Emergency Management
Emergency Management
Emergency management is mandated to many government, utilitity and transportation entities, and uses an external lens to identify hazards and risks, the anticipated impacts, vulnerabilities and exposures. From this, organizations then prevent and mitigate what they can, and prepare and plan to respond and recover from the remaining risks. Emergency Management operates within an incident management system, and often must deliver services considered vital to the public, i.e., fire services, healthcare, water services, etc. Deliverables include conducting a hazard risk assessment, departmental priorities, response plans and tools.
Prevention and Mitigation
Preventing or at least reducing the impact of impacts, interruptions and emergencies are key goals for emergency management and business continuity. Prevention and mitigation helps to protect critical functions and activities while reducing the financial costs of response and recovery. An example is a portable satellite phone, that mitigates the potential of officials being unable to connect with outside resources to coordinate response efforts.
Preparedness
Preparedness is achieved through planning activities (establishing plans, procedures, checklists and forms), resource management (ensuring the tools/people/spaces needed to do the tasks), specific training (awareness to complex), and exercises that test assumptions, arrangements, plans and procedures. These efforts support response and recovery activities, contribute to reducing the anticipated impacts, and identify opportunities to further prevent and mitigate identified risks.
Response
All organizations respond to interruptions, be it when staff call in sick, during power outages, or reacting to an unanticipated interruption, i.e., building fire, severe storm. Organizations adopt an incident management system (IMS) to structure response priorities and establish recovery strategies. Operational protocols include situational awareness, communications, authority and response priorities to ensure the safety and security of staff and organizations, while efficiently and effectively coordinating available resources. Such coordination is critical during complex incidents that span jurisdictions, disciplines and organizations.
Recovery
Recovery activities are often built into operational protocols for known and anticipated interruptions. However, for larger and more complex incidents, moving from response to sustained response, while implementing short and long-term recovery strategies can be complex, time-consuming, and costly. Organizational recovery plans identify authority, priorities, goals, legislative and regulatory requirements, and strategies to address known tasks and challenges, i.e., guidelines to capture the financial costs of response and recovery.