Chemical incidents can quickly overwhelm a community’s emergency response system and often require specialized resources which may not be immediately available. Decisions made and communicated within the first few hours of an event can dramatically reduce the spread of contamination and the number and severity of injuries. Engaging in pre-incident preparedness activities can help ensure the community understands, plans for, and tailors the response system to the most likely chemical risks, while building an understanding of how a chemical incident response fits into the larger all-hazards response system. Effective pre-event planning can help mitigate short- and long-term incident consequences and potentially reduce time and cost of recovering from a chemical incident, leading to a more efficient and effective response and recovery.
- 1. Why Pre-Event Plan?
- 2. Engage with Local Chemical Incident Planners and Create Stakeholder Working Groups
- 3. Identify and Understand the Community’s Chemical Risks and Current Capability Gaps
- 4. Understand How Time-Sensitive Decisions Are Made in Crisis Situations
- 5. Treat the Community’s Entire Response as a System of Systems
- 6. Develop a “Whole Community” Concept of Operations