Emergency managers think of disasters as recurring events with five key areas: Prevention, Protection, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery. The following diagram illustrates the relationship of the five phases of emergency management.

These key areas overlap and occur during more than one phase or time period of an incident—in advance of an incident, during an incident, or following an incident.

Preparedness is a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, and taking corrective action in an effort to ensure effective coordination during incident response.