Pre Disaster & Post Disaster Documentation

Disaster Planning

The author of this report will be answering several questions that relate to disaster pre-planning and post-planning. To be specific, there will be a focus on the documents and plans that are created for both. The author of this report will elaborate on the differences that exist between the planning that exists for both pre-disaster and post-disaster scenarios. The author of this report shall use personally gleaned examples to make the case. Finally, there will be the answering of whether pre-planning or post-planning is more important in the grand scheme of things. While post-disaster reactions in terms of documentation are very important, planning for the disasters in advance and knowing what to do and why when the time comes is much more important.

Analysis

When it comes to the three differences between pre-disaster planning and post-disaster planning, there are easily more than three differences but the author of this report shall focus on only three. The first major difference that the author would point to is that pre-disaster planning is about what is known at that time, what could be expected and what can be planned for. For example, Florida is an area that is hit by hurricanes quite a bit and thus they know what can happened because they know what has happened with prior stores. Whether it be major hurricanes like Andrew or more minor ones, the after-effects have been seen and dealt with before so the emergency planning organizations know what needs to occur. This is not to say that there is not a "post-mortem" with each new storm because there is and there should be. Further, the response to each storm will be a little different. Even so, the pre-planning will be based on what has happened before while the post-disaster planning will be based on the realities that actually exist in light of the storm (Fairfax County, 2012; DHS, 2015).

Another major difference is that what is planned for and what actually happens can be quite different. Hurricane Katrina was quite nasty on its own. The one thing that made Katrina very nasty, at least for New Orleans itself, was the levees breaking. It's hard to say across the board, but the city probably presumed that the levees would hold. They obviously did not. Lastly, another major difference between pre-disaster planning and post-disaster planning is that the coordination (or lack thereof) between the agencies can be malleable and ever-changing. For example, Hurricane Katrina led to a debate and conflict after the storm hit regarding whether the federal authorities and response teams should intercede or if the local agencies (state, county and city) would intervene (Guarino, 2010). As for whether pre-planning or post-planning is more important, the answer is most certainly the former and not the latter. While executing after the fact is important, having the proper plans and infrastructure in place ahead of time is absolutely paramount because the post-disaster planning will be a lot harder if the pre-planning was not done or at least not done with the proper amount of forethought and with the proper amount of resources allocated (Schwab, 2014).