Welcome to Primas 2024 podcast series. My name is Shonda Ragland. I am the senior director of Education and Training at Prima. On this Prima podcast, Diana Wolf will discuss developing an emergency operations plan.
Diana is the senior risk services consultant at Cedric Public Entities Pool of Ohio. We will also be joined by Primas education coordinator, Taequan Gilbert. Taequan will moderate the discussion. Enjoy the podcast.
Thank you for joining us today, Diana. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity and the platform to discuss an area of policy, risk and very passionate about. You're welcome.
So to start, how can public entities best prepare for a large emergency for disaster in the community? I'd like to begin with discussing or defining a emergency versus a disaster. The terms emergency and disaster are often used interchangeably. The terms are dependent on the size of an incident and the resources available to deal with it.
For example, house fires and emergency for the local fire department, but they also have the resources to deal with it. A train to railmen, filling chemicals and hazardous to human life with pose a need for resources well above the local public entities fire department. So basically, this is a lot of resources and responsibility components depending on what is it's a learning to your disaster. It may not the definition may not always be the same for larger and smaller entities.
So a public entity can best prepare for large emergency or disaster by doing a couple things at a minimum. First, what's critical is the recognizing the need for preparedness of community planning. Many times when I ask a public entity client how they're doing with their emergency planning for their community, they assume the county or parish emergency management agency will take care of everything. This is very common.
I see this so much in public entities. Emergency management agencies are actually responsible for coordinating activities to prepare for or respond to and recover from disasters and emergencies. They also develop and maintain resources and networks to support these efforts. Their focus is a more broader plan, not specific to your single entity, but encompassing all of the communities in their jurisdictions.
So what do public entities do then? They can start with a hazard identification and risk assessment of their community. These things can start off by using natural threats such as are you susceptible to tornadoes while they're in fire, hurricanes, you have a dams or potential for letting failures, flooding, snow, ice thorns, you know, these are all natural threats that are dependent on your location, your geographic area. What could happen in your community?
Do you have trains coming through? Do you have one train that comes through versus 50 trains with chemicals on them? Now, chemical factories in your area? You know, do you have a potential in your area for civil unrest, interstates with tanker trucks and chemicals running through that constantly?
How about our susceptible power to combat? Do you like with the ice burn? There's also this threat like water contamination, like what happened in Michigan and West Virginia in 2014? After shooters at a public event are gathering, you also have, most communities have festivals, parades, boarding events, fairs, and a lot of them have concert venues now with the incorporation of large anteceders for public gatherings.
You also need to understand some special needs of your population. Like, do you have a lot of nursing homes? Do you have hospitals? Different types of hospitals?
They have prisons. These are all areas that need to be helped in, helped within a response to the new year in disaster. You know, there's a disease outbreaks, foodborne outbreaks, if you're in a rural community, livestock needs and foreign animal disease, you know, that's very imperative for some rural communities, it can be devastating. And then obviously, unfortunately, we have those terrorist attacks as well.
Second, you can develop an emergency operations plan. An emergency operations plan has a document that outlines the policies, strategies, and general concepts of operations for managing emergency or disasters. It describes who will do what, when and with what resources, and by what authority before, during, and after emergency. That sounds like a big cast to handle, but it's not as bad as what most people think it might be to develop.
Next, throughout the development of an emergency operations plan, you need to be able to identify resources available locally through mutual aid requests and state assets. Once the hazard or risk identification for each risk is identified, you need to get resources or know where you can get them to assist in response and recovery to those specific risk threats. Like, for example, hazmat teams. If you have a trained derailment, you need to be able to contact your fire chief association, if the program works in your state, to be able to request higher level hazmat teams, but you also need to know the process of how to get them.
And again, at a minimum, really just to understand how to request them. The next step after developing the emergency operations plan and identifying resources, you would then want to train on the plan and make sure you include all departments in your organization. This includes office staff, your public works department, water, and wastewater. All employees should be included in some form.
