[ADMIN] The TB2K Disaster Drill 2004 - It's coming!

This was pending for MONTHS now, but real life events like the forum software upgrade have put it on hold until now.


On Tuesday, the 31st of August we will be conducting the first TOTAL, ALL-TimeBomb disaster drill. This drill will involve the board, our realtime chat system, and the Emergency Alert System. We will be simulating a few major and minor global news events and at least one surprise disaster that will affect most of the continental United States. None of it will be real, but we will be "seeding" the scenario in advance to make it seem more real for the sake of making the exercise "feel" as real as an exercise can. But, more on that in a moment.

Members that have prepped for a shelter-in-place scenario are invited to "play along" by initiating each their own personal or family disaster response procedures. Since no battleplan survives first contact with the enemy, this is everyone's chance to test their own preps and plans in actual real-world application. It is hoped that this exercise will allow each of us that has preps to see how well we can actually survive on those preps, expose any weaknesses in our gameplans, and give us ideas on how to better handle the next SHTF situation that comes along.

We will be encouraging discussion on everyone's own results as they play along (or don't), and hopefully we all will learn a few things from the drill.


The disaster drill will have a lead-in period of a few days to a week. During that time volunteers will be crafting fictional "news reports" that will set up the scenarios we will be using for the actual drill. These reports will look realistic to varying degrees, and will be marked with a text/graphic-image marker linked to this thread so that folks that were unaware of the drill can figure out what's going on. Additionally, the fictional "news reports" will also be tagged with a small header marker in their titles - "DD-" for Disaster Drill - so that they will be visible on the board's thread lists. This will allow nonparticipants or disinterested members to skip the fictional threads if they like.

The lead-up will culminate in a custom-crafted doomsday chosen especially for TB, with several major events going down just about simultaneously. The EAS alert Dennis mentioned will occur in tandem with the start of the drill, and chat will switch over to "emergency mode" to act as a realtime news source (and there too, we'll be feeding fictional reports in to further the drill's scenarios).

During the drill events will unfold rapidly, with these various scenarios being expanded upon, until the drill ends. The volunteer "news reporters" will be pumping all sorts of really nasty surprises into the mix so we end up with TSHingTF for most of the membership. We'll then reach a predefined stopping point, unwind the scenarios, and complete the drill.

Again, members that are prepped are encouraged to "play along," and we're looking for folks (prepped or not) willing to volunteer to help there too by adding fictional "live reports" from their own home turf to further the scenarios while the lead-in and actual drill are taking place. In other words, everyone can get involved by playing along in some way - posting a "yeah, I saw that happen!" to some fictional event in their home city, testing their preps, even bugging out for a while to test BoBs and bugout plans if circumstances permit.



If you are not interested in participating, don't - the posts relating to the drill will also be marked in their titles so you can skip them if you'd like. Participation is most certainly optional and the rest of TB will be running like it has been, albeit with more urgency than normal.



I know someone will ask this: "But what if a real-world event happens during the drill?"

If this happens, all volunteers will be notified via PMs to suspend their story posting and we'll announce in a huge thread that the drill has been called off due to real happenings in meatworld. The plug can be pulled on this exercise real fast if anything happens for real.



I'm still looking for a few volunteers to help build the "news" - if you have creative-writing skills and can reasonably duplicate the "feel" if a news post, please PM me.

Our current volunteers:

theoutlands
Mark D
WriterMom
piggyandpeewee
SurvivalRing
CanadaSue
DustMusher
RoseTower
Kickapoo Kicker
Suzy
homecanner1
Jumpy Frog
Infoscout
MaureenO
Libertarian
A.T.Hagan
Knell
Charlie
Claudia
NevadaBlue
Pixmo

This list will be updated until it's time to start the process.


Welp, that's all there is to it! I'll post more details later tonight when I get home from work.

oO

Mark D has also volunteered.

Incidentally, for those of you who haven't seen it yet, this will be the appearance of the main forum during an EAS alert or drill:

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/forumdisplay.php?f=107

BRING IT ON!

