How to Manage with Disaster Management

Effective disaster management and planning are key for any business in its recovery from a crisis or emergency situation. Disaster planning is often confused with the creation of an emergency action plan when the creation of an emergency action plan is just one step in disaster management. Effective disaster management requires not only the action steps in the immediate emergency but also planning to ensure required resources are available and coordination of those resources in disaster recovery.

Things You'll Need

• Disaster planning team
• Emergency action plan

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Instructions

Form a Disaster Planning Team

• 1

  Create a disaster planning team involving key functional managers from all operations of the organization as well as human resources and safety or risk-management professionals. Officials from local fire, police and emergency-management offices as well as city, county or state officials are also important members of this team.

• 2

  Decide who will be authorized to make decisions for the planning team and the extent of the authority to make decisions. If additional authority is needed for important decisions, this may be requested or additional decision makers invited to join the team.

• 3

  Develop a mission statement and plan structure. The team needs to decide the purpose and scope the the project to be undertaken so that there are no misunderstandings and the end product of the team can be implemented. A timetable, deadlines and budgets are useful tools in helping this process along.

Structure, Control and Action

• 4

  Establish what personnel should be in the Emergency Management Group. This group can be considered a crisis team who will coordinate all activities related to the emergency or disaster. An incident commander must be chosen out of this group. The incident commander is the leader of the EMG and the EMG activities support the decisions, leadership and activities of the incident commander.

• 5

  Install an incident command system. An incident command system is a protocol used by municipal fire services, police organizations, emergency response units and business organizations to organize a coordinated response to an emergency or disaster. Although incident command systems are standardized, there is some flexibility to customize an ICS to fit special circumstances.

• 6

  Set up an emergency operations center. The emergency operations center is a centralized area that serves as the base of communications, decisions and emergency operations. It is essential to set this up so that decision makers gather in a known central location in an organized fashion to immediately coordinate disaster response. Set up the EOC in an area unlikely to be directly affected by the disaster or emergency but accessible for all responders. Ensure the EOC has adequate communication and transportation resources.

• 7

  Coordinate assistance from outside resources. If required make sure mutual aid agreements are in place, as well as provisions to transfer authority for incident command to emergency responders such as police, fire or federal officials.