Let me get back on the original article. Personally I find that such scenarios used on table top exercise to be counter productive or atleast not the best way to train people.

- Many just don't take such huge scenarios as serious anymore, because it's over the top, doesn't feel realistic or 'won't matter if that much happens'.
- Since massive scenario's can't be solved nicely, it always means it's never finished nicely, leaving the students with a bad after taste, which reduces the effectiveness how they can reflect and learn from a exercise.
- Small numbers (victims, resources, etc) are tanglable, massive numbers are just statistics and seem to matter less.
- Crisis management is about proper information gathering, communication, resouce management and dicision making. The goal of exercise should be to training peopls skills and identify where skills and procedures lack, so they can improve them. Having huge scenario's means you can't really focus on these things.

However my experience comes from training people up to a multiregional level, not as big as those Maximums of Maximums training incidents.