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Monday, September 23, 2013

Disaster Preparedness Centers On Emergency Communication Equipment

By Dawn Williams


Dealing with the chaos, fear and danger of a major contingency relies on preparation and knowledge. Those charged with managing such crises must have the training to understand the unique challenges that crop up when the normal operation of society are interrupted. As with most things human, coherent discourse is essential to action, and that depends in large part to emergency communication equipment.

Even in the wild, creatures have figured out that when things do not go as expected, they have a greater chance of survival by following a leader. Primates like the great apes follow the ranking silver-back to find food and avoid danger. Elephants follow the senior female as she seeks out water during severe droughts, and human beings also naturally look to those in a position of authority to get them through crises.

When a population elects leaders, they imbue them with the authority to deal with huge problems, and hold them responsible for dealing with contingencies. The source of the contingency does not matter, as a lone gunman or an earthquake are equally dangerous to society, and leaders need to be able to handle either. This makes for a long and complicated list of possibilities groups must be able to deal with.

Throughout the nation, each community has developed a way to deal with disasters. While information and experience sharing have always been a part of the process of developing contingency response systems, there was no standard way of getting things done. Some organizations, both public and private, also have set methods for dealing with contingencies.

For the most part, the responsibilities and tasks are assigned to people who do something entirely different as a job. When an emergency occurs, the ease of response and recovery depends in large part to the skills of those individuals assigned to act. How well these individuals can actually respond is a matter of training, exercises and experience.

Large corporations and the armed forces also have a stake in crisis response and have developed systems to deal with them. The military run numerous realistic exercises each year to keep their command staff skilled at handling all manner of crisis, natural or military. Each branch of the service, each company and each city usually have completely different methods.

When something happens which requires a full blown response for these individual organizations, their training and exercise experience helped them make the best response and recovery possible, minimizing damage, injury and loss of life. But when the event that occurs is beyond the assets or expertise of the organization, they would have to ask for help outside their group. This is when the response system began to fail, or at the least function more poorly.

Following such major catastrophes as the Oklahoma bombing and Hurricane Katrina the after action analysis led to the development of a nation-wide formal process called National Incident Management System. With all military and government entities required to participate and private organizations encouraged to, standardization has come a long way. The key to being able to work together for mutual assistance was standardizing and training on emergency communication equipment.




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