Emergency Management Response for Earthquakes

Emergency Management
Earthquakes, even minor ones, can be traumatic for all who experience them. Engaging in swift efforts for complete recovery need to include both long-term and short-term actions to transform the school to its normal operating conditions as rapidly as humanly possible. Hence, effective emergency management means addressing a host of factors to ensure that there is a sense of balance and normalcy so that both students and teachers alike can engage in recovery. Medical, psychological, infrastructure, record keeping are all of the numerous issues that the school will need to correct with the help of others. As a professional in charge of the recovery management movement, this report will outline some of the more major steps that will need to occur in order to return to a state of normalcy.
Determining the structural safety of the school building is the first step. According to the case study, an initial inspection shows that there is damage to half of the classrooms, which will need to be relocated on a temporary basis. Subsequently “…you will need to look further to assess structural and non-structural risks, and your resources for mitigation, response and recovery. The location, design and construction of a building can increase or decrease your school’s vulnerability in the case of fire, earthquake, flood, landslide, snow or windstorm, extreme temperature, volcanic hazards, or bomb threats. If you have identified these hazards as priorities, ideally you will already have taken structural safety measures in the course of school site selection and school construction, retrofit or remodeling” (ifc.org). The emergency management team needs to include structural engineers and architects who assess the areas of the school that appear to be safe and functional and to ensure that they are in fact safe and functional. Then these two experts need to assemble a team of construction workers, architects and engineers to rebuild the unsafe and structurally unsound areas of the school. There should be a geologist or a ground specialist who can inspect the grounds that the school rests on to ensure that the grounds are safe for children to be on, and to ensure that there is nothing hazardous present that could jeopardize the safety of young children on the school grounds. Furthermore, there needs to be a community liaison who can assist in finding a safe alternative for the half of the students who will be unable to return to their classrooms. For example, public libraries would be ideal places for some of these students; even some museums might be able to house some grades in their conference halls.
The community liaison needs to be well connected, influential and creative in order to find viable options to act as temporary replacements for the classrooms that the earthquake as evicted many of these students away from. Furthermore, the community liaison should be able to work with the transportation director. The transportation director will be the one who is in charge of transporting children from their homes or rescue shelters to the school or to the sites of alternative study such as the museums and libraries. This person needs to be super organized and needs to understand the safest routes to transport children where there is no debris in the way and nothing blocking the safe passage of the buses.
Safeguarding the sanctity of mental and emotional health is also crucial. There needs to be a small, mobile team of school counselors, along with a director of emergency response psychology who are all versed in the traumas and obstacles that major disasters can create with both teachers and students alike. “Because psychologists are uniquely trained in helping people cope with stress and strong emotions, they are able to help disaster survivors, volunteers and disaster relief operation workers understand their emotions, such as anger, distress and grief” (apa.org, 2018). Many of these children, teachers and parents might be experiencing emotions that they don’t quite understand and if these issues aren’t dealt with properly, they can become overwhelming, making individual lives unmanageable. These professionals “can help people build upon their own internal strengths to begin the process of recovering from the disaster. Psychologists help those in disastrous circumstances to build their skills of resilience to move from feeling hopeless to having a more long-term, realistic perspective.”
One of the more important, but often-overlooked aspects of this demanding time is the necessity of record keeping. “School is responsible for establishing the administrative controls necessary to manage the expenditure of funds and to provide reasonable accountability and justification for expenditures made to support incident management operations. These administrative controls will be done in accordance with the established local fiscal policies and standard cost accounting procedure” (Fema.gov, 2011). Furthermore, there need to be copious record taken between school official, emergency responders and rehabilitators and parents. Complete and total parental permission forms need to be obtained from parents, granting their permission for their children to return to school. These forms need to be collected and stored in a safe place and organized alphabetically and according to grade and classroom so that they can be accessed at a moment’s notice. Furthermore, the exact contact information of parents needs to be recorded, as do the emergency and secondary contact information from each child.
Hence orchestrating proper emergency management is a nuanced and multi-faceted endeavor, one that requires the help of many experience professionals. Ensuring that the school building and grounds are safe is the first priority, and that there is a safe alternate location for students to go to. Making certain that the transport of students is safe and organized is the next priority. Then mental health professionals need to be on call to help all struggling individuals. Finally, keeping copious records of all significant events in rebuilding, along with parent permission forms is key. This is not an endeavor that can be achieved overnight, but with strong leadership and the help of many capable professional, there’s no reason that the school and all related studies are up and running in no time.











References
Apa.org. (2018). What psychologists do on disaster relief operations. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/disaster-site.aspx
Fema.gov. (2011). Retrieved from https://training.fema.gov/programs/emischool/el361toolkit/assets/sampleplan.pdf
IFC.org. Retrieved from: https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/8b796b004970c0199a7ada336b93d75f/DisERHandbook.pdf?MOD=AJPERES