Voices of Experience: Emergency Action Plans

Dick Robert The people you serve, the people in your community, the people who are affected by your facility—they just inherently believe that you have some process in place, if you have a catastrophic failure you’re going to protect them, you’re going to warn them, you’re going to save them. And the emergency action plan, maintained at a current level, gives you all those tools.

Yazmin Seda-Sanabria An emergency action plan helps you set the stage for the preparedness portion, to know how to be better prepared prior to the event happening, and then immediately respond after the event happens. It allows us to have a one-stop source of information on how to be better prepared to face a crisis. It has key elements such as an alert notification chart, know who needs to be called first on our calling tree, when the emergency arises and how to reach out to all the potential elements that can be adversely affected, so we can move forward faster. One of the key benefits of emergency action plans is that it assists first responders to get people fast out of harm’s way, during a catastrophic event or an emergency.

Herbert Nakasone The value is in being able to react in an orderly and rapid manner. If one didn’t have a plan, you wouldn’t know whether you’re doing the best thing possible or the right thing and you wouldn’t have made the contacts of the various organizations you need to contact in a crisis. One organization can’t do it alone. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a levee crisis or a dam crisis, any kind of crisis really amounts to doing the same kind of thing: Informing people, letting them know whether they’re in harm’s way and then what to do.

Alfred J. Hancock The emergency action plan is a notification of the people downstream and the businesses downstream to let them know that there is an imminent danger or that it has occurred and get the evacuations going. It’s notification of the emergency management folks, to get their plans and put them into place and start evacuating people. It’s basically saving lives, saving injuries, but also on the other side you have the economic impact, you’ve got to make sure the businesses get notified, and if possible, remove as much stuff as they can. It comes down to trying to get the people out of the danger zone.

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