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The Disciplines of Emergency Management: Preparedness
This module focuses on the actions that are taken by governments, nongovernmental
organizations, communities, families, and individuals, that help to prepare them for the
actions required of them during an actual disaster response.
Preparedness, within the field of emergency management, can be defined as a state of
readiness to respond to a disaster, crisis or any other type of emergency situation.
Preparedness is a theme that permeates all facets of the emergency management field,
and most aspects of the emergency management profession.
Since the building of fallout shelters and the posting of air raid wardens in the 1950s,
preparedness has advanced significantly and its role as a building block of emergency
management continues. No emergency management organization can function without
a strong preparedness capability. This capability is built through planning, training and
exercising. Today we recognize that all organizations, whether they are private,
nongovernmental, or governmental, are susceptible to the consequences disasters and
must therefore ensure their preparedness. We also know that preparedness must focus
not only on the protection of citizens, property and essential government services in the
aftermath of a disaster event, but also on ensuring that the viability of the community –
including its businesses and markets, its social services, and its character, are able
sustainable despite the hazard risks that exist. Emergency management agencies
alone cannot ensure this, which is why the practice continues to expand.
As an academic field and an applied practice, emergency management is young. The
fields upon which it draws are steeped in tradition—relying less on academic or analytic
processes. Without a foundation tying academia and structured analytic methodologies
with tradition, the extreme complexity of emergency management will not be effectively
managed. A systematic approach is necessary for emergency management. The
FEMA National Preparedness (NP) Division has depicted the planning process,
beginning with planning for the range of hazards that exist and working in a cyclical
manner to establish and improve preparedness. This cycle recognizes the importance
of the four major components of any preparedness effort, namely planning, equipment,
training, and exercise, and stresses the importance of evaluation and improvement.
This cycle also represents preparedness not only for government jurisdictions at all
levels, but also preparedness actions taken by individuals, businesses,
nongovernmental organizations, and other entities.
Mitigation versus Preparedness
Significant confusion exists regarding what constitutes mitigation and preparedness
(and how much crossover exists.) At the Federal level, mitigation and preparedness are
highly defined, with FEMA maintaining two completely distinct divisions to manage
these functions. However, at the State, local, organizational, and private levels, the
boundaries are less defined. The major distinction is in the mission of the actions
themselves. Mitigation attempts to eliminate hazard risk by reducing either the
likelihood or consequence components of the risk associated with the particular hazard.
Preparedness, on the other hand, seeks to improve the abilities of agencies and
individuals to response to the consequences of a disaster event once the disaster event
has occurred.
Preparedness: The Emergency Operations Plan (EOP)
The Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) is the playbook by which emergency
management response operations are conducted. However, the development of an
EOP is not just documentation of what will be done and by whom, but rather the cyclical
process by which these factors are determined. There are select components that
appear in almost all EOPs, having formed and standardized because they are the most
logical presentation of the response and recovery needs of most jurisdictions. These
components include:
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The Base Plan
The Functional Annexes
The Hazard or Situational Annexes
Planning both dictates and accounts for the equipment that must be purchased to treat
the disaster consequences that are planned for and to carry out the tasks assigned.
Planning also becomes the basis of training and exercise, and responders train to the
capabilities laid out in the plan and rely upon the assumptions captured by the plan to
determine those core competencies that are sought. And exercises that are conducted
are what test the effectiveness of the jurisdiction or organization to carry out what is
prescribed in the plan.
In the United States, nationwide planning efforts are guided by the FEMA-produced
Comprehensive Planning Guide-101 (CPG-101), created to provide general yet
standardized guidelines on developing Emergency Operations Plans (EOPs).
Evacuation Planning
For many communities, citizen evacuation in major disasters is their greatest planning
consideration. For disasters with advance notice, or for situations where post-disaster
mass-movement of citizens is possible, advance planning is required in order to
determine activation, routes, transportation methods, destinations, security, order
adherence, and facilitation. Many communities have conducted evacuation planning,
but few have conducted a full-scale test of those plans. After Katrina, the US
Department of Transportation conducted a Gulf Coast evacuation plan study and found
there exist seven key elements that can be used to measure the comprehensive nature
of a plan, including:
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Decision Making and Management
Planning
Public Communication and Preparedness
Evacuation of People with Special Needs
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Operations
Sheltering Considerations
Mass Evacuation Training and Exercises
Special Needs Populations
Traditionally, emergency planning has looked at a homogenous population thought of
collectively as the ‘community’. However, communities are made up of distinct
individuals and groups, each with unique conditions that define their lives, their
interactions, and their abilities. Communities must assess their population to determine
what special needs exist, and how those needs must be addressed in the emergency
plan. Planners must work with representatives from or representing each group. By
including these key stakeholders, the planners are better able to adjust existing policies
or create new policies that allow for the safety and security of these groups before,
during, and after emergency events.
Preparedness Equipment
Emergency management organizations rely upon an incredibly-diverse range of
equipment categories by which they are able to perform the response roles assigned to
them. These categories of equipment include (among many others):
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Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
Firefighting apparatuses
Communications systems
In the preparedness phase, consideration of equipment becomes very important, as it is
during this phase that:
1. Equipment needs are identified
2. Equipment is purchased
3. Staff is trained in the use of the equipment required to meet anticipated response
requirements.
Education and Training Programs
Education and training has always been integral to the emergency services.
