Emergency planning: Introduction
Emergency planning is an important part of modern safety management for events, which includes the consideration of safe normal operating conditions as well as potential damage situations. Emergency planning describes the handling of a specific damage or incident and the resulting consequences, while the maintenance or restoration of normal operations is covered as part of continuity planning. Emergency planning has numerous interfaces with other planning tasks, in particular crowd management, risk management and emergency communication.
Accordingly, an emergency plan is an interorganisational plan that defines the necessary steps, documents and resources, the cooperation of the parties involved and the timetable for dealing with specified scenarios in order to prevent damage or minimise its effects.
General emergency planning for events must cover numerous hazard prevention measures that generally apply to events of all kinds. These include, for example, precautions for medical emergencies, general fire-fighting measures, the provision of escape route capacities or the creation of a clearance or evacuation concept.
Specific emergency planning is based on the particular content and risk of an individual event, which must be determined specifically for the event in question as part of a risk analysis.
A structured emergency plan is necessary for every event in order to
- Protect people
- Reduce damage
- Fulfil legal requirements
- Reduce liability
- Reduce contingencies
- Reduce negative media attention
Emergency planning consists in particular of the following tasks
- Preventing emergencies through risk analysis or vulnerability analysis
- Dealing with emergencies
- Continuing relevant procedures
- Returning to normality
and can be divided into the following phases
- Preparation (organisational structure with the respective responsibilities, rights and duties) and process organisation (plans, exercises)
- Coping (identifying, collecting / analysing information, initiating / implementing procedures and measures)
- Follow-up (documentation, evaluation, improvement)
