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 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…