Core Impacts of Calamityville™

The Research and Commercialization Impact

Under the guidance of the Calamityville™ Fusion Center, Calamityville™ becomes a shared laboratory for scholars dedicated to investigating questions and issues surrounding medical and civil readiness, while formulating and validating important solutions and discoveries in answer to those difficult questions. Calamityville™ features provide realistic disaster environments, consistent opportunity to observe and measure the activities of actual response personnel conducting actual patient care and other response activities in controlled, yet realistic, settings. This research model will be the basis by which society discovers the best practices and tools by which to ready themselves for community catastrophe.

• Tactical Laboratory – serving as a site for advanced studies in human effectiveness and complex decision making. Prop areas will have sufficient fidelity to support a wide array of research activities, and a steady flow of students with which to observe behaviors. As an outdoor platform, the Tactical Lab will host all four seasons, but will not be able to be controlled. Activities at the Tactical Lab are augmented by other sophisticated environments such as Owens Community College and its School of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. Prop features also allow for usage and investigation of sensors technologies as they relate to the post-disaster environments.
• Virtual Laboratory – providing a site for long-term ongoing studies in human decision making, best practices in logistics and supply chain management, and advances in the complexities of exercise design, planning, and implementation. The Virtual Lab also provides a platform by which logistics tracking technologies can tested on a global scale, but within the secure confines of the lab.
• Austere Environments Laboratory – provides additional capacity to integrate environmental impacts and to consider the complex problem sets associated with environmental toxicology.

The Training Impact

While applying the highest known levels of training methodology, training environments, training curricula, and training approaches, Calamityville brings a student along side of a rare and unique glimpse into a validated and important training regimen. Likewise, training is the tool by which the research engine is fueled by providing a stream of research topics and observable behaviors. This training model will be the practice which will become the standard by which society measures adequate training of its responders and receivers.

• Tactical Laboratory – leads the training experiences and delivers nationally recognized curriculum with an enhanced deliver methodology, bringing even currently purveyed material to entirely new level of effectiveness. The addition of simulation features allows students to have a much more robust experience which will further prepare them for actual emergent conditions even at the “tactical” level.
• Virtual Laboratory – serves as a unique opportunity for students to directly experience the immediate effects of research upon educational programs. By enhancing the students’ anticipation of their actual physical presence at a Calamityville facility, the student’s experience at any of the labs will be greatly enhanced. The addition of podcasted material from important figures of readiness, or other interesting historical perspectives assists the student’s understanding with the significance of the training experience which they will be embarking on. Interesting, interactive, web-based training opportunities, likewise offers first time exposure, as well as follow-on, advanced level or case study coursework.
• Austere Environments Laboratory – Similar to the Live Laboratory, the experience of training in the Austere Environments Lab provides civilian responders and receivers a glimpse of the edge. This global network of wilderness environments challenges medical providers with rugged conditions by which they can learn, test and hone critical life-saving skill sets.

The Exercise Impact

Utilizing not only advanced simulation systems and interesting, cutting edge technologies, but also equally unique and proven advanced exercise design and execution concepts; the exercise is the experience by which a user finds him/herself in a completely controlled event where mistakes can be made safely, and where users receive as near to equivalent of actual events as humanly possible. The exercise experience will define the norm for how a society better understands and orients itself to disaster environments, and for how it will interact with its community components in actual conditions.

• Tactical Laboratory – serves as the place where many experiences are developed, often reminiscent of events more commonly experienced such as hospital fires and shorter term evacuations.
• Virtual Laboratory – will allow students to participate in intense interactive virtual experiences and introduce regional, national, and international disaster gaming. This will allow simulation of catastrophic world type events.
• Live Laboratory – able to support lengthy operations of multiple days duration, leading to an intense multi-day experience.
• Austere Environments Laboratory – will test providers’ abilities in mobilization under the harshest conditions.

