Emergency Plan: For Communities and Agencies Alike,

Emergency Plan:

For communities and agencies alike, an emergency plan is the arrangement of dealing with a crisis that contains procedures on how to prevent injuries and fatalities, lessen damages and speed up the resumption of normal operations. It's important for these agencies and the community to have an emergency plan since it helps them to prevent multiple losses of resources and lives. Some of the major components to include in the emergency plan include possible emergencies, emergency preparedness procedures, lists of personnel and maps with evacuation routes ("Emergency Planning," 2005). This is because these elements provide the agency's staffs or the community with instructions of the possible emergencies and how to tackle them, their emergency duties and evacuation routes to enable them to handle the emergency effectively. To ensure that the agency or community is aware of the provisions in the emergency plan, community or agency awareness and education should be conducted. The provisions should be communicated clearly and effectively during the awareness or education program.

The main lesson learnt from the rescue efforts at the Pentagon following the 9/11 terror attacks is the need for emergency responders to incorporate appropriate strategies for fair access to response and recovery services in their emergency planning and operations. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, emergency preparedness in first responder community was divided between governmental levels and functional disciplines. However, based on the TOPOFF exercises, emergency preparedness exercises should be designed toward the first responder community across functional disciplines (Trindal, n.d.). Some of the main utilities targeted by terrorist groups to accomplish their objectives include natural gas, telecommunications, electric service, transportation, refuse and water. Of all these utilities, water can be regarded as the most vulnerable utility to terror attacks since a disruption of these facilities have a greater impact on the entire public. This is largely due to the fact that water is the most basic and important necessity of life as well as the essential facility of a society's public services.

As part of developing an emergency plan, dispatch services act as important factors in the plan for emergency preparedness. Dispatch services are systems which are used to initiate a reaction from first-responders and organize the delivery of emergency management services. In most cases, an emergency dispatch service enables citizens and community members to report a crime or event via the phone which is usually available and accessible to them. During a large-scale crisis, establishing an effective dispatch service ensures that the community or agency is prepared in the face of disasters ("Emergency Dispatch Service," n.d.).

An effective emergency dispatch service is important in the successful management of an emergency since it enables the first-responders to handle situations correctly depending on the particular specifications. Dispatch service is also important to the successful management of emergencies especially large-scale ones since it provides guidelines that are essential to the handling of that particular situation. As a result, the emergency service workers are able to dispatch the appropriate kind and number of units as reactions to the calls for assistance.