The Whole of Community Approach to Emergency Preparedness

In these days of tightening budgets, over stressed taxpayers and increasing distrust in government itself we must expand the way we look at emergency management.  First, everyone must do what they can do to increase preparedness, not just public safety officials and our typical responders. This includes businesses, individual citizens, government officials and community groups.  As FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate calls it, the "Whole of Community".

 

In Pacific we have been creative in our approach with this.  As a result of classes I have taken, I am working with our Emergency Preparedness Citizen Advisory Board to assess our communities capabilities, conduct a gap analysis and then create new training programs that meet our exact needs.  Combined with the Volunteer Plan created last year and the Volunteer Center Operations Plan created this spring we are well on our way in adopting this "All of Community" approach.

 

We know that in times of crisis there are spontaneous volunteers who can be counted on to show up, work long hard hours and who do so only because they care deeply about their community.  Unprepared, these spontaneous volunteers can be difficult to manage and effectively use. So our plan deals with this two ways.

 

The Volunteer Center Operations Plan organizes volunteers under ICS and creates specific jobs and duties we plan on staffing with volunteers.  This Operations Plan also builds upon the innovation of our volunteer plan itself and the creation of a tiered system of volunteers, identifies people we know will volunteer and provides them training and better prepares all of our community to face disaster.

 

Tier 3 volunteers are our spontaneous volunteers who might show up to sandbag during a flood, clean up debris following a windstorm or help our community recover from the devastation of an earthquake.  We know who many of these people are from past experience as well as many have self identified themselves.  We want to provide these people with basic preparedness, incident command and some skill specific programs such as building a sandbag wall.  We have already held classroom versions of ICS 100 and 200 classes as well as "Are You Ready" (IS-22).

 

Tier 2 volunteers will receive a bit higher level of training and take a more mid management role. Some of this training might be in volunteer management, Emergency Operations and more hands on training such as is taught in CERT.  These would be the people staffing the Volunteer Center, working as strike team leaders and taking more of a lead role in times of disaster.

 

Tier 1 volunteers will take leadership roles in both response and recovery.  Working directly under control of the Command and General Staff and closely following the Incident Command System, these volunteers will help us leverage our already limited resources.  They might work directly in the EOC or oversee critical response in our community.  When the "Big One" strikes we might not have the opportunity to request immediate assistance from our preparedness partners or fully staff our emergency operations.  By identifying, training and using these volunteers we would better be able to safely, effectively and efficiently meet the response needs of our community. 

 

We also want to include citizens and business in our normal training and exercise process.  Over this next year the city will host some training focused at and available for citizens and business community.  Next Year we will hold an exercise that will simulate a disaster, call for the activation of our EOC and the establishment of a volunteer center.  Instead of our more traditional exercises that are typically limited to staff and test small sections of our plan, we will invite all of our community to participate.  Since it is likely we will need everyone to participate during a large scale event, it is wise to include everyone when we test our plans. In early September we will hold a public meeting to discuss the training available, preparedness for this next winter and layout the concept of a community wide exercise next spring.

 

I am proud of what we have accomplished in Pacific so far in development of our Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan (CEMP) and our Continuity of Operations / Continuity of Government (COOP /COG) plans.  I believe we have one of the best written plans in the country (and I do not just say that because I wrote it).  I believe Pacific will set new benchmarks for all communities to perform to.  This is also something I am proud of. This is why I have been so committed to participating in Emergency Management and Homeland Security training.  I encourage other Elected and Appointed Officials to do the same thing.