P.S. This is a great idea!

Excellent idea. Gotta drill all preps.

Considering that many real disasters hereabouts in the PacNW have indeed occurred during disaster prep planning meetings of various sorts, it's good to have the contingency for real emergencies intruding on the drill exercise
Leska

Just had a terrible thought, though!

What if we really get attacked, and no-one realizes it because we are other-wise engaged in testing?

Count me in!

P.S. I think the timing is phenomenal!

housemouse said:

What if we really get attacked, and no-one realizes it because we are other-wise engaged in testing?

Click to expand...

OddOne states in initial post:

"I know someone will ask this: "But what if a real-world event happens during the drill?"

If this happens, all volunteers will be notified via PMs to suspend their story posting and we'll announce in a huge thread that the drill has been called off due to real happenings in meatworld. The plug can be pulled on this exercise real fast if anything happens for real."

I hope to get our best and brightest weavers of nightmarish tales in on this little endeavour. The volunteer list already has some good names on it.

oO

I'm disappointed this will be on a weekday. It will prevent many of us from really participating, probably far more so than if it were on a weekend.

OO refer to the thread in the EAS lounge for a couple more folks volunteering....

C

Could you make the "emergency" up around Canada Sue's area?......

and include Canada in it??? Something like an EMP accidentally exploded over N. Ontario (or Alberta, I'll go along with that ) .....and the effect on all the northern states???

After all, Canada is going to go along with the Missile Shield program......now.

Great idea. Sounds interesting

Count me in, I'd be glad to do some "on the scene reporting" and contrinute to the senario. Lets test the system and ourselves!

suzy

Brooks:

I understand/sympathise. However, SHTF situations don't care if you're at work.



Laurane:

I don't have anything planned for Canada per se, but I'm sure we can come up with something. Still, I can say that it'll suck to be in the U.S. if the planned scenarios ever come to pass.

oO

I just set myself up on chat so I can be ready

I'm in. It is a good idea.

Are we going to do it inthe members only area or out in the open and scare the lurkers?

Libertarian said:

Are we going to do it in the members only area or out in the open and scare the lurkers?

Click to expand...

Everywhere. Across the main, probably a few of the SIGs, in chat, and through EAS.

oO

well hell, seeing as though I'm only a few miles away from a major Army base, I'll volunteer to throw up a few field reports from Ft. Bragg

oookay

Sounds like a plan. I almost think it would of been good to surprise us with the date. Just say within a certain time frame and then see who gets caught off guard with needed preps. That should wake a few more of us up. Maybe another time for that one.

Vicki

Let's hope our news hounds can think of far worse attacks and disasters than the terrorists could dish out! That way we will be ahead of the game....

Well....that is - as long as no one loses their cool ........

Quick thought... Should a pre-announced EAS test be run prior to the drill? I think it could be worthwhile because of the large number of new members who have signed up both on the board and for EAS in the past couple of months. My suggestion is for Friday Aug 20 at around 8:00 pm EDT or Saturday at around noon. This gives a 10 day window so that the test is not confused with the drill, and those who have trouble with receiving the test message have time to fix things.

A limited EAS alert will be sent out prior, in order to test the mailers. This test will probably only be sent to the EAS stafers.

How do I register? I tried the link above, but I don't have the pass codes just the tb2k? Help me, I don't want to perish in this fun-filled, make-believe drama.

Alert registration Problem solved

I have been trying to register for months ,and have been denide..
But came up with solution for those haveing same problem.
AOL explorer seems to be the problem .So I used Microsoft Internet exploder .
And it worked I am now registered ..
I noticed there are others with same problem ..I bet there useing AOL exploder
Administration mite want to get this info to those with problem
I wasn't sure if I should have started a thread for this info ????

......scrapman

Thank you Scrapman-
I was having the same trouble
just registered with NO problems
KM

OddOne said:

Brooks:

I understand/sympathise. However, SHTF situations don't care if you're at work.

