EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS PLAN PROJECT: WHAT IS AN EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS PLAN?

 An emergency preparedness plan is a document developed to guide the administering of resources to prepare for, mitigate, respond to, and evaluate crises of all kinds, e.g., natural disasters, mass shootings, terrorist incidents, large-scale fires, incidents at nearby nuclear power plants. There is no set format or length, though the approach taken in this class is the development of a comprehensive plan on the assume that such a plan covers all aspects of any kind of shorter plan that to which a student may be required to contribute in the future. As an example, we will use the Regional Hazard Mitigation Plan Update of the West Texas Council of Governments, completed in July 2018. Samples of various Emergency Preparedness Plans will be available on Blackboard for you to review. These examples serve as guides and tools to use as you work on your project. THE COURSE ASSIGNMENT This class culminates in the preparation of an emergency preparedness plan. Parts of this plan are written and discussed over the course of the semester, and Week 15 of the course is set aside to complete the plan. Students will be a jurisdiction or agency of interest for which a plan will be written, and students are encouraged to use for their plan a setting in which they envision working in the future or are already working in today. Examples of settings that creates plans are as follows: • A state or local government entity or agency, e.g., city government, police department, fire department • A federal agency required to respond to a crisis or assist in recovery • A business or nonprofit agency planning for the continuity of operations during or after a crisis • A nonprofit agency engaged in disaster relief, e.g., American Red Cross, Salvation Army, Samaritan’s Purse Undergraduate students will create a plan dealing with a single hazard. Graduate students will create an “all hazards” plan. There is no minimum page length or number of sources required for this assignment. Please note, this project will be your final exam. Weeks 15 – 16 have been designated as work weeks for this project. COMPONENTS OF THE PLAN At a bare minimum, the plan will contain the follow components: • Section 1: An introduction summarizing the background of the plan and the scope of authority of the sponsoring agency. • Section 2: A summary of the planning process, including time frames for the development of the plan, hazard mitigation, and the ways in which stakeholders were incorporated in the process. • Section 3: A profile of the jurisdiction or agency highlighting demographic, social, and economic factors. • Section 4: A risk overview and description of hazards, including a thorough description of the hazard, the potential extent of the hazard, a summary of historical occurrences of the hazard, and the possibility for future events. In the West Texas plan, this work encompasses several sections as the the plan works through each identified hazard. • Section 5: A mitigation strategy and actions, past and future. This work is also multiple sections in the West Texas plan. • Section 6: Activities to maintain and update the plan