Vermont Resilience Serious Game Simulation

A "Vermont Resilience Serious Game Simulation," has been proposed and will be discussed in tomorrow's 6/21 NSSI preparatory meeting for the NDU symposium.  In the "Vermont Resilience" simulation, it is proposed that the serious game look at what communities can do to prepare for and respond to a rapid price spike in fuel prices ($5.19/gallon of gas for transportation fuel and $144/barrel for heating oil).  The concern is that this kind of change, even if only lasting a few months in the winter, could have significant impacts on the social ecology in the northern U.S.

There are ways for communities to organize themselves to be resilient under these circumstances.  For example, school gymnasiums and churches could remain open and heated 24 hours a day for that are at risk for hypothermia.  That said, there are no strong rapidly generalizable and replicable models for rapid resilient actions under this kind of event.  There is no agency efforts that I know of currently that would address this type of relatively likely scenario that could significantly affect the health and human security of tens of millions of Americans.  Although this serious game scenario was proposed before the collapse of governments in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, and the war in Libya, further expansion of the  "Arab Spring" combined with Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela pushing for reduced oil production to raise prices makes this scenario even more likely.

The northern state governors and emergency managers will certainly want to have effective models for resilient actions in hand for these types of scenarios.  FEMA and DOE would probably be the best federal institutions for organizing and funding the preparedness actions that might extend from this type of exercise and resilience model building.