Ross Woods (Rev. Oct. 07, '10, 18)
These steps covers planning an emergency strategy, leading an emergency team, including deployment of resources at the scene of an emergency. They relate to a single command context, but include some liaison with other agencies. It includes the possibility of a operations centre, but not a crisis management committee, which is the next step up in complexity. (For the purpose of this e-book, "emergency" is the same as "crisis".)
The level and complexity of emergency planning will vary greatly according to the kind of incident and the amount of risk. Even so, the main point is that if you are well-prepared, handling even a fairly major emergency can be fairly simple. If you are poorly prepared, a small emergency will be quite difficult.
Knowing what to do and having practiced it in a simulation will increase the likelihood that people will follow procedures correctly in a real emergency. It will make people less likely to panic.
Crises can sometimes provide enormous opportunity for positive outcomes. You will gain loyalty from a client who sees you handling an emergency so well that the general public does not know that it existed. The public will give your client goodwill if they see you handling an emergency very well.
The most likely emergencies are usually:
Other emergency situations may include:
If you can do a better job of considering possible outcomes and exploring the implications of each, you can make more informed decisions.
Identify hazards and analyze risks, and prioritize hazards so that the response is appropriate to the kind and scale of possible emergencies. It doesn't necessarily matter if risks never materialize for two reasons:
Consider a Scenario Analysis approach. That is, envisage a range of scenarios, evaluate their probability, and evaluate the ramifications of each. Scenario Analysis is a way of exploring what might happen in unpredictable circumstances. It is one of the best approaches for analyzing risks in possible disasters and emergencies, because the findings are necessary even if risks have never materialized, and the plans need to be discovered and thought through before the disaster. The steps in Scenario Analysis are:
Let's presume that you have been nominated to assume the leadership role if an emergency were to occur. Plan a chain of command. Coordination is primarily about being systematic in the way you acquire and apply personnel, equipment and organizational resources so that you are as efficient as possible.
Emergency management descends into chaos and inaction very quickly if all action is based on "discuss and vote." (Not to mention the extra risks of being sued for incompetence or negligence.)
Command must operate vertically within an organization. It is the matter of a superior being authorized to issue orders and expecting subordinates to obey immediately. With limited time, decisions must be fast, and there is insufficient time to inform everyone of all factors affecting decision-making.
Plan a communications system that would work in an emergency. It must be within your organization and should parallel the chain of command. It must also have a way to communicate to other organizations, especially emergency organizations that come to offer help.
It will be your job to manage operational information during any emergency. If you don't do it yourself, give your staff the tasks of collecting and collating operational information, so that you an keep an up-to-date big picture view. Even so, you may still have to make decisions with only partial information. Remember: a delayed decision is also a decision to do nothing, and may be your worst option.
Plan a system of getting regular, timely situation reports and identify who needs what information. Don't give people unnecessary information; it will distract them from what they need to do and could create confusion.
Decide also on what operational records you need to keep at the time.
How will you communicate? Consider these possibilities: face-to-face, mobile phones,two-way radios, internet or intranet links, runners or couriers
Consider the kinds of information you will need to deal with, e.g.
Write a list of people and organizations that you might need to contact in an emergency, e.g.:
Plan what you would put in situation reports and who will get them. Establish a set of templates and have someone check it. (They will be necessary if the emergency is subsequently investigated for any reason.) Reports may be oral or written and may include:
Consider what you can do to contact family members of anyone injured.
The next step is to put a policy in place on how you relate to the press in cases of emergency, for example:
If you might need to operate over a spread-out area or at several related sites, you will need to know how to set up and run an operations center.
It may sound odd, but most decisions might be very easy to make if you have foreseen the situation accurately and made adequate plans.
Your approach will probably follow the following steps, and perhaps in roughly this order. Depending on the situation, you could do the first four steps in as little as thirty seconds, so that you can get straight to helping people in urgent need.
Immediately after the emergency, you will need to consider the effects of post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) on yourself, your team members, rescuees, those who escaped safely, even if they didn't need to be rescued, their family members
It is likely that many will function very well during the emergency, but then "fall in a heap" soon after all danger has passed.
Do a full analysis of the incident.
Almost all organizations will want an accurate detailed written report, written while the details are still very fresh in your mind. These will be important for future risk analysis, insurance reporting, and government reporting (e.g. serious WHS accidents). In more serious cases, they will probably want to debrief you orally in detail and perhpaps form an investigative committee.
If government departments decide to do their own investigations (e.g. police, WorkSafe, emergency services), they will have their own investagators and procedures.