FS120-3: Explain the programmatic elements of the emergency management program.
The Situation
You have graduated from college and accepted your first job as the Director of Emergency Management for Pillow, Pennsylvania. Here are some great resources to learn a little bit about your new town:
- https://www.pillowpa.org/about-pillow.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillow,_Pennsylvania
Now you might be wondering why a quiet town of 300 people needs a director of emergency management. As luck would have it, they just built and opened their first mega nuclear power plant. The nuclear power plant has the capability to energize the majority of the east coast. This makes this site critical infrastructure for DHS and FEMA and also becomes a single point of failure for millions of people who receive electricity downstream from the site.
In addition to the facility, it is anticipated that the facility, named Nuclear 1, will employ 1,500 people. It is anticipated that the population of Pillow will increase by 300% over the next five years. The community is working to create a business district as well as preserve floodplains and other historical areas through land use planning.
Prior to your arrival, they have never had an emergency management program in place and the elected officials are not sure what emergency management is but the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) is requiring them to have a full-time emergency manager due to the high-impact/low-frequency event a nuclear emergency would cause.
To complicate matters, Pennsylvania is a commonwealth, which means that the lowest level of government (township, village, borough, city, etc.) is a recognized form of government. The county is the next level of government that you will need to coordinate efforts with. The county will then coordinate efforts with the state. In addition to the county, you will also be coordinating efforts with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and other federal agencies.
There are a lot of things that you will need to do to get an emergency management program up and running. Please remember that a program is a collection of projects and there may be many projects within a single folder. For example, the four phases of emergency management (mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery) are usually used as the main folders for which many child projects live. As you set up your program, tell me a little bit about what you are going to be working on and what programmatic elements do you want to have in place and when? As you work through the program development process, think about the following:
- According to NFPA 1600 Chapter 4, what are the programmatic elements that should be part of your emergency management program?
- Who will be the program coordinator?
- Who do you want on your program committee? Will you invite members of the community who are against the nuclear facility to your program committee?
- How do you not lose sight of the more relevant hazards in your community that are more probable than a nuclear emergency at the facility? It is going to be hard for the community to see anything except the massive nuclear facility.
- With some of the elected officials not completely sure how this new position will work, what will be some of the challenges of administering the program? How do you plan on overcoming them?
- How do you plan on evaluating a new program? How will you measure the success of the program and how many years do you believe it will take before you are able to start measuring program success or failure?
- What are some of the other challenges, not mentioned above, that you believe that you will be dealing with as you start a brand new emergency management program in Pillow, Pennsylvania?
Task
In this assignment you will be dealing with a very challenging scenario that is faced by a number of emergency managers each year. While we would like to believe that every community/organization has an emergency management program, that isn’t true. There are more agencies that lack a viable program than you realize. The result of this for many new emergency management directors is the need to start a program anew or refresh an existing program. This can be challenging in and of itself. When coupled with a community that is in turmoil as well as a government body that isn’t sure what emergency management is or does, it can be extremely difficult.
Your task for this assignment is to apply the programmatic elements we discussed in this unit to this scenario by creating a programmatic implementation plan for Pillow, Pennsylvania. This plan does not need to be any specific structure outside of our typical APA requirements. However, it should address the areas identified above as well as any additional areas that you would like to discuss.
Because this is a challenging scenario, it is going to require you to be able to adequately address all the topics that you need to cover. Your goal is to address the challenges in an adequate manner. With that in mind, please do not submit a 1-page paper as that will definitely not be adequate for this assignment.
Purpose
The purpose of this assignment is to present you with a real-world situation that occurs more frequently than most realize. The goal is to introduce you to the emergency management program and how to implement it in a challenging environment. I don’t expect you to do this perfectly and I will keep this in mind when grading your assignments. However, you should be able to speak on the topic of the emergency management program and understand the four major components of the program as identified by Canton.
Measuring Success
- Paper will be written using APA formatting.
- The paper will have at least three citations: Your textbook and two additional academic sources
- You will adequately cover the questions posed realizing that you are new to establishing emergency management programs. I’m looking to make sure that you understand the fundamentals of programmatic emergency management.
- The paper will be submitted on time through the Unit 6 Assignment Dropbox.
