SINGAPORE: The Land Transport Authority (LTA) and
SMRT jointly carried out on Monday a tabletop exercise to examine
the comprehensiveness of the organisations' plans to manage train
service disruptions.
The exercise involved more than 40 officers,
including representatives from the Singapore Civil Defence Force,
Traffic Police, Public Transport Security Command, Singapore Police
Force and SBS Transit.
The exercise analysed issues related to a prolonged
train service disruption.
It assessed the agencies' management of various processes including
the handling of the situation, management of commuters and bus
bridging services, communication to affected commuters and the
public, and the coordination among the relevant agencies.
It also identified certain areas for improvement, such as how
information should be transmitted more quickly, and when various
relevant agencies ought to be activated.
LTA chief executive Chew Hock Yong said the incidents of 15 and 17
Dec 2011 revealed many areas of incident management were not done
to the satisfaction of commuters and needed to be significantly
improved.
He added the exercise was also a useful platform for LTA, SMRT and
the relevant agencies to take a deep and critical look at their
revised plans so that they can fine tune them further.
LTA said its aim is to put in place a set of comprehensive plans so
that it can act swiftly and effectively should a disruption take
place and minimise the discomfort and negative impact on
commuters.
SMRT executive director and interim chief executive officer Tan Ek
Kia said SMRT is committed to making a decisive improvement to its
incident management capabilities for the sake of its
commuters.
Mr Tan added that Monday's multi-party tabletop exercise was useful
as they tested their revised emergency and crisis response plans
and discussed the coordination of response efforts by the various
agencies with a view to further improve them.
The lessons gained from this exercise, he said, would allow SMRT to
further strengthen its processes with the view to minimise
inconvenience to commuters.
More such incident management exercises, including those that
involve full ground deployment, will be conducted in the coming
months.
- CNA/wk
