First of all, an emergency plan needs an organizational home. This will usually be a civil protection agency or an emergency response unit. Although plans are needed at many levels of government and in many forms of organization, we can consider the local authority (the municipality or other form of local government) to be the ‘bedrock’ level, the point of reference for many other kinds of plan. Whatever their size, emergencies are always local affairs, for the local area is inevitably the theatre of operations. Thus the response to the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 September 2004 was a local affair, even though the disaster affected long stretches of coastline in 12 different countries. Municipal governments are central to the question of emergency planning because they have a direct connection with local populations, businesses, industries and services and are thus centrally placed to co-ordinate rescue and response activities.
PRINCIPLE: because emergencies (of any scale) are essentially local problems, the municipality is the basic, or ‘bedrock’, level of emergency planning.
Emergency planning should be an inclusive process and so, once the scope and jurisdiction of the plan have been defined, it should be created and maintained on behalf of all participants, including those from organizations other than the one that hosts it.
Nominally, the head of the plan should be the chief executive of the organization in charge of it. In a local public authority this may be the mayor. In practice, tasks will probably be delegated to a person who is competent in emergency management, such as the head of a civil protection service or other emergency response unit. Nevertheless, the chief executive carries the can: he or she should not be able to evade the responsibility for having a workable plan. Where CEOs, mayors and presidents are unaware of that responsibility they should be informed, and the need to plan should be backed up by laws requiring emergency preparedness, such as many countries have enacted.
In any country or legal system the laws of relevance to emergency planning can be divided into two. Before creating the plan it is a good idea to make a thorough and comprehensive study of them. First, there are laws that deal directly with emergency management and response, and perhaps with other forms of disaster risk reduction and preparedness. Many countries have a national emergency preparedness law. This usually has several functions. It states the need to organize national resources in advance of a crisis or disaster, and describes how this will be done. In this respect it assigns legally binding responsibilities to particular organs of government and, in an increasing number of cases, to outside agencies, such as utility companies. Measures will have been enacted to guarantee national security, safeguard populations, maintain welfare arrangements and organize a response to events, including monitoring them and communicating with the public.
In most cases, the main purpose of a national emergency management law is to create, by statutory means, a system for dealing with crises, emergencies and disasters that cannot adequately be managed at the regional or local level. In legal terms, the system will specify who is responsible for the various kinds of emergency response. These are as follows.
• Search and rescue of victims who are trapped under rubble, isolated by floodwaters or landslides, or otherwise in need of help to remove them from danger. Search-and-rescue teams usually include technical specialists and medical responders (doctors or paramedics). They may include dogs and their handlers.
• ‘Blue light’ services, namely fire and rescue, police and ambulance.
• Emergency managers, who are primarily co-ordinators of resources, and should be present at all levels of government and in many different ministries.
• Voluntary services, referring, not to spontaneous voluntarism, which is generally counter-productive, but to associations of trained, equipped volunteers whose role in an emergency is clearly specified in terms of the services they are able to provide.
• Health services and hospitals.
• Carers and social services.
• The private companies and corporations that provide fundamental services to society, including infrastructure operators.
• Technical specialists: for example, in the engineering profession.
One approach used by some countries in major national emergencies is to appoint a relief commissar, whose task is to co-ordinate emergency relief, and who has special powers delegated by the national government and who presides over lower levels of public administration. This position may have a different title, such as ‘emergency relief co-ordinator.’ In any case, if powers to institute such a figure are invoked, the person in question will act as a direct link between central government and lower levels of public administration. It is generally better if the former, in its national emergency arrangements, seeks to empower, rather than override, the latter.
In national legislation for disasters and crises, there is an increasing tendency to draw in the private sector, as so many fundamental services are likely to be run by private companies. These are usually required to draw up, maintain and exercise emergency plans of their own in order to ensure continuity of supply of fundamental necessities. Many of these are related to infrastructure, especially in the utilities, transportation and banking sectors.
For the emergency planner who is working at any level other than the national one, the main point to bear in mind about a national law is that any plan that he or she may make should be fully compatible with the national requirements. These will – one hopes – determine which agency is responsible for tasks and competencies during emergencies, and the extent of that responsibility. However, responsibilities may vary with the type and gravity of crisis or disaster, and hence some flexibility may be needed in responding to the specifications of the law. It may well be that one requirement under the law is that emergency plans be drawn up by government agencies and providers of essential services.
The laws in related fields
An emergency plan will also have to be compatible with some laws and regulations that are not directly concerned with civil protection, or with protecting the public against disaster. Most commonly, these are in the fields of environment, health and safety at work, and urban and regional planning. Environmental legislation may specify actions to be taken and systems that must exist to care for the natural environment, reduce pollution levels, avoid contamination and maintain public health. The death of 20,000 people and injury of 550,000 at Bhopal in Madya Pradesh state, India, on 2–3 December 1984 when methyl isocyanate gas was released from a pesticide manufacturing plant reminds us that, at their most extreme, environmental problems may be disasters. Health and safety legislation also has significant potential to overlap with emergency planning. For instance, there is a problem that is difficult to resolve over the extent to which emergency rescuers should risk their own lives in carrying out rescues in which, if they take no risks, people will die through lack of immediate assistance. Moreover, health and safety comprise a field in which risk assessment and appraisal are widely used, as they should be in creating the basis for an emergency plan. Finally, there is a strong, but often neglected, overlap between urban and regional planning and emergency planning. Both fields deal with geographical problems and the use of a mixture of encouragement and prohibition to encourage the safe, compatible use of land. Furthermore, urban and regional planning can be the means by which land-use controls are imposed on areas subject to high hazard, which will help reduce the disaster potential of localities.
