Friday 20 September 2013

Disaster Preparedness Centers On Emergency Communication Equipment

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.

Over the years, each community has developed a way to set themselves up to handle the variety of likely problems they may face. Some of these methods come from the experience of long time residents, others from shared experiences with other communities, and some from books. Private companies also have their own internal methods for handling crises.

Often people who will be tasked to help in a crisis have other jobs on which they spend most of their time. When it comes time to respond to a disaster and they are pressed into service, their skills and experience can make the difference in mitigating damage, injury and fatalities. They need the specialized training to deal with the decidedly unorthodox situations catastrophes make them face.

Large corporations and the armed forces also have a stake in crisis response and have developed systems to deal with them. The military run numerous realistic exercises each year to keep their command staff skilled at handling all manner of crisis, natural or military. Each branch of the service, each company and each city usually have completely different methods.

When a contingency occurs that is small enough the an individual group can handle it alone, their systems and experience serve them well and the responses are often accomplished efficiently and well. But the nature of contingencies is that they are often too large for an individual organization to contain. Sometimes the event simply involves more than one organization at a time.

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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