Everyone wants more realistic emergency response training. 

Everyone also knows it’s one of the hardest things to organise regularly. 

When you break it down, the obstacles are practical. 

1. Realistic training demands people you can’t always get 

Full crews, supervisors, control room staff, maintenance, sometimes external responders — they all need to be involved. 

Now add: 

• shift rotations 
• fatigue rules 
• contractor availability 
• business-critical operations 
• unplanned outages 

You can’t hit a schedule that works for everyone consistently. 

So instead of regular practice, teams get occasional events. 

2. The site itself is a limitation 

Realistic training normally needs a real environment: 

• real equipment 
• real layouts 
• real hazards 
• real weather 
• real operational constraints 

But real environments aren’t always available. 

• Airports can’t halt operations just to run a scenario. 
• Industrial sites can’t simulate a leak or fire on live equipment. 
• Fire grounds have capacity and reset limits. 

The more “real” you want training to be, the harder it is to access the place you need. 

3. Cost quietly becomes the decision-maker 

Realistic training is expensive. Not theoretically — practically. 

• overtime and backfilling 
• equipment wear 
• consumables (foam, fuel, props) 
• use of training grounds 
• lost operational capacity 
• transport and coordination across sites 

Budgets don’t stretch to frequent, high-fidelity exercises. 

So frequency drops. Not because it’s unimportant — because it’s unaffordable. 

4. Realism doesn’t scale across sites 

One facility might run a solid drill. 

Another site gets a reduced version. 

A third gets nothing that year. 

Different: 

• instructors 
• layouts 
• standards 
• culture 
• expectations 

The result? 

Preparedness becomes uneven — which is exactly what emergency response cannot afford. 

5. Rare training isn’t enough 

When training is rare: 

• skills decay 
• coordination weakens 
• procedures drift 
• new hires don’t get real repetitions 
• confidence under pressure doesn’t build 

Real emergencies demand instinct. 

Instinct only comes from frequency — not annual events. 

But frequency only comes when training is easy to organise, not a major project. 

The core problem?

Realistic, high-fidelity emergency response training is the gold standard — 

but it’s too slow, too expensive, too operationally disruptive, and too difficult to organise often. 

That’s why organisations end up with rare realism instead of regular readiness.