The Road Warrior
By Allen Baldwin

Tabletop Training Is Realistic And Safe
For years, emergency services have used tabletop exercises to train officers, review incidents and preplan responses. These tabletops can be just as effective a training tool for rescue, ARFF and EMS operations as well as the normal suppression activities.

There are numerous benefits to this type of training which includes responders learning from their peers, making the training a fun and enjoyable process and allowing us to make mistakes without having to pay the price. Tabletops really let responders engage and use all of their senses.

Commercial Or Homemade
There are some very good articles at the ICS Toolbox Web site, www.ics-toolbox.com, on using tabletops as an instructional technique and their advantages. Tabletops can be very elaborate set-ups using large layouts with buildings and streets, and some built by instructors have even had working railroads, burning buildings and communication systems.

Tabletops are available commercially, and homemade ones work well too, using kids toys or, if you’re careful, even grown up collectibles that inevitably accumulate in the chief’s office.

Unfortunately, tabletops have not been used as much as they could or should be. Personally, I try to build tabletops into a lot of my classes, including hazmat and highway safety. I have found this tool to be especially useful for command classes, EMS command and even rural water supply classes.

One manufacturer that really stands out in this field is ICS Toolbox, which has an excellent product for the ready-made crowd. Its tabletop units are plastic laminated sheets, which can be as large as four feet by eight feet or cut into smaller sizes. The company offers standard generic boards detailing urban, rural, interstate and mid-size airport scenes. It can also produce custom boards featuring your community. It also offers complete kits with vehicles and other accessories.

ICS Toolbox Sets
The ICS Toolbox sets are a 1/87th scale, which is the size of HO trains. This size is a good one as there are a lot of model vehicles available in this size along with a wide variety of buildings and accessories. The scale also accommodates a lot in a small area.

Another nice feature of this product is the ability to draw on it with write-on, wipe-off markers. You can add buildings to the flat mats to give some depth and simulate your area or supply the manufacturer with aerial photos of your community along with street names and other details to have them placed on the mats.

This product offers an attractive durable and professional tabletop mat/board. ICS Toolbox can be reached at its Web site or by calling 757-302–0399.

Some of you may not be able to afford a comercial system, no matter how reasonable the cost. There are several ways to overcome the price obstacle.

First of all, let’s talk scale/size of vehicles. I have worked with several different sizes such as Corgi or Code 3 truck sizes, which are close to S gauge and O gauge model trains.

While the plus sizes are good and offer a lot of detail, they are very expensive and, more importantly, the larger the scale the more mat area needed, which may limit how much of the scenario can be shown. Also there are more types of vehicles and accessories for the HO scale than for any other.

Making tabletop mats can start with the basics, a roll of shipping, shelf or deli paper or a white plastic or paper tablecloth and some markers. Lay out the streets and area that you want to use, and develop the scenario from there. It is very basic and somewhat crude, but it works.

A neat idea that I have seen is to use a role of green felt material as a base and then take precut sections of gray or black felt fabric as the roadways. Additional pieces for this setup included static water sources and buildings. The fabric can be painted to add additional details.

I like this setup as it is very portable – you just need to fold or roll it up for storage and transport, and you can tailor it to your specific needs. Best of all is that it is very inexpensive and easy to build.

Another variation I have found to be quite effective is to hook up with someone in your GIS department or someone who has a large plotter that can print GIS maps or aerial maps such as Google Earth of your area. You can have it done in 1/87th scale. You could also just have that person make up some stock street layouts and save the files for later use.

What is nice about using the paper rolls or the printed out paper mats is you can write on them and customize them to fit your needs without worrying about damaging them, and at the end of the day just toss them out.

Let’s talk about vehicles. There’s a whole host of HO scale vehicles available to choose from. Check your local hobby shop or you can go on-line to one of the world’s largest model railroad suppliers for your vehicles and other accessories – Wm. K. Walthers Inc. (www.walthers.com).

If this route is outside your budget then go to the local Target, Wal-Mart or drug store and pick up some Matchbox and Hot Wheels vehicles. These kinds of die cast toys are not as detailed as the model vehicles, which are mostly plastic, but I have found that they hold up better and are close enough to the 1/87th scale to work. The best part is you can buy them new for less than a dollar, if you shop around at flea markets, garage sales and at train shows you can find used ones at a good price.

Whatever vehicles you buy, get some kind of container in which they can be stored, organized and protected.

You will also need masking tape to secure the mats to the table, various markers, some small stick-on dots and labels to number the vehicles.

If you are using one of the commercial boards, make sure you use write-on/wipe-off markers as you don’t want to ruin it. Another thing you can do to enhance this experience is to use some department radios and set up a communications system. Perhaps you can buy some General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) units to use for the exercise only.

Some other things to do are make up some wild cards that the instructor can put into play that will alter the incident at a moments notice or add patients for triaging by just color-coding index cards or plastic chips to match the four triage tag colors and let your crews work the triage by the colors present.

Have your incident commander practice using a command work sheet and command board. Think about accountability and setting up the various groups and divisions for an incident.

For hazmat incidents, make sure you have folks doing the R&I (Recognition and Interpretation) research and provide supporting paper work, such as bills of lading and Material Safety Data Sheets.

In The Sandbox
Think about using these exercises in conjunction with your emergency operations center (EOC). Simulate this by placing them in another room or even off-site. I have been involved in tabletops where the exercise was videoed live and sent to a simulated EOC so they could receive real time data from the scene.

This all boils down to role playing and going back to the days of being in the sand box or playing with Matchbox city. Be honest, how many of us still have a few toy vehicles lying around or have picked up one of our kids’ vehicles and thought about the old days.

Heck, if the kids are grown, some of the vehicles might still be around and could be used for this. I know my son had more fire trucks and emergency vehicles in his collection than anything else. I think it’s that recessive gene thing.

So, dust them off or get some new ones. Set up a training exercise using a tabletop to help expand the learning environment and, who knows, you might just have some fun and get the team to learn something in the process.

As always stay safe and return to quarters.

Editor’s Note: Allen Baldwin is the manager of operations and incident response for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission and a volunteer assistant chief with the Gettysburg (Pa.) Fire Department. He has been a firefighter and EMT for over 25 years, served as chief of the Chambersburg (Pa.) Fire Department and is an instructor with the Pennsylvania State Fire Academy and several community colleges.