Featured Demonstrations and Events
Over the past two years, many opportunities to conduct in-person meetings, training, drills, and exercises for radiation emergency preparedness and response were brought to a halt due to the public protection measures necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic disrupted many aspects of responders daily lives, efforts continued to develop new and enhanced tools and resources to support radiation emergency preparedness and response.
Over Spring and Summer of 2022, three workshops and associated drills brought together several initiatives from the ROSS program activities, CBRNResponder (RadResponder) feature/functionality releases, and a novel field team training simulation (RadTeamSim.Route) that have been underway.
Workshop sessions were conducted at the National Radiological Preparedness Conference (NREP), the Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors, Inc. (CRCPD), and The American Academy of Health Physics (AAHP) conference. In each session, a Radiological Dispersal Device (RDD) drill scenario was created for participants to play various emergency response roles. The events enabled demonstration of and practice with the recently released simulation capability in CBRNResponder (RadResponder) as well as opportunities to drive in RadTeamSim.Route with the same associated radiation readings and roads as provided for CBRNResponder.
2022 National Radiological Emergency Preparedness Conference (NREP)
NREP 2022 was the first time that RadTeamSim.Route was showcased to the user community at large. At this conference, nearly 100 attendees participated in a drill. There were physical cars as well as simulated vehicles using RadTeamSim.Route all simultaneously collecting radiation readings to support operational awareness.
2022 Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors (CRCPD)
At the CRCPD annual meeting, RadTeamSim.Route simulation was leveraged to drive on the physical roads necessary to obtain the radiation readings along the transect line of a simulated RDD. Once at each location, the attendee would then use simulation on the CBRNResponder mobile application to collect various survey types.
I/ITSEC 2022
We spent a week showcasing RadTeamSim.Route at I/ITSEC 2022 using a nuclear detonation scenario. Attendees from around the globe were able to try out the simulation and compete for the lowest total dose on the Dangerous Radiation Zone challenge that we conducted throughout the week!