During this 2023 edition of the gear.UP event an 8-day field exercise was held designed to further advance the emergency response capabilities of the participants in a fictional scenario:

“Lives and livelihoods are on the line in Tukastan. An intense 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck the central region of Ugrigk on 15 September—resulting in the loss of approximately 2,000 lives, 80,000 injured and massive damage to the infrastructure in a radius of 50km from the epicentre. Massive aftershocks keep causing more destruction of the infrastructure and hamper search and rescue missions— to date.”
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The location of the exercise is the THW Training Centre, Neuhausen in Germany with 45 people participating. It is a large-scale inter-agency operational exercise and functional training event that provides personnel from participating organizations of each cluster with opportunities to practice and train on various emergency response functions, and to support each other as they would in a real emergency. The exercise is prepared by the World Food Programme (WFP), as the global lead of the ETC and Logistics Cluster, and is hosted by Technisches Hilfswerk (THW) with support from Ericsson Response, German Federal Foreign Office, and the Government of Luxembourg, Ministry for Development Cooperation & Humanitarian Affairs.

The exercise aims to train partner agencies and organizations to collaborate and overcome challenges together, forming a trusted network of emergency responders in a demanding scenario that reflects the intensity of global emergency environments. The participants are expected to work in teams alongside Logistics colleagues to deploy the technical solutions to provided problems, including satellite connectivity, common networking services, and security telecoms under challenging conditions and timeframes. The exercise environment is field accommodation with simulated field conditions.