Standardized Emergency Communication Equipment Makes Successful Disaster Response Easier

By Dawn Williams


The nightmare every community is being faced with a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, largely because dealing with them requires so much work. People who have to deal with these problems have to devise a system that can best use available resources to handle a variety of possible problems. Having functional emergency communication equipment is critical to success.

The animal kingdom has a number of species which form societal groups which rely on the ability of their leader to keep them safe. A pride of lions depends on the large male to fend of other encroaching males. When the water sources dry up, a parade of elephants follows the oldest female elephant, relying on her memory to find alternate sources of water, humans also set up leaders to guide the population in crises.

Leaders of every community have a responsibility, legal and moral, to prepare for the unknown, to help each group be as ready as possible to survive and recover. Whether a crisis is a natural phenomenon like an earthquake or wildfire, or of human sourcing as in war, preparation is an inherent responsibility of leadership. As human settlements became more complex, it meant that there is much more to prepare for and protect.

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 most cities, it is the elected officials, flushed out with some local business experts, who handle the response control positions when bad things happen. How well this group of individuals handles the crisis has less to do with how well they work together than with how much training they have had. Running exercises that simulate disasters can also pay great dividends.

If there are military organizations in the community, they have experience in handling all manner of disaster, through a detailed exercise program designed to keep their abilities honed and practiced. Their ability to help in civilian crises is limited by policy, but with proper precoordination, an understanding of how they can help is easily accommodated. Unfortunately, cities, military organizations and private corporations usually develop their systems without much coordination.

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.

After recent enormous disasters like the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, a national effort to resolve the problems of coordination began. The resulting national incident management system has made it easier for communities to work together. At the center of this system is the ability to make each group able to talk together, a benefit of standardized emergency communication equipment.




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