Good Day Everyone,

I am a firm believer in table top scenarios! They are great tools to train our firefighter and fire officers. Cost effective training; it is easy to run a multi station, multi agency incident on a table top rather than a full scale exercise. Easy to set up, easy to tear down, easy to make another scenario! …How easy is it for you to pull 5 engines, 5 tankers, 4 ambulances, and 5 police cars out of service to do a training exercise as well find some business owners who are willing to participate on top of bringing in firefighters and other emergency services staff… This would take a lot of man hours to develop a scenario and is likely logistically impossible.

Don’t get me wrong full scale exercises have their place. They are effective however like I said costly and logistically straining. Many great lessons are learned from both large scale and small scale. Lots of critical thinking on strategy and tactics! This is what I enjoy, watching the reactions and stresses of those commanding the table tops, seeing what decisions they make! Then breaking down the who what why where and how they came to making that choice and then providing useful response and additional ideas.

Table tops are used to generate that critical thinking within a controlled environment. Being able to analysis options to strategies and tactics is the key. Commanders can also evaluate operations and safety concerns, as well response issues. Proper radio communication can also be hammered out!! The options are almost endless.

I hope you enjoyed the images of some of our latest table tops.  What I am looking for are futher ideas to table tops, how can we make them better more effective???  What props are you using?  What can we add to our sets? Who are suppiliers of props? Anything, lets get the discussion rolling!