subject: It Is Too Late After The Fact To Worry About Emergency Response Planning [print this page] We've all seen a group of people engaged in some activity with readily available safety equipment ignore that protection until after someone gets hurt. At a societal level this is the same phenomena that prevents communities from engaging in serious emergency response planning. It is common for governments to conclude that they cost a such preparation is prohibited only to be shown on your site that thinking is in the wake of a disaster.
Building the correct course of action is to mitigate the unthinkable destruction of natural and man-made catastrophes can cause is the primary reason there are so few population centers with adequate response plans. There are so many day to day crises getting ready for an earthquake, volcanic eruption or tidal wave can be branded as s foolish and wasteful expenditure.
This is why it takes to leadership to motivate a population to prepare for things that might happen, with no assurance that they ever will. Such is the nature of risk management. Even then perfectly in a disaster does not strike the work appears to have been in vain and worse can be seen as a waste of resources. It is therefore critical that such planning be done in an atmosphere of frugality balancing vulnerability with likelihood of recurrence.
Keeping in mind this necessity of reasonableness in preparation for disasters is crucial to developing a response that the community can and will abide by the creation of that will be adequate when they must rely on it. A first step in this process is necessarily an assessment of what the area is vulnerable to. It makes little sense to prepare for a hurricane in the northwest or tidal weaves in the middle of the continent. This is why there is no one size fits all approach to the problem.
Each community must evaluate the historical experience of their areas combined with likely man made crises. For those living near a nuclear reactor there will be different concerns than those downstream of a major hydroelectric dam. The key is paring down the threats to those the community could reasonably expect to have present. Terrorism should be included in this threat with a healthy evaluation of the target value of the local setting. While we all believe our location is important, even critical, to the overall health of the nation, there are greatly varying values to each location as a target for terrorists.
It is also important to make an unbiased assessment of what the most important things in the community are. This may take the form of a large facility for housing groups of people or information focal point from which emergency response is coordinated. It is essential to understand and accept that not everything can be protected equally in developing a comprehensive yet attainable plan.
Another important measure of the community's ability to respond to an event is the time available to take last-minute precautions before the event occurs. The development and maintenance of the capability to warn everyone in the area as early and as efficiently as possible is a significant measure of how well the community will survive. It is the surprise and unknown that cause so many deaths in flash floods and avalanches.
Correctly applying these steps before anything bad happens, and even practicing the procedures developed will increase a communities likeliness to survive with as limited damage as possible. For many events, there is no way to absolutely ensure there will be no damage injury or death, but every measure of mitigation before an event pays huge dividends during. The effort put into emergency response planning is inversely proportional to the negative impact of a catastrophe.
