Emergency Management Response

Emergency Management Response

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Emergency Management Response

Towards the end of the spring of 2008, State X was hit by a massive disaster. There was a series of tornadoes that struck the state. Most of these were classified by the Enhanced Fujita scale as being at scale 3.Prior to this, state X had undergone some major disasters including a severe hurricane five years earlier and several episodes of floods and has countered them quite well. Therefore, in terms of emergency preparedness, they were well prepared out of experience. The research was conducted mainly through a triangulated qualitative approach and most data collected mainly through face to face interviews .

The National Incident Management System (NIMS) is an organizational program that was incorporated by the federal government in the year 2005 and several disaster management organizations to facilitate faster response to emergencies and disasters in general. The article of this discussion was drawn from a publication of a very recent research study. This study was done in one of the states that had incorporated the NIMS protocol. The main aim was to study the level of preparedness and the emergency management response mounted in response to the disaster at hand. The names of the study cities and those of the respondents and participants were kept coded because of the ethical confidentiality that had been promised to them. Therefore the names State X and City X were used. State X refers the state in which the disaster occurred and city X is the city from which the respondents were obtained and thus the research performed. National standards under the NIMS were followed by the local, state and federal responders in response to the tragedy.

Following the tornado, the first report of damage was received at approximately 4.05p.m by the 911 emergency center. The condition was then declared a local emergency approximately twenty minutes later. This thus triggered a series of events that had been outlined by the emergency disaster management program. This involved four key steps. The first step involved the dispatch of local fire and rescue, emergency medical services, and law enforcement officers to the affected neighborhoods and to deal with basic life support skills and safety.

The second step involved the activation of mutual aid agreements. This included requesting the metropolitan medical response team, the fire engine and ladder trucks and law enforcement officers to arrive at the scenes most affected. The aid arrived at the scene approximately one hour after the tornado. Next was the establishment of an incident command post (ICP) within a local hospital, which was nearest to the most affected areas. During the early hours of the response, the ICP ordered resources and called in mutual aid who then worked out of the ICP. Finally, the local emergency manager activated the city Emergency operations center (EOC) .

The local emergency manager sent a mass text message to key city representatives alerting them of the situation and requesting their presence at the . By 5:30 p.m., a pre-designated room, ordinarily used for meetings, had been transformed into an and assembled were the city manager and representatives 6 from social services, public health, public affairs, city planning, finance, fire, rescue, law enforcement, and others. The terms highlighted included an ultimately successful respond from all the sectors of the mutual aids, The Emergency Operating center and NIMS disconnect and the role played by the outsiders. The authorities involved included the law enforcement officers, the fire personnel, and the emergency medical services team .

The law enforcement officers were in charge of secluding civilian far from the areas most affected and providing them with safety and advice on other safety measures regarding the tornado. They also kept watch of the ongoing rescue process and ensured that providers of safety services were safe and sound as they continued giving the affected people the help they needed. The fire rescue personnel were in charge of evacuating people from buildings especially those that had collapsed and those that were almost collapsing. They then took the individuals to the secluded safety zones. The emergency medical personnel on the other hand were in charge of medical matters. They did a triage of individuals who were hurt and offered basic or advanced life support mechanisms on the patients depending on their condition. They then transported them to the nearby health facilities with the help of their ambulances .

The most used component of NIMS was the incident command system (ICS) .This begun within the first hour of the disaster when the ICP was set up within the local hospital. The ICS is reported to have been used during the first 24 hours at the ICP, after which the use of the NIMS was not quite apparent. However, as expected, during the first hours of the implementation, there was some confusion about the roles of each sector. This then created some level of disorganization. There was a lot of confusion of where people were, where they were to go and who was to do which part of which task. Also, the destruction was reported to have gone too fast and this did not give the people responsible ample time to organize themselves and go through the EOC. They therefore only got to interact as the commands came through. Another challenge that mainly affected the use of the ICP element of the NIMS was that resource management did not go as they had initially been planned. Instead of being ordered by the EOC, they were ordered by the ICP .

The outcome of the response following the tornado was partly a successful one despite the many challenges they had. They were able to establish curfews and to confirm the road status of different regions so as to know which zones to warn people against. They were also able to safe guard residents’ reentry to affected neighborhoods, acquire the emergency aids, assess the progress on the preliminary damage and their influence on pets, and schools. All in the first few hours of the tornado. By 7 p.m., they had established a common shelter zone within a local school. The Police mainly ensured the entry points were safe and conducted patrols on the nearby regions. On that same day by 9 p.m., the press was briefed by the city officials with regards to the number and status of the injured, property damage, power outages, emergency shelters, mandatory evacuations, school cancellations, weather protection, recovery center, water quality, vandals/looting, and fraud. By the end of the next day, an incident management team (IMT) had arrived on scene to support local EOC activities, building inspectors had assessed more than 300 properties, and they assessed the conditions of the buildings and those that were at a high risk of collapsing. In less than 24 hours after the tornadoes’ impact, the short-term recovery had begun and there were no further victims .