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Preparing an effective plan for disaster response

1. Preparing an effective plan for disaster response & recovery for a single agency or institution differs from an effective plan for disaster response and recovery for a community chiefly because no single-agency plan can account for the multiple factors that may arise when a disaster strikes. A truly effective plan, like any truly effective disaster response, has to have interagency coordination. A community's disaster plan, plus training, must deal with which organizations (always more than one) and persons are responsible for the various aspects of managing disasters--for everything from warning the community about the problem to establishing and expanding command structures and interagency communications during a problem to postdisaster preparedness.

Every disaster has unique features, but some aspects of disaster response can be anticipated and planned for. Van der Heide recommends creating an "action plan" at the time of an individual incident occurs, but that includes the idea of having multiple organizations involved in planning it: "The failure to do this is one of the reasons that different organizations responding to the disaster often do not carry out a unified, concerted effort" (2000, p. 203). What that means is putting into place "prearranged, mutually agreeable" protocols for setting up an action plan. That way, when the disaster happens, the action plan contents can be focused on and not which agency does what or should do what. That comes about only if individual agencies work together cooperatively to work out what to do. Or in other words, the fire department and police department have to know what to expect from each other when each arrives at a disaster scene. That brings up the structure of the Incident Command System (ICS), which anticipates many of the problems of interagency cooperation and chain of command.

2. It must be settled in advance that people with the proper expertise have primary authority o...

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Preparing an effective plan for disaster response. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:37, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689251.html