Emergency Management 2: Scenarios
As part of emergency planning, the following questions must be answered in regard to the specific management of the emergency:
- What are the triggers?
- How is the alarm raised / who is alerted?
- Who is involved?
- Who is responsible / Who decides (what)?
- What are the necessary steps?
- What are the timings?
- What tools and resources are available?
- Which documents / plans are relevant?
Emergencies must always be handled from the perspective of all parties involved.
Scenarios
Scenarios have the task of defining processes and specifying competences, interfaces and responsibilities for decisions, actions and the implementation of individual steps. They show time sequences and interrelationships and define the necessary resources. Scenario planning also helps to deal with unplanned situations on the basis of existing procedures.
Regular scenarios for events include both dealing with the incident itself, for example
- Weather (heat, storm, thunderstorm…)
- Crowd related scenarios
- Medical incident
- Fire
and the reactions, for example
- Show-Stop
- Evacuation or Invacuation
- …
Scenarios are highly dependent on the individual event under consideration and must be created on the basis of a corresponding individual risk analysis.
Scenario planning not only helps to improve the handling of emergencies, but can also help to identify vulnerabilities.
The classic tools of continuity planning, damage relevance analysis and maximum tolerable downtime also help to define necessities in emergency planning.
