July 09, 2008 Email Print Talk BackRegisterBookmarkWhat's This

8 ways to increase your community's level of preparedness

Planning is an important avenue to community emergency preparedness. The practice of emergency response planning is best thought of as a process--a continuing sequence of analyses, plan development, and the acquisition by individuals and teams of performance skills achieved through training, drills, exercises, and critiques. Over the years, researchers have identified eight fundamental principles of community emergency planning that can be used to increase acommunity's level of preparedness regardless of the amount of funding available:

(AP Photo/Jim Mone)

• Anticipate both active and passive resistance to the planning process and develop strategies to manage these obstacles.
  
• Address all hazards to which the community is exposed.
  
• Include all response organizations, seeking their participation, commitment, and clearly defined agreement.
  
• Base pre-impact planning on accurate assumptions about the threat, about typical human behavior in disasters, and about likely support from external sources such as state and federal agencies.
  
• Identify the types of emergency response actions that are most likely to be appropriate.
  
• Address the linkage of emergency response to disaster recovery.
  
• Provide for training and evaluation of the emergency response organization at all levels--individual, team, department, and community.
  
• Recognize that emergency planning is a continuing process.

Learn more about the 8 fundamentals of community disaster preparedness

Copyright 2008 International City-County Management Association
Copyright 2008 Gale Group, Inc.