Evacuation and Containment in an Emergency

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 in Nigeria in 2014: containment measures were quickly put in place, which helped prevent the virus from taking the lives of hundreds and even thousands of individuals as happened in other West African countries that year. 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 to seal off the risk. The greatest challenges to evacuation and containment are break-downs in communication.

If the risk is one that is not localized but that has the potential of spreading—like a virus—the response team must make every effort to track down potential contacts of the patient zero to keep the outbreak from spreading. Evacuation is also important and relies upon communication. Communicating effectively is the biggest challenge in each of these approaches.

The consequences, if these operations were considered failures, would be that the risk turns into a catastrophe: the threat is not neutralized or contained and instead spreads, causing catastrophic damage and waste on many levels. If evacuation fails, lives can be lost. If containment fails, lives can be lost. In both cases, lives are on the line and.