Emergency Management Communication Paper

While state laws mandate that local governments must create a traditional emergency management plan, it’s crucial to remember that catastrophes are frequent and that only a variety of management tactics can match their life cycles. In order to assist team members reduce risks, each emergency response department must develop practical strategies in addition to the universal rules. (Comfort, 2007). Additionally, it is critical for the response team to be well-prepared, react to crises as they arise, and aid victims in recovering from their physical and emotional injuries. Although the emergency response team could have handled the issue in other ways, there are five crucial components of emergency management, which include preventive measure, preparedness, reaction, recovery, and mitigation.

Prevention as the first component of emergency management means providing permanent protection from hazards by ensuring that people live in safe environments. However, it is worth noting that not every hazard is preventable but the risk of people losing their lives when such instances occur can be still be reduced through good evacuation plans. Therefore, Grenfell managers could have used appropriate design standard to reduce the chances of fire breaking out (Comfort, 2007). Preparedness is the second phase of emergency management. Preparedness means conducting a cyclical planning, control, training, empowerment, and taking into account corrective measures that will help improve the safety conditions. The management should have put in place mechanisms that would help them respond to all kinds of disasters and emergencies. Response is the third component of the emergency management plan, and it focuses on effective coordination and resource management. The resources here include workers, equipment, and supplies that are used during hazard incidents. This phase of emergency response is known as a reactive phase and occurs at the time of the disaster.

The fourth component of the recovery plan focuses on those activities that will restore fundamental community functions or ensure that people become stable and ready to continue with their daily functions. In most cases, emergencies and disaster incidents leave people vulnerable, heartbroken, and discouraged. However, through the recovery process, people find it easy to accept the incident and move on with their lives. The recovery process as part of the emergency management plan should always begin immediately after the incident with the aims of bringing the affect people back to normalcy. The final component of emergency management is known as mitigation (Comfort, 2007). Mitigation include all the efforts levied with the intentions of preventing deaths and harm to properties, consequently, reducing the impact of hazard incidents and emergencies. Mitigation in this context include putting in place both structural and non-structural measures that can reduce the impact of emergencies on the populations and property. For instance, Grenfell managers responded prior to the fire incident by changing the structural characteristic of the building as well as its surrounding. The specific structural changes included the introduction of modern kitchens and more improved lighting systems while non-structural changes included positive response to new building codes and operational standards.

In every emergency planning, the most fundamental step involves establishing a response team and assigning roles to each player. In several instances, we have come across situations where teams miss important recovery activities simply because part of the members did not have prior information regarding their roles and key responsibilities. In other words, the success of a recovery process during an emergency relies on effective communication and interoperability of the response teams (Kapucu, 2006). Communication interoperability, therefore, is a system of network and infrastructure that allows emergency response teams and their respective field commandants to make communications within and across organizations and jurisdictions when need arise. The communication platform and network system must allow for easy transmission of voice information, data, or recorded video within the appropriate time (Manoj & Baker, 2007). Therefore, system managers must ensure that the communication channels are capable of interoperability. This is because, successful emergency management and response to disasters can only happen when there is free and continuous flow of critical data or information between jurisdictions and organizations or between disciplines and respective agencies.

From the case study, it is evident that disaster, whether natural or human facilitated, can occur at any time and to any city, state or country. Most disasters are unprecedented, and when occur, they tend to compromise public functions. We have come across several instances where the emergency response teams throw around “interoperability” with the main intention of organizing, planning, and responding to a security situations. Undoubtedly, the question of communication interoperability often occur in after-process reports (Kapucu, 2006). In most factual hazard incidents, the inexistence of interoperability means that the recovery response teams lack the capacity to communicate amongst themselves or transmit data to a central unit using the radio system.

Communication system and recovery infrastructure are among the components that are necessary for a response team to execute successful operations. However, there is also a need to differentiate between private and public interoperability communication systems. In most cases, field operators using private communication systems complain of fixed peak usage capacity. Furthermore, the cost costs of operating private communication systems seem to override the capacity of the players to effectively deal with disasters. The incident of 9/11, for example, demonstrated that under certain circumstances, a private communication system may not scale an emergency as required by both the participants and recovery agencies. The only way to improve interoperability communication is by establishing a strict emergency communication protocol. However, in such circumstances, the field commandant and members of the team must engage in subjective decision-making processes so as to enhance information movement.

To sum up, the relationship between interoperability and communication revolves around the simple fact that without a proper link between the two components, recovery teams may not have the ability to respond to emergencies. Ineffective communication can also lead to confusion during field operation. Therefore, when evaluating the emergency incident communication plan, it is wrong for an agency to ignore the physical elements. The evaluation should go beyond deciding the method of communication, service provider, equipment and systems that can be used as backup. Additionally, interoperability communication demands that system users must have prior knowledge regarding the time and place of the disaster incident.

References

Comfort, L. K. (2007). Crisis management in hindsight: Cognition, communication, coordination, and control. Public Administration Review, 67(s1), 189-197.

Kapucu, N. (2006). Interagency communication networks during emergencies: Boundary spanners in multiagency coordination. The American Review of Public Administration, 36(2), 207-225.

Manoj, B. S., & Baker, A. H. (2007). Communication challenges in emergency response. Communications of the ACM, 50(3), 51-53.