STORY TYPE: Homeland Responder Brief #111

SEGMENT TITLE: Plans and Procedures for Response: Part 1

Reporter - John McQuiston

SYNOPSIS:
In order to carry out the provisions of Federal and State law, Disaster/Emergency Management Plans must be established at the local, state and federal levels. To accomplish goals of the response plan, it needs to integrate all incident management activities across the continuum from pre-incident awareness, prevention, and preparedness to incident response and post-incident recovery. The plan should also address all hazards and contingencies, covering all disciplines.

SCRIPT:
Announcer:
The perception of the inherent dangers and complex threats facing this country has changed significantly in recent years. These threats continue to cross a broad spectrum of contingencies from acts of terrorism to natural disasters to other man-made hazards. Because all carry the potential for severe consequences, these threats must be addressed with a unified effort. Planning is essential component to successful prevention and mitigation of a WMD incident.

Rad Jones:
It's chaotic; if you don't know what the expectations are from each other, it's chaotic. Those first few minutes, an hour, can be highly critical because you're going to start to develop and understanding that should have been developed months and days before when you sat down at the same table.

Charlie Dickinson:
We really changed the Paradigm for America's first responders. America's communities that we protect expect us, first responders, to be prepared to interact together. The community needs to be confident and have an understanding that their responders are prepared to meet that threat.

Announcer::
The purpose of a response plan is to enhance the ability of the jurisdiction to prepare for and to manage incidents with a more comprehensive approach. This new paradigm must be approached through increased awareness, preventive measures, and robust preparedness. Effective Communication between every organization with-in the response Community will be one of the most important elements during the planning process.

Bob Johnson:
WMD response plan in my mind offers the emergency responders a document, a policy procedure document, that can be used for training as well, especially with terrorism. You can have all the plans that you want, and when they're sitting on the shelf, they're not going to do you any good when a disaster happens.

Charlie Dickinson:
The purpose of the response plan is not unlike most response plans to be prepared for a specific type of incident or incidents. Agencies need to respond with a much more weariness today when they suspect, know, or verify that it is a WMD incident because the responders themselves responding to help the community do not want to become victims themselves. A WMD well-planned response plan can help enormously keeping that from occurring.

Announcer::
To accomplish goals of the response plan, it needs to integrate all incident management activities across the continuum from pre-incident awareness, prevention, and preparedness to incident response and post-incident recovery. The plan should also address all hazards and contingencies, covering all disciplines. The plan is usually a multi discipline input plan with all the response agencies departments both governmental and non-governmental that would have to come together in a response. Establishing a team approach to the emergency planning process forming a common framework that captures valuable best practices between agencies is critical to the success of the plan.

Bob Johnson:
In the city of Sterling Heights, we utilize federal, state, local agencies and departments, the private sector, health care, local chamber of commerce, and we looked at: what would happened if a terrorist attack occurred in this city? Bringing everybody together because it would involve, as well as the schools, it would involve anybody in the community plus the residential community.

Charlie Dickinson:
Coordination and communications begin with people getting up from behind their desk or wherever they work that are responsible for different agencies and meeting one another personally. Understanding that if you're the police chief and I'm the fire chief, we are on first name basis. If the sheriff's department and the fire department and that agency's arena of influence or response are strangers, communications are going to be very difficult.

Bob Johnson
Again, if you sit down and write a plan yourself, it will absolutely fail. You bring people together, and you find out number one, what are their needs? Because everybody has needs; it doesn't matter who's on the team; they all have special needs.

Rad Jones:
I think what you should do is sit down and map out who some of the stakeholders are, and bring them together in a room and start talking about how you're going to develop a WMD plan; how your going to respond, and at the same time say to the people that are sitting in the room: "What other people do you think we need to interface with?" And use this cascading process.

END