Most public entities think it is just police and fire who need to know the plan, but how do those other departments react in an emergency when they may be affected or are the emergency? Every employee should or could be utilized in a role and should be trained. Once you train your organization, training with your neighboring jurisdictions is a huge benefit. History has shown how the impact of an emergency disaster can be widespread.
What's going on in my community may be affecting the government vice versa. You should participate in your local emergency management agency drills and exercises. These build relationships prior to the need. Finding familiarity during disaster is critical in response and recovery efforts.
This helps by we're not meeting for the first time on an emergency. How do you work? How is your personality? How is your leadership style?
These are all doing those drills and exercises with neighboring jurisdictions. Finally, I need to need a public information officer. Training a public information officer and also providing accessible avenues for your community to communicate. How can you communicate to them the needs during an emergency?
My community does not have social media or any way of communicating with the residents. When I had to talk with them about this, they felt that same premise as love that EMA will take care of it. When this is not the case, EMA will help. They will do their thing.
But it's more again, like I said previously, it's on a broader scale. Why is the emergency operation staying important? The emergency operations plan, also known as the EOP, is based on the national response framework and incorporates the national incident management system, also known as NIMS. This helps different departments and agencies coordinate their response efforts to an incident.
The national response framework is a guide that outlines how the United States respond to all types of disasters and emergencies and terrorist attacks, major disasters. It is important to understand response and recovery efforts start local and local. No matter what, the bigger picture is that's going on, your local entity, your disaster or part of that emergency is when you start local and local. This framework was developed in January 2005 in part as a result of the September 11 attacks, deriving it based on the previous Wilding and Enfire Management concepts.
They have since developed this wide program of NIMS and incident command systems that helps organize and manage disaster response. How does the Relates and Emergency Operations Plan? Well, all public entities are required to have an emergency operations plan. This starts at the federal level through the federal national response framework and travels down to the state, county, or parish and local level.
These plans are developed off of basic format, then included basic plan, functional annexes and hazard specific appendages. These areas are all supplemented by the operating procedures, policies and checklists for implementing a plan. So some description of those parts. The basic plan is an overview of the jurisdiction's emergency response organization, policies and assigned responsibilities for planning and operations.
A part of the basic plan is giving authority and emergency authorization. So if you have a disaster and you request through the state's immediate incident management team to come in and help manage your incident, you need to be able to provide them an emergency authorization and giving them the authority to help you manage that. So they're working under you. Function plan access are plans organized around the performance of a broad task.
These are critical functions of areas such as police, fire, transportation, communications, public works, mask here and public health to suggest a few. Then you go into the hazard specific annexes which provide additional detailed information and applicable to the performance of a particular function. Then policies and checklists provide detailed instructions adding to that organization or individual needs to fulfill their role. So if my boss is on vacation and I'm next in line to senior birdie, I would know what to do to assume his role during an emergency because I'm provided with those checklists and understanding.
What is the difference between an emergency operations plan and an emergency action plan? So these terms are always confused and you can changeably, but there is a difference. An emergency operations plan is a document that outlines policy strategies and general concepts of operations for managing a emergency or disaster. How you will respond to help your community during an emergency versus an emergency action plan is a detailed but more concise document that outlines procedures and guidelines for keeping people safe in a workplace or a specific venue or building.
For example, public health to the other concert venue. An emergency action plan is used to outline response to emergency or that specific event which could be different based on the type of event at a venue. A sports event for example could have a different needs than a concert and accessible. The emergency action plan includes instructions on what to do during a fire, power outages, act a shooter and any evacuation needs.
The emergency operations plan is how the public entity responds to the needs of the community. The emergency action plans can be developed from the emergency operations plan. So once you have the plan in place, the Delta emergency action plans for different events is a kind of coincide together. Do large event venues operated by public entities need emergency action plans?
Absolutely and many do not have them or they develop them specifically for insurance purposes, throwing something together and then they don't share them with anyone. The viewpoint, it won't happen here but we don't have the time or the usual excuses not to do them. When most just don't know what to do or how to do them and they're just intimidated by the process. However, they are critical during the chaos of an incident.
