A hostage scenario played out across three Auckland campuses is the stuff of nightmares but provided a great opportunity for AUT University to put its Gold (Executive), Silver (Operational Management) and Bronze (Site Incident Response) teams through their paces recently.
Liz Gosling, Director ICT Services and Director of Operations for AUT’s Silver team says AUT has worked with Kestrel over the past four years to improve its emergency management capability.
“As well as helping us with our emergency plans and providing advice they have also run two previous emergency exercises with us. These exercises were desk based and had primarily involved our Silver (operational management) and Bronze (on-the-ground security) teams.”
“While they were great and provided us with realistic scenarios and valuable learnings I decided we really needed to turn up the heat a bit this year.”
Liz says AUT specifically wanted to activate its Gold team comprised of the Vice-Chancellor and his direct reports. To do this the scenario had to be a very serious one with a threat to life.
In addition it was identified that if there was a weak link, in terms of emergency preparedness, it would be at the Manukau campus – the University’s smallest and newest campus.
Enter Kestrel Group with Exercise Kea. A real life scenario that saw Ted forming a delusional relationship with a student, searching for her at the North Shore and City campuses, before finding her at the Manukau campus where he stabs a tutor and takes hostages. The Police then got involved negotiating the hostage release.
The exercise covered all three campuses, with the Bronze team activating first. “The scenario gave our security people at all campuses a good opportunity to practice their emergency procedures and to see how well their CCTV footage worked, whether it was good enough for Police to be able to use and identify the suspect – it was.”
As the situation played out the Silver and then the Gold teams were also activated, says Liz.
“We learnt a great deal from the exercise about our processes and plans, how people react in this type of a situation and where the gaps were in our emergency planning.”
“Although we have had previous exercises and the Silver team and Bronze teams have had to activate about four times to handle actual situations, the Gold team had never taken part in an exercise or been activated for real.”
Liz says Exercise Kea provided a chance for the Gold team to understand its roles and responsibilities and identified the need for better guidelines.
“It also became clear to us that we need to co-locate the Gold and Silver teams to improve communication.”
Liz says there were some very practical learnings like needing to have more security sent to a site once a situation is identified and the need to have a media liaison person actually on-site as well.
It was also an opportunity to identify the things that worked really well like the CCTV footage and HR procedures for identifying which staff were on site, she says.
AUT is now looking at implementing a series of recommendations that came out of the exercise and will be looking to employ Kestrel again to run the next exercise.
“We really enjoy working with Kestrel, the team are very practical and pragmatic. They don’t just know the theory but they understand the challenges that exist within real organisations – they are very flexible in their approach with different suggestions.”
“Kestrel have helped us to develop our own emergency management plans that work in our own environment with the personnel who use them,” says Liz.
“Next time we get Kestrel in I want to turn up the heat even further. I’ll be looking at mixing things up a bit. After all, emergencies are not renowned for happening at a convenient time!”