After the Prevention and Mitigation phase, the next phase of the Emergency Management cycle is Preparedness. The preparedness phase is where you’ll spend most of your time as a community Emergency Manager, getting your community ready to deal with the negative consequences of hazards that you can’t fully prevent or mitigate.
Definition: In the Emergency Management field, preparedness is “the process of building capacity to effectively respond when people, property, the environment, or economy are affected by disasters.” It’s important to remember that preparedness in the EM context is an action – better, it’s a continuing series of actions. There is no point at which the preparedness phase can be said to be complete.
Why are you preparing? That’s easy – you’re preparing so your community will be as ready as possible for the negative consequences of hazards.
So HOW do you prepare? That’s not as easy. There are all sorts of tasks to do in the preparedness phase, but they all fall into one of four categories:
Planning – Creating formal written plans for how your community will prepare and respond to emergency incidents. This includes a large overall Emergency Plan for all facets of your Emergency Program, and it also includes response plans for individual emergencies that might occur. You’ll end up with a few response plans, because what you do when there’s a fire, for example, is going to be very different than what you do if there’s a flood or a chemical spill.
Placement – Ensuring you have all the resources your plan requires in place and ready to go when an emergency occurs. That doesn’t mean that you always have resources like outside first responders on reserve, but it does mean you have a plan for when and how to contact them, a person whose job it is to carry out that plan.
Purchases – Some of the resources your plan requires, like equipment, will need to be purchased so you CAN have them in place. And when you’ve purchased stuff, you’ll need to decide where it goes, and whose responsibility it is to make sure it’s properly maintained and ready for an emergency.
Practice – Training and exercises are crucial to preparedness. You can have the best plan in the world, but if people responding to an emergency incident haven’t done anything but read the plan, they won’t be effective. They need thorough training in how to do their job and regular practice exercises doing it.