Is Your Community Prepared for a Hazardous Materials Incident?

Experience in disasters has shown repeatedly that when emergency plans and procedures are known, exercised, and kept up-to-date by operating forces, reaction times are reduced, coordination is improved, and overall response and recovery measures are more effective and efficient.

Your community’s Emergency Operations Plan serves as a blueprint for its response to a potential hazardous materials incident.

Your community’s Local Emergency Operations Plan serves as a blueprint for response to many types of emergencies that could occur in your community, including a hazardous materials incident. Ideally, a multi-disciplinary team of specialists will have prepared the plan, which consists of:
  • The hazards in your area
  • The local resources available to respond to an incident
  • The resources of neighboring jurisdictions, as well as from States and the Federal government
The hazardous materials plan should be one component of a more comprehensive plan detailing how your community would respond to various types of disasters. The key components of a complete local plan are the following:
  • The basic plan, which is a relatively broad conceptual framework describing the policy and approach to emergency operations.
  • Supporting annexes that contain information on specific functional responsibilities, tasks, and operational actions needed to deal with particular hazards. The focus of an annex is on operations—what the function is and how it is carried out. Annexes are action-oriented and written for personnel charged with execution of the plan. Examples of annexes include warning, evacuation, and fire and rescue.
  • Implementing procedures—these may be in the form of hazard-specific appendices, standard operating procedures, or checklists. They support annexes and contain technical and detailed operational information for use by emergency personnel, including such information as lists of people to alert under specified conditions, and specific “how to” instructions for operating departments or individuals to carry out assigned responsibilities.

Because the requirements of hazardous materials incidents differ markedly from those of other emergencies, a separate hazardous materials annex to the generic operations plan is needed to address these issues. The plan outlined in the annex should be comprehensive, but specifically tailored to your community’s unique situation. For example, local fire service jurisdictions must reach specific agreements on how they will communicate and work together in an emergency. Local industries must be approached beforehand to ensure that critical equipment can be made available in the event of an emergency, with agreements in place to facilitate leasing or lending.

Once in place, the hazardous materials annex to the plan should allow your community to respond quickly and effectively to a hazardous materials incident. Its benefits will extend beyond this, however. The planning process itself—by bringing together local officials, response workers, citizen volunteers, and industry representatives involved with hazardous materials—opens important lines of communication. Through dialogue, planners can find options for minimizing the chances of a major hazardous materials incident, and prepare to work together efficiently if a major or minor incident does occur.

The following summary reviews the basic elements that comprise an effective plan.

Detailed instructions for preparing an effective plan are published by the National Response Team. (See the listings at the end of this course.)

To be effective, an emergency response plan must address the unique characteristics of the community it is to serve—a “fill-in-the-blanks” type of plan simply will not do.