First responders, including local guard force members, medical emergency response team members, and other embassy personnel, attend to injured role-players during the crisis management exercise, Nov. 9, 2022. Photo courtesy of Embassy Kathmandu
By Miti Patel
In November 2022, the U.S. Mission in Nepal, with support from a three-member team from the Crisis Management Team (CMT) at the Foreign Service Institute, held a full-scale crisis management exercise (CME) at post. Ten months in, lessons from this experience have shaped ongoing preparedness efforts and post’s ability to assist and be available as a resource to other missions with similar disaster risks.
Given Kathmandu’s geographic location in a high-seismic activity zone and its experience with a devastating earthquake in 2015, Embassy Kathmandu has always taken disaster risk reduction and preparedness seriously and employs a dedicated office—the Disaster Risk Reduction Office (DRRO)—focused on inter-agency emergency preparedness. The office includes an eligible family member as mission planning coordinator and a locally employed (LE) staff member earthquake preparedness coordinator. DRRO serves as the primary disaster preparedness and response coordinator initiatives internally, incorporating risk awareness and readiness activities across all embassy sections and agencies.
The office operates out of the management section and is responsible for providing relevant training and information to all staff and family members; planning for accountability, including managing a robust post-wide rally house system; and for procuring, storing, and deploying all emergency supplies. Rally houses are places with prepositioned emergency supplies that serve as a rallying point in case of emergency. Currently, there are 50 rally houses for LE staff and 23 for American staff and their families.
For this exercise, Miti Patel, who was the mission planning coordinator, served as the point of contact. Recognizing that a tabletop exercise was not a substitute for physically reacting to disaster challenges and practicing various emergency responses, all operations were suspended for the day, Nov. 9, 2022, to focus on the full-scale CME. More than 700 members of staff participated in an unfolding scenario that lasted all day. The scenario included a fictitious 7.9 magnitude earthquake and corresponding outages in communications, medical emergencies, American citizen assistance requests, and information requests from Washington. Numerous volunteers from the Mission participated as role-players. Post used this exercise as an opportunity to revitalize local contacts in hospitals, police, and fire services; and invited them to respond and participate in the exercise.
Members from 11 other diplomatic missions, including the EU and the U.N., were invited to participate in one of the three Emergency Action Committee meetings during the day. These partners provided valuable insights into their own planning processes and resources and helped frame the sorts of coordination and diplomatic outreach that would be required given Nepal’s sensitive geopolitical location.
Mission Nepal identified 110 after-actions based on the all-day exercise and comprehensive after-action review session led by the CMT. Nine months in, Embassy Kathmandu is well on its way to addressing these after-actions and finding solutions to identified issues.
“The issues identified during the exercise spanned from smaller, specific things—for example, we realized that the fire hydrant connectors on chancery grounds were not a good fit with local fire responder equipment and would need to be adjusted—to larger Mission-wide issues which would need to be reconsidered and fixed institutionally,” said Patel.
Post encountered communication system breakdowns as part of the scenario and realized throughout the day that there were no substitutions besides relying on runners. As a result, the Mission revamped its PACE (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency) plan to include different communication options. Recognizing the difficulty in getting clearance from a single source for the multitude of messaging required during the first 24 hours of a crisis, post drafted a new clearance protocol for emergencies, with shared responsibilities depending on the subject of the messaging. Embassy Kathmandu quickly identified that during emergencies certain teams would be responsible for responding immediately. Post is currently discussing how to empower and reinforce the initial response team. Shift schedules based on successes during the exercise have been identified and included in their emergency planning.
Recently, the U.S. Mission in Turkey consulted Embassy Kathmandu in the days after the catastrophic earthquakes there to provide guidance to their efforts. The embassy was able to rely on its own experience with both, the 2015 earthquake and the recent CME, to provide insight.
“Crisis management training gives us the opportunity to think through our preparedness and responses before the house is on fire and enables us to build muscle memory so our first foray into the problem isn’t in the midst of a crisis,” said U.S. Ambassador to Nepal Dean Thompson. “Tabletop exercises are great, but having a large simulation exercise like we did in Kathmandu forced the entire Mission community to focus. Our CME and preparatory work raised several issues for us to work through and has made us much better prepared for future challenges.”
Miti Patel was the mission planning coordinator at Embassy Kathmandu.