The Educational Impact

By taking advantage of the unique facility features and approaches of the Calamityville, and being co-located with the scholars of the Calamityville Fusion Center, Calamityville is an ideal location for university-level undergraduate and graduate classes and course experiences to be held. Here, science and applied science merges. The products of these applications can be infused directly into the academic main stream, and thus institutionalized with a shorter time frame, bringing added value to the benefits of higher learning. This educational model will become the standard for society to measure its educational value, and by which it will expect societal change to be matured and implemented. This effort also places academia in a critical position to effect positive change and, and to be a catalyst for institutionalizing validated solutions.

• Tactical Laboratory – An academic “playground” where many varied university courses can conduct experimentation, or even participate in selected training and research opportunities in support of their course curriculum. Here, also, all Wright State University students, staff, and faculty (and other partner institutions), must receive baseline disaster training, further enhancing the societal marketability of graduates of higher learning.
• Virtual Laboratory – This is an excellent method by which mainstream, university academic programs can interact with “the edge”. Any academic specialty would have purpose to access the Virtual Lab as part of their course expectations, immersing a greater segment of the population in emergency readiness.
• Austere Environments Laboratory – Like the other facilities, the interesting network of austere labs, allows a myriad of educational opportunities, including the support of public health and various disciplines of environmental and occupational health.

Experience Multipliers:

Concurrency

In unique and exiting ways, society and its communities (elected officials, first responders, first providers, medical, public works, non-governmental organizations) are brought together into a common set of experiences, both in terms of physical presence and shared spaces and work environments, but also in terms of societal merger of private sectors, public sector, educational sector, and military sectors. This concurrency multiplier will revolutionize how communities ready themselves for disasters by creating an environment where all sectors share, in a meaningful way, the planning and readiness table.

Innovative Vision

The Calamityville™ movement seeks not to shift paradigms, but to re-create the paradigm on how disaster readiness is shaped. All assumptions are challenged here, and everything from building materials, to classroom design, to furniture selection, to curriculum is meant to fulfill the vision, not to perpetuate conventional thought.

Relevancy

All programs and experiences at Calamityville™ are validated by case study and scholarly approach. Eyewitnesses are consulted, actual disaster decision makers are sought out who will define and validate actual conditions and what is important for users to experience.

Advanced Safety Systems

Users of all Calamityville™ facilities will be able to participate in the highest level of experiences with little to no limitations based on safety. Thus, safety systems will receive the same amount of innovative thought and attention as the primary features. Likewise, on site measures are taken whereby users feel comfortable with the simulations because they know that site safety considerations receive the utmost levels of attention and technologies. Site safety officers are assigned and briefed, all instructors have the necessary safety equipment and technologies, such that if an incident does occur, there is little delay in bringing to bear the utmost level of care and evacuation possible. Safety is also an important component of pre-arrival requirements and is where the Virtual Laboratory plays a very critical part of heightening the entire Calamityville™ experience. Safety maneuvers can actually be “gamed” on Virtual Calamityville™, so that students have actually experienced the safety features of the facility prior to even arriving on site.

Maximum Simulation Fidelity

Most medical providers, and responders of all types, experience actual conditions the first time they are thrust into a disaster situation. Training is generally limited to primitive recreations which seldom meet the level of intensity or complexity for the very techniques for which they are training. Thousands of responders are thus certified every year to conduct techniques that they have never actually performed, even in simulated conditions. Calamityville™ seeks to overcome this challenge by using simulations which provide the actual experience. Likewise, having experienced actual conditions, students leave in a much better position to make wise decisions related to time and resources because less is left to conjecture. Virtual modeling and simulation technologies need to be cutting edge, and users of Calamityville need to leave the experience having realized that short of an actual disaster, they have, indeed been exposed to the conditions they should expect.

Predictive and Analytical Approach

The Calamityville™ experience is also multiplied by approaching all activities from the perspective of the future. Analyzing current conditions and indicators, allows the user to be prepared to predict not only how a particular incident will behave, but also to be able to analyze data in order to predict future incident behavior and therefore resource and command and control requirements.

For more information, contact:
Bill Harchick, EMT-B, CPM
Assistant Director, Operations
The HELP Center™
3139 Research Blvd., Suite 205
Kettering, OH 45420
(937) 775-1320
Fax: (937) 775-1329
william.harchick@wright.edu