be advised that there is not an option to pause the completion of this form. An incorrectly completed or an incomplete form will require the submitter to resubmit the form in its entirety.

Click here to view the virtual version of the EMER form.

Click here to view the MS Word version of the EMER form.

EMER Guidance Document. This guidance document is for state, county, local and tribal emergency management practitioners who have either developed and conducted exercises or are leveraging applicable real-world events or actual occurrences for Oregon exercise requirements per federal grant funding and state statutes. Both Actual Occurrences and exercises can be reported using the EMER form

Exercises conducted to fulfill HSGP requirements require a full After-Action Report and Improvement Plan (AAR/IP). See our 2020 Oregon Wildfires & Straight-Line Winds State Recovery Function AAR for an example.

Click here to view the EMER Guidance Document

The Emergency Management Institute (EMI) conducts a monthly series of Virtual Table Top Exercises (VTTX) using a video teleconference platform to reach community based training audiences around the country and provide a virtual forum for disaster training. The VTTX process involves key personnel from the emergency management community of practice reviewing a pre-packaged set of exercise materials then convening for a four hour table top exercise discussing a simulated disaster scenario. The event allows the connected sites to assess current plans, policies and procedures while learning from the other connected sites as they provide their perspective and practices facing a similar situation. A standard VTC system is required for participation.

See EMI's VTTX Webpage here for more information: https://training.fema.gov/programs/emivttx.aspx

The National Exercise Program (NEP) serves as the principal mechanism for examining the preparedness and readiness of the United States across the entire homeland security and management enterprise. The purpose of the NEP is to design, coordinate, conduct, and evaluate exercises that rigorously test the Nation’s ability to perform missions and functions that prevent, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate all hazards. As a component of the National Preparedness System, the NEP provides a consistent method to examine and validate federal and whole community partner core capabilities, which in turn indicate the Nation’s progress in reaching the National Preparedness Goal (Goal).

Each Program cycle consists of a two-year, progressive schedule of exercises that are selected based on their support to the Goal, and the Program’s Principals’ Objectives. The types of exercises selected into the program may include facilitated policy discussions, seminars and workshops, tabletop exercises, modeling and simulation, drills, functional exercises, and full-scale exercises. All of which may be sponsored by organizations from any level of government, non-governmental and private sector, and the whole community.

The National Exercise Program also provides contractor support, free of charge, to assist in development, conduct, and documentation your exercise. It does not provide additional funding to cover other exercise expenses.

For more information on National Exercise Program, click here.