Emergency Response
The two most important operations that are executed during a successful response effort are evacuation and hazard or threat containment. Communication is essential to both responses and neither can be achieved without an effective communication effort; however, communication by itself is not a sufficient goal. In an emergency response situation, the two most critical steps are to safely evacuate anyone potentially still in danger and to then effectively contain the threat so that the danger does not spread to other places and risk the lives of others. Victim treatment and apprehension of the perpetrators are important—but in the first stages of response, they are secondary to the immediate goal of getting people to safety, which is always going to be the first and foremost initial concern in any emergency response approach (Haddow, Bullock & Coppola, 2017).
As Ding, Tong, Zhang and Mao (2018) point out, evacuation is one of the most important elements of any safety plan in a facility where threat levels are high and loss of life can occur unless individuals are effectively removed from a threat should one break out. Likewise, containment is critical, as Shuaib et al. (2014) showed when an Ebola outbreak occurred...
Evacuation saves lives, and so does containment. Once these two steps are taken, the next steps of treating victims and apprehending the perpetrators can be implemented. However, both containment and evacuation required a thorough approach to communication, for people cannot know what to do, where to go, and how to keep a situation from worsening if they do not have access to solid communications.
Operations should be executed according to a pre-planned arrangement. That means individuals involved in the response have to know ahead of time what channels to use in order to communicate with people on the ground, who is in charge and the proper methods to use during evacuation and containment. Operations should be executed with team leaders taking charge of individual operations and coordinating with one another so that there is a multiple front response: evacuation and containment are steps that can be taken almost simultaneously. As people are being evacuated for a high-threat risk site, containment efforts can be initiated…
