Selection of an emergency or disaster event

As a rule of thumb, the following parameters are provided to assist you with the selection of your event:

• It is preferable that the event chosen by you should have occurred at least 4 - 5 years ago, this would ensure that the various investigations and inquiries should have concluded and any reports would be readily available to you;
• the event should have occurred not more than 25 - 30 years ago, otherwise, there may be difficulties in obtaining relevant reports, newspaper articles and possibly interviewing those involved, etc.

Spend some time now thinking of a suitable event, taking into account the constraints/parameters that I have briefly mentioned above. Look at the various topics that will need to be analysed and addressed in the pre-impact, impact and post impact analyses and satisfy yourself that there is sufficient information likely to be available. One way of going about this is to develop a matrix detailing all the information that you need to consider in selecting an appropriate event.

Do not be too concerned if you have listed several events; some of these may be discarded once you measure them against the assignment selection criteria that are provided.

This next step is going to be extremely important to you and that is how to go about locating relevant information on the events that you have listed so as you can make your final selection. Although this may be very time consuming it is essential that you invest this time wisely as the time spent now on locating and documenting this information in your selection of an emergency/disaster event will save you considerable time and effort later on.

The acquisition of this information may take a number of days. You may have trouble finding the time to visit all of the relevant departments/organisations you have listed. Use all the modes of communication available to you to search out, locate and obtain the information you require. Telephone, fax, email, Internet and personal discussions/interviews are amongst these modes of communication. You may find that one of the sources that you list may have information on several of the events you are considering.

Now what you need to do is review your list and ensure that the final list of topics that you have come up with measures up against the assignment selection criteria we spoke about earlier, i.e.:

• timeframe of the event;
• availability/accessibility of information;
• sufficient information available on the event to address the assignment criteria;
• preferably of interest to you and/or your workplace

The final criterion you will need to impose on your selection of a topic is that of the word limitation. Although we do not have a strict word limitation, you must realise that there is only a specific amount of time available for you to search for, obtain and analyse information pertinent to your selected event. In addition, we have limited your analysis to only certain aspects of emergency management. Therefore you need to determine just how “big’ your analysis and final report will be. This ‘scoping’ of your report will also be influenced by the above criteria.

Now that you have commenced to gather the information required to satisfy your assignment criteria you are ready to start working on your first assignment.