Emergency Planning: Disaster Management

Disaster Management: Emergency Planning Emergency Planning An emergency plan serves primarily to provide guidance to on-site personnel on how to act during an emergency so as to prevent injuries or fatalities, mitigate damage, and speed up the return to normalcy. It specifies, among other things, who the lead personnel will be, how decisions will be made, and what the chain of command is.

For ease of decision-making, it is important to have an emergency coordinator who takes up the lead role, and has the power to make independent on-site decisions in case crucial decisions have to be made at short notice. It is also reasonable to have a back-up coordinator on-site to take up the lead role in case the lead coordinator is in no position to conduct his duties. The lead and back-up coordinators ought to be selected based on the nature of the emergency.

In the case of floods or tornadoes, which will often provide warning prior to occurrence, and where most of the work on-site is likely to involve a lot of movement - movement of large numbers of victims, relocation of specially-skilled personnel such as divers and counselors, and movement of water, light, or power equipment - the lead role ought to be given to someone with knowledge of logistical support activities, who will be better-placed to identify requirements and coordinate movement to ensure requirements are met in good time.

Only the lead coordinator at any one time ought to have the power to make independent on-site decisions in cases where instant decisions are required. All the same, transparency ought to be a key factor in the making of such decisions; in fact, independent decisions only ought to be made if the situation calls for extreme urgency, otherwise all decisions ought to be made in consultation with supervisors and other agencies assisting with the rescue operation (HHS, 2015).

This is to mean that in as much as the lead coordinator has substantial authority over the rest of the personnel, he is required to maintain democracy -- the personnel working under him have the right to know what decisions were made, and more so, why they were made. This opens doors for discussion, criticism, and feedback, and prevents a situation where a lead coordinator, out of stress, makes misinformed judgments that jeopardize the lives of victims and personnel even further, resulting in severe losses.

Communication is likely to be a challenge in rescue operations involving floods and tornadoes. As such, there ought to be proper arrangements to ensure that alternate communication mechanisms are available to maintain communication, particularly between key personnel such as the on-site coordinator, the overall lead coordinator, and the rescue and medical teams. Personnel with reporting or alerting responsibilities ought to be provided with telephone numbers of people they will be expected to contact. Communication on-scene is just as important.

Miscommunication could result in serious losses and unnecessary injury to both victims and personnel. Paging systems could be an effective way of maintaining communication among personnel as they are less likely to interfere with the flow of work. On-scene communication is needed to alert personnel, and staff members need to decide on one type of signal to be used to give orders at the scene. Paging system announcements, flashing lights, whistles, and sirens could be valuable communication signals for giving evacuation and other types of orders to personnel.

The all-clear signal may not be an effective way to communicate orders to personnel in emergency situations because time is usually not an urgent concern in such circumstances. Besides establishing communication with personnel and outside agencies, and ordering evacuation, the lead on-scene controller performs other additional roles including addressing the media and relatives of casualties, requesting external aid, alerting the rest of the population of possible risk, and coordinating group activities (Demiroz & Kapucu, 2012).

Effective information dispatch could aid the rescue and response efforts as they could give the emergency response team a feel of what the norms and values of that particular community are, and consequently, how people therein expect the disaster personnel and first responders to handle the situation. For instance, rescue efforts in the Mississippi required some shrimp boats to be pushed to the gulf; however, this did not go down well with the neighboring Native American.