Firefighters acquired (and continue to acquire) their skills by attending the fire academy.
Police officers did the same at the police academy. EMS officials received medical and
emergency first aid training from both public and private sources. However, there has
been a revolution of sorts in the provision of education and training in the emergency
management profession. The advent of emergency management training and
education coincided with the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in
1979, which touched off development of the practice as a profession. FEMA’s
Emergency Management Institute has become the focus of emergency management
professionalization, establishing the core competencies of emergency management
professionals and developing a common understanding of what constituted an
emergency management curriculum.
Public Preparedness Education
Perhaps the most difficult component of emergency management preparedness training
is that which focuses on the general public. Public preparedness education, also called
risk communication, is a field that has seen vastly mixed success. In recent years there
has been a flurry of mass communication in the emergency management and
preparedness spectra, but very little has come close to achieving such widespread
behavioral change for two reasons: most campaigns are conducted by emergency
managers with understandably little training in the highly complex social marketing and
public education disciplines, and the public faces myriad risks on a daily basis beyond
what is being communicated. CERT is one effort that has seen a great amount of
success despite the obstacles that exist.
Emergency Management Exercises
Once an emergency response plan is developed, equipment is purchased, and
personnel trained to the plan and in the use of equipment, there is a need ensure that a
critical level of preparedness has occurred. In actuality, the only true validation of
preparedness efforts comes as the result of a response to an actual disaster event.
Exercise is a controlled, scenario-driven, simulated experience designed to demonstrate
and evaluate an organization's capability to execute one or more assigned or implicit
operational tasks or procedures as outlined in its contingency plan. There four types of
exercises identified by FEMA:
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Full-scale
Partial-scale
Functional
Tabletop
FEMA supports exercises through the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation
Program (HSEEP), created to provide guidance and standardization to the exercise
efforts of emergency management organizations, and to develop a framework for
evaluation. HSEEP compliance is required for grant eligibility. The penultimate
emergency management exercise series is the DHS-supported National Level Exercise
(NLE) program. The NLE program, formerly called TOPOFF (for Top Officials), is a fullscale exercise held once a year that tests response to major disaster events spanning
states, regions, and across international borders.
Evaluation and Improvement
It is through evaluation and assessment that those responsible for response and
recovery are best able to refine preparedness capabilities. There are several programs
by which emergency management evaluation may be conducted. A select few of the
more commonly-encountered include:
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The Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP)
The State Preparedness Report (SPR)
The Target Capabilities List (TCL)
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The NIMS Compliance Assistance Support Tool (NIMSCAST)
The Disaster Emergency Communications (DEC) Communications Project
The Comprehensive Assessment System (CAS)
The Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) program
Preparedness: A National Effort
Emergency and Disaster Preparedness is conducted at all levels of government, but it is
through the FEMA National Preparedness (NP) Directorate that a national-level strategy
for preparedness is developed, communicated, and supported. NP was established on
April 1, 2007 in order to oversee coordination and development of the strategies
necessary to achieve these goals, and was established in order to provide
preparedness policy and planning guidance, and to help build disaster response
capabilities.
As a FEMA Directorate, NP has wide leverage to develop and institute preparedness
programs that include training courses, national policy development and state/local
policy guidance, and the planning and conduct of exercises. The requirements of a
national-level preparedness effort are guided by the National Response Framework
(NRF), which superseded the National Response Plan (NRP) in January of 2008. The
NRF was released to establish a comprehensive, national, all-hazards approach to
domestic incident response, and to provide clear guidance over the integration of
community, state, tribal and federal response efforts. In order to achieve the capability
to conduct the necessary actions prescribed within this framework, FEMA has released
a series of doctrine guiding preparedness at a strategic level. Homeland Security
Presidential Directive-8 (HSPD-8) directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to
develop a national domestic all-hazards preparedness goal. As part of that effort, in
March 2005 DHS released the Interim National Preparedness Goal. This goal was later
adapted into what is now the National Preparedness Guidelines. Two other programs
maintained by FEMA that help guide national-level preparedness are the Radiological
Emergency Preparedness Program (REPP) and the Chemical Stockpile Emergency
Preparedness Program (CSEPP).
Business Continuity Planning (BCP)
Business continuity planning (BCP) is the process by which businesses prepare for
disasters by identifying the risks to their business processes, their facilities, their people,
and their information, and take action to reduce that risk. BCP also includes
identification and enactment of the processes by which businesses are able to continue
to function during periods of disaster such that they are able to remain viable for the
long term and so that the products and services that they provide the community and
country remain available. BCP is the most effective way for businesses to prepare for
emergencies as the process initiates a much greater understanding of how community
risk affects the businesses and what will be required of the business. BCP, like all
preparedness efforts, increases community-wide resilience as the sooner the business
sector is able to get back up and running, the sooner the community is able to recover.
In November of 2009, FEMA announced the Voluntary Private Sector Preparedness
Accreditation and Certification Program (PS-Prep), which was mandated by legislation
that followed the September 11th 2001 attacks. This process involves the development
of preparedness standards, which did not exist previously. BCP, however, is chiefly
driven by the private sector itself. For instance, DRI International (DRII), a business
continuity planning institute, provides significant guidance on higher education programs
on BCP, supports BCP research, and maintains a capacity to enable businesses to selfassess their preparedness capabilities.