Joint News Release Date of Issue: 27 February 2012 LTA - SMRT Tabletop Exercise to Improve Emergency and Crisis Management Procedures

1 This afternoon, the Land Transport Authority and SMRT jointly carried out a tabletop exercise to examine the comprehensiveness of LTA's and SMRT's plans to manage train service disruptions. Chaired by Mr Chew Hock Yong, LTA's Chief Executive and Mr Tan Ek Kia, SMRT's Executive Director and interim Chief Executive Officer, 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.
2 The exercise analysed issues related to a prolonged train service disruption. It examined the agencies' management of various processes including the handling of the situation; management of commuters and bus bridging services; communications to affected commuters and the public; and the coordination between 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.
3 Mr Chew Hock Yong, LTA's Chief Executive, said: "The incidents of 15 and
17 Dec 2012 revealed that many areas of incident management were not done to the satisfaction of commuters and needed to be significantly improved. As a follow-up to this, LTA has been working with SMRT to improve its rail incident management plan since then. As part of this work, we had just last week facilitated an agreement
2
between SMRT and SBS to let commuters affected by train disruptions, travel on each other's buses for free. Today's exercise was another important step in this process as it brought everything together in a challenging exercise setting and allowed both agencies to step through the improved plan in detail together. The exercise was also a useful platform for LTA, SMRT and the relevant agencies to take a deep and critical look at our revised plans, so that we can fine tune them further. Our aim is to put in place a set of comprehensive plans, so that we can act swiftly and effectively should a disruption take place and minimise the discomfort and negative impact on commuters."
4 SMRT's Executive Director and interim CEO Mr Tan Ek Kia said: "SMRT is committed to making a decisive improvement to our incident management capabilities for the sake of our commuters. Today's multiparty tabletop exercise was useful as we tested our 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 will allow us to further strengthen our processes with the view to minimising inconvenience to commuters."
5 More such incident management exercises, including those that involve full ground deployment, will be conducted in the coming months.