Research on geographical and demographic phenomena, and the attempt to encourage a wise use of the environment, are two elements that are held in common between emergency planning and urban and regional planning, which can thus be viewed as parallel processes. It is a great shame that, throughout the world, it is so rare to find the former taught in courses on the latter, which is a much more established discipline. Architecture and geography are the main disciplines that contribute to urban and regional planning. Architects and geographers have been active in developing the emergency planning field. The paradox is that there has been a strong disinclination to exploit the common ground between the two branches of planning.
In summary, the emergency planner should start his or her work by reviewing any legislation that may appear to be pertinent, both within the emergency management field and in related fields. For those people who are not legally-minded, this can be a daunting prospect. However, it is not ‘rocket science’, or in other words there is no particular mystery to the process. One can start by listing any articles or provisions in a law that are pertinent to the emergency planning process to be undertaken. At a later stage one can make a comparative reading of the plan and each law to ensure that there are no obvious violations or incompatibility. As legal instruments can include ‘grey areas’, in which specifications are unclear or responsibilities are poorly attributed, it may, on occasion, be necessary to seek learned advice.
The emergency planning process should consist of five basic steps, as follows:
1) Research. An initial study should be carried out and data collected in order to understand the hazards, vulnerabilities, risks and emergency response needs present in the geographical area covered by the plan. This may mean collaborating with scientific organizations such as universities and research institutes that have monitored adverse events and associated phenomena, produced maps and analysed time-series of data. Scenarios for various hazards will need to be constructed and their implications for emergency resource usage studied.
2) Writing. The emergency planning team will then consult with the stakeholders in the plan and produce the document in a draft that will need to be circulated, commented upon, amended and finalized.
3) Publicity. Once the plan is ready it must be distributed to the users, who may need to be trained in how to use it. Despite the emphasis on secrecy in counterterrorism operations, there is a growing tendency to open emergency plans to public access, by depositing copies in public libraries and putting electronic versions on the Internet. Where there are some elements of the plan that the public would benefit from knowing and others that it would be inadvisable to make generally known, two versions can be produced, one of which is for limited consumption. Alternatively, parts of a plan published on the World Wide Web can be protected by password access.
4) Operations. Emergency simulation exercises can be conducted at various levels from table-top discussions to full-scale field tests. They can be used to test various elements of the plan, although only with difficulty and much expenditure can they test the whole thing. The final test of an emergency plan is, of course, a disaster or crisis. If this occurs, it is important to gather information on the functioning of the plan in order to determine how it can be improved for future occasions. This requires a certain degree of selfawareness among the emergency managers and other responders, but the information obtained, which is usually of a ‘perishable’ nature i.e., it needs to be collected immediately before it disappears), is often invaluable. Some of the information can be obtained by technical debriefing directly after the emergency is over.
5) Updating. Changes in circumstances can affect any aspect of the plan. They may include new information on hazards, improved vulnerability and risk studies, changes in the urban environment caused by new construction work and alteration of route-ways, changes in emergency equipment, changed telephone numbers of key personnel, and a myriad other contingencies. It is a good idea to establish a revision cycle for the plan, with the possibility of extraordinary revisions if there are exceptional changes to take into account. Figure 4.1 shows how emergency simulations and real disasters provide experience which can be fed back into both the planning scenarios and the plan itself.
In summary, the emergency planning process involves investigating hazards and risks, determining the modality of emergency interventions, informing and training participants, and updating the planning instrument. It is a never-ending cycle in which there are always improvements to be made.
As Professor Harold Foster famously observed in his book Disaster Planning (1980) ‘Victims trapped under rubble cannot afford the luxury of bureaucratic procrastination.’ One of the main purposes of the emergency plan is to identify those decisions that can be made before a crisis and those that must be made during it. The former should be tackled preventatively and mechanisms should be in place to ensure that real-time decision-making during the emergency is effective and efficient. This means ensuring that the authorization structure for decisions is robust, comprehensive, familiar to participants, and accepted by them.
Figure 4.1 Feedback from simulations and emergencies can be used to improve the basis of scenario models using in emergency planning and the plan itself.
In summary, the emergency plan should, on the basis of knowledge of local hazards and vulnerabilities, create a clear, unambiguous structure for emergency response. This should include decision-making, command and control, operations (i.e., who does what) and the division of responsibility. The plan should instruct participants about what procedures to use and what emergency resources to employ under particular circumstances, which will probably be unfamiliar or exceptional with respect to the daily round of activities. There is nothing magical about this process, and in many cases it is a question of the rigorous application of little more than common sense.
PRINCIPLE: the emergency plan should create a clear, unambiguous structure of decision-making, command, operations and the division of responsibility.
The ‘building blocks’ of an emergency plan are as follows:
• the organizations whose actions will be guided by the plan and the structures that they inhabit, particularly the emergency operations centre, the natural home of the plan and its ‘nerve centre’ during times of activation;
• the resources that will be used during an emergency: personnel (manpower), communications, vehicles and heavy plant, equipment, consumable supplies, fuel, services and buildings;
• networks and the communications that link them (either directly or indirectly, most plans will apply to more than one organization);
• the command structures used to manage the emergency and the physical resources that make them function (command centres and posts, and communications channels);
• the procedures that will be applied during an emergency; and
• tasks assigned to particular organizations, task forces and personnel members.
One could also consider as ‘building blocks’ the geographical analyses of hazard, vulnerability and risk that are the chief ingredients of planning scenarios, and the integration of external resources, which will either come from higher levels of organization (e.g., the national government, or a parent company) or through mutual aid agreements from other levels of public administration.
The following chapters will take the reader through the process of writing and using an emergency plan, starting with the preparatory work.