Standardized Emergency Communication Equipment Makes Successful Disaster Response Easier

By Dawn Williams


Dealing with the chaos, fear and danger of a major contingency relies on preparation and knowledge. Those charged with managing such crises must have the training to understand the unique challenges that crop up when the normal operation of society are interrupted. As with most things human, coherent discourse is essential to action, and that depends in large part to emergency communication equipment.

Social animals, from lions to elephants, rely on a leader to help everyone survive in a crisis. In Severe drought, the matriarch elephant leads the group as far as it takes to get water. Similarly, when roaming lions attempt to take over a pride, the pride depends on the dominant lion to fend off the attack off, and human societies have an analogous response.

Each city and state, as well as the nation as a whole, depend on their leaders to be ready for such crises, and to guide the rest when it happens. Regardless the source f the crisis, natural or created by man, society holds leadership responsible for reacting to it. The problem has grown over time as cities become larger and more complex.

Throughout the nation, each community has developed a way to deal with disasters. While information and experience sharing have always been a part of the process of developing contingency response systems, there was no standard way of getting things done. Some organizations, both public and private, also have set methods for dealing with contingencies.

For the most part, the responsibilities and tasks are assigned to people who do something entirely different as a job. When an emergency occurs, the ease of response and recovery depends in large part to the skills of those individuals assigned to act. How well these individuals can actually respond is a matter of training, exercises and experience.

A number of private companies and some governmental agencies have developed their own courses of instruction. Each military organization, for example, holds a required number of exercises each year designed to test the leadership and resources of the organization in the aftermath of a number of different contingencies. The process was different for each service, just as it was for each city or private organization.

When something happens which requires a full blown response for these individual organizations, their training and exercise experience helped them make the best response and recovery possible, minimizing damage, injury and loss of life. But when the event that occurs is beyond the assets or expertise of the organization, they would have to ask for help outside their group. This is when the response system began to fail, or at the least function more poorly.

Following such major catastrophes as the Oklahoma bombing and Hurricane Katrina the after action analysis led to the development of a nation-wide formal process called National Incident Management System. With all military and government entities required to participate and private organizations encouraged to, standardization has come a long way. The key to being able to work together for mutual assistance was standardizing and training on emergency communication equipment.




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