Are there any emergency planning guidelines in your area of work?
Having determined the context of your emergency management plan, you may wish to consider the question of whether there are some formal emergency planning guidelines in your area of work. It is quite likely that there will be a standard or guideline that outlines the requirements for plans, procedures or an emergency response. Your text book AEM- Emergency Planning is one such guide. Emergency Management Australia also produce a number of other planning guides that focus on differing community contexts. including land use planning for natural hazards, business continuity, recovery management and planning for mass gatherings.
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I would now like you to consider your own community context and your emergency management planning project. See if you can find any emergency management planning guidelines that relate to your own particular community context. Eg. you might be in the mining industry and be developing an emergency management plan for a mine or operational area within a mine. Are there any specific guidelines for mines? You might be developing an emergency management plan for a community threatened by potential flooding from a dam failure. Are there any specific guidelines for this type of planning activity? |
Once you have identified guidelines pertaining to your specific community context, briefly tell us about them on the subject Forum. Are they current/ recent or are they a little or a lot dated? Once again, you may be quite surprised at the variety and number of guidelines that exist out there and are identified by your fellow class members.
There are many guides that will provide direction in specialist emergency management planning areas. There are however two general criticisms of these planning guides:
- Firstly, very few of the guides will actually suggest how to develop emergency management plans. They tend to concentrate on the content of plans and on the technical requirements of planning in a specialist area. This subject you are studying now (EMG103) is intended to provide you with a series of techniques for the development of emergency management plans, and these techniques, and any modifications you care to make, are applicable to all types of emergency planning.
- Secondly, the guides tend to concentrate on only one or two aspects of emergency management. Some are concerned solely with response, others with preparedness and response, others with recovery. Very few cover these three aspects andprevention and mitigation. One of the lessons that is being slowly learnt in emergency management is that there is a requirement for planning and co-ordination across all aspects of emergency management – a comprehensive approach.
The value of the guides is that they will often provide precise information about emergency management in a specialist field. If you combine this information with the techniques or processes that are contained in this subject, and in the Australian Emergency Manual: Emergency Planning, you will have the best of both worlds, and will be confident of having addressed form, content and process.