Click to expand...

But it DOES affect whether we can participate WHICH I THOUGHT WAS THE POINT!

Brooks:

It comes down to how *you* define "participate"...

Is "participation" creating and adding posts on the scenario threads???

Is "participation" putting your Bugout Plan into action???

Is "participation" putting your Shelter-In-Place plan into action???

Is "participation" going over and over in your mind what you would REALLY be doing if the scenario was REALLY happening, taking into consideration what other people would also really be doing, traffic problems, panic problems, restriction of movement because of the situation, immediate safety, separated family members, etc???

The answer is...

Any or all of the above...

Depending on your situation at that moment in time...

And like oO said, the next real crisis is not necessarily going to be scheduled for our convenience. Think 9/11 on a Tuesday at 9:00am. Most of us will most likely be in less than optimal situations when TSHTF, especially if it is sudden and relatively without warning.

Follow what you can, participate however you choose based on your situation at the time. It is very likely that many will not be able to do any more than "go over in their mind what they would really be doing" under those circumstances.

Kris

Kris Gandillon said:

The answer is...

Any or all of the above...

Click to expand...

No, the answer is closer to NONE of the above.

The answer MIGHT be because that is the only schedule those who have to put the most effort into to have available. If anyone has said that, I missed it and I apologize, carry on.

However, I doubt I'm the only one in this situation. It is probably a majority. I thought this was supposed to be for the benefit of the membership. It is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT that the real deal may be at an inconvenient time.

Really, Kris, this is sounding like goobermint planning.

Actually that date is good for those on a low end budget as it is just before payday for many. We have the test and see where we fall short in preps and are able to go do my DWs favorite prep thing....Shopping.

Jumpy (who thought he was prepped until he got married and had two kids).

Actually, Brooks...

The planned timing is totally inconvenient for me...as far as I know THAT consideration didn't even enter into the "planning".

And while the intention is that we are suggesting the membership be as involved as best they can/want to be, (my 4 types of "participation" above) a significant portion of the test is to also simply stress test the bulk mailer and the forum configuration itself as people login to respond to see if we can handle the resulting load.

There is always that underlying concern of "at what level of traffic does the forum grind to a halt" or start getting the infamous "Server Busy" errors??? We suffered through that on 9/11 and have since upgraded the hardware and software a couple of times...but we have no idea at what level of "reading and posting" this current configuration reaches "saturation" and grinds to a halt.

Kris

Thanks, Kris, that's an excellent reason to test. (You know how crabby I get when I haven't had my TB fix.)

Brooks, the actual point of the exercise is to:

1) Flex the forum under load

2) Flex that chatroom under load

3) Determine if the EAS notification system is able to function adequately

4) correct any issues that arise from 1, 2 & 3 above.

What each one of US does (in terms of personal action), is up to us as individuals. OUR goal is to make certain the system works on THIS END.

As to the date - we wanted to have this drill in May, but the server upgrades (gag!) made that impossible. Now the goal is to get the drill completed prior to the Labor Day weekend.

Thanks, Dennis.

Ohhhhh...I like it, I like it!!!!....I just hope we don't get the REAL DEAL during the test. Ya know,the ole "flirting with disaster thingy." This should be VERY INTERESTING!

And like the Seven Blind Men and an Elephant...

We all have a slightly different perspective on this "drill".

oO is all over the development of the scenario itself, and the ability of people to actively "participate" as I described above...

Dennis is all over stressing the "systems" to see what breaks...

The EAS team is just here in the middle...trying to facilitate it all...



Kris

Kris, that's why staff is a "team". Different folks have different jobs and goals for something, all working together to accomplish the whole in an efficient manner.

Werks fer me man....

Thanks

Thank you Dennis and all the volunteers. This is a great idea. I know that there are things that I have forgotten in my preps and this will help me discover what those might be. I appreciate everybody here that works so hard to help us make sure that we are ready.

I am gonna re-register for EAS just in case it is wrong. this is very much needed.