What is Emergency Management

What is Emergency Management?

Emergency Management is an intricate cycle with a simple focus on helping communities: Prevent, Mitigate, Prepare For, Respond To, and Recover From any incident that threatens life, property, the environment or the economy.

Emergency Management helps communities manage risk, prioritize their actions and resource allocation during emergency situations, and promote a timely recovery for affected stakeholders. The core focus of emergency management is to use the Incident Command System (ICS) as a organization reflex in the preservation of (ranked highest to lowest priority):

• Life
• Property
• The Environment
• The Economy

The Incident Command System

The Incident Command System (ICS) is an internationally standardized mechanism for coordinating incident management activities, regardless of the size or scope of the event. The Incident Command Statement is designed to be adaptable to evolving situations and allows for the easy integration, or discharge, of available support services and response activities as the event progresses. In this way, ICS allows for a unified command structure that is able to make effective and efficient use of assets – human, material and financial – depending on the size, scope or “type” of incident.

ICS classifies incident into types bases on factors such as the size of the response or the time the response remains active; Type 1 is the highest level (most intensive) response, while Type 5 is the lower level – the types on incident we deal with on a day-to-day basis. The SVREMP allows a local response to larger (Type 3 or 4) events on behalf of our partners when requested – and may also give us a strong local reaction in he case of Type 1 or 2 events until additional resources (from regional partners or the Province) can be marshalled to the area.    

ICS trains emergency response personnel to be effective members of a team – any team – by focusing on the PPOST when organizing an incident response and by ensuring the stated objectives are SMART:

PPOST – Priorities, Problems, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics

SMART (Objectives) – Specific, Measurable, Achievable (or Action-Oriented), Realistic, and Time Specific

Using this system makes for responses that address both immediate and long-term considerations by taking actions that balance the needs of the community, the abilities of the responders and limited resources available at any given time.