Training and police even volunteers are needed. They also need to know the entirety of the plan but they should know in their role what to do in an emergency. Knowing what to do when the unexpected happens helps direct actions that are critical for response from recovery from the beginning of an emergency. So I had recently visited a marketplace type venue operated by Public entity but it was stacked with all volunteers on the weekend.
When I asked the volunteer like well whatever you do if you have an emergency, the response was just what if our extinguishers are over there and we exited the building? Well what happens then? You know they didn't have a plan or they weren't aware of a plan for the entity. So yeah again includes your volunteers at least with a basic minimal understanding of what to do or at least who to call.
And then identifying like emergency medical resources within your emergency action plan especially for these large event venues is really paramount. Many times public entities don't want to or can't afford to spend that extra money to have those emergency medical needs on site. They have a large event venue that holds about 30 to 40,000 people to be sporting events festivals and concerts and they needed this emergency operations or emergency action plans for these events. And when discussing the medical resources they don't have a fire department or EMS services in their community they contract to them.
Well to find out that the ones that contract to cover a region or district of 108 miles out of one fire station with two ambulances. If you have an active shooter or another kind of mass event problem if those two ambulances are out on some other call and they're 108 square miles of jurisdictions that they cover this is a huge problem. What exactly is the National Incident Management System? The National Incident Management System also called or more formally known as NIMS is actually a requirement of all public entities and they should have adopted NIMS in 2005.
However many at the time did not know what they were adopting they just were told they had to adopt this in order to meet the condition to obtain federal assistance grants in contract. So we kind of lost some training aspect of NIMS and implementation of NIMS just based on hey we're just going to do this because we need that availability to get grants. NIMS itself is actually a system which helps government agencies, non-governmental organizations and the private sector work together to respond to incidents. It's a framework that provides an organizational structure and understanding that everybody knows for managing an incident.
NIMS is based on the idea that incidents begin and locally and it doesn't take command away from the state and local authorities. Instead, NIMS helps responders work more effectively together regardless of the size, location, or complexity of the incident. The incident commands us in response rules and positions are organized the same way across all incidents within the NIMS system expanding or contracting with the incident. It is a system based response on priorities and resource management.
So I am able to I'm trained in many positions on the incident management team. I'm able to fulfill any of those role responsibilities no matter what incident I respond to in any jurisdiction. The different positions in the NIMS system such as incident commander, public information officer, planning section chief, and operations chief all operate important effort to respond to an incident knowing how the incident command system works within NIMS is imperative for the local public entity. There are many training levels for public entities from basic courses in NIMS with everyone should take to understand the system to high level and to the command response levels.
There are NIMS courses beyond the basic ones specifically for public officials helping them understand their rules during an incident. If they do not know the system, those who do know the ICS or the NIMS system will carry on without you. However, the local public entity is still responsible. So to manage a disaster, if you're not familiar with the system and what's going on, that system and the players that are able to notice this already are going to continue the response to recovery efforts and you're not going to have any say or partake in it because you're not even going to know you're missing it.
What are resources are available to assist with an emergency operations plan? So you can work with your local emergency manager to establish preparedness priorities and assistance with EOP development. You can contact your state EMA's. They also provide emergency operations plan development assistance.
You can go on and look at templates and learning applications and checklists are all kind of provided on there to help you in this planning process. FEMA also provides EOP guidance and NIMS training up to the higher command levels. A lot of these you can take right online and then once you get to the higher command level of FEMA NIMS training, it's then provided in a classroom setting through your state EMA and many of the state EMA sites have a training resource site where you can request training or see when they're holding those higher level NIMS courses once you obtain or get to that level. You can contact your state training officer, your state EMA training officer for a list of courses provided to the state.
These of course, is encompassed a wide variety of training from incident response, public information officer and to recovery efforts. And then finally obtaining emergency operations plans are then entities similar to yours and it's a great start. Wiring that the wheel can't just copy it but utilizing the format and to the understanding of the process is a great start and seeing what they're thinking. They're a neighboring jurisdiction and they already have one.
A lot of their natural threats or risks could be the same. So again, talking to your neighbors and developing those relationships will also help in developing emergency operations plans. We've reached the end of our podcast. Thanks for tuning in.
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