Homeland Security & Crisis Management Planning

There is a notably challenging requirement for all emergency managers and homeland security professionals at all levels and across all sectorscoordinating plans with all potential stakeholders. Prospective partners can range from one incident to the next, but plans and planners must accommodate the needs, interests, and capabilities of all potential contributors so as to create the most comprehensive and integrated plan, policy, or strategy. One might consider such coordination a matter of common sense, but this is often overlooked, at least in part, for various reasons.

Causes might stem from the actionsor lack thereofof EM/HS team members, external partners, or both. Lethargy; lack of resources such as time, funding, or expertise; lack of interest on any stakeholder’s or planner’s part; lack of understanding the criticality of advance collaboration; or a simple failure to follow up with organizations and individuals upon whom an EM/HS may depend, may each play a part in explaining why collaboration is not fully accomplished. It can also be difficult for individuals at the planner level, or those inexperienced in incident response, to have the vision that is necessary to foresee an assortment of circumstances requiring relationships with agencies and people and their attendant special capabilities.

Stakeholders may include fire, police, emergency services, and community leadership. Providers of public services, including public utilities, school leadership and networks, city engineers, and others, are also probably key players to consult. However, threats, conditions, hazards, limitations, geography, climate, and many other factors also combine to create the need for tailored planning, which will probably require special relationships. In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all template to employ for identifying, developing and nurturing requisite partnerships.

Advance coordinationthat is, developing relationships, sharing information, and understanding the various contributors’ capabilities before you need them for managing emergenciesis essential. Knowing what specific skills, resources, and capacities entities can bring to bear in preventing or responding to crises allows planners to incorporate these capabilities into strategies, plans, and exercises. This knowledge also aids leaders and resource managers in identifying gaps in capacity, which will need filling somehow. At the same time, once an incident occurs or seems immediately likely, the ability to contact vital participants to literally assemble and join the active response effort makes for an optimally efficient and effective endeavor.

What type of information is coordinated? Everything from listing points-of-contact and their current, tested contact information to knowing what special skills an organization or individual might have. For example, if the community believes that certain hazardous materials are a threat, say by accidental spill or if used in a weapon, the EM/HS planners should determine whether the local hospital personnel are trained, equipped, and able to perform chemical, biological, or radioactive decontamination. The planners’ motive for determining this is knowing whether the hospital staff’s abilities may be degraded if personnel are exposed to unknown substances or the facility become contaminated. If decontamination is a skill that has not been trained for, if equipment and supplies are not available, or if it is considered too remote a threat to spend time on, planners may identify and liaise with a different hospital for select crises.

Yet, as mentioned above, the vision that is required to establish comprehensive and integrated strategies and plans can be elusive. Gathering myriad prospective partners together can assist in identifying vulnerabilities, allaying fears, clearing up confusion, establishing a functional baseline for all responders, etc. Note the lessons from the following real world illustration:

A small western town is home to several prisons. Trains carryingamong other thingschemical corrosives, travel close enough to the prisons that a spill might require a prison’s evacuation. This scenario had been planned for and exercised by EM/HS and other stakeholders, yet the prison planners had not been consulted when that plans were being developed. When the many partners were together one day, quarreling about timelines and priorities during such a scenario, a local police officer calmly asked the prison officials, Where will you evacuate the prisoners to?” The official responded, To the high school.” The police officer replied, Have you mentioned this to the high school’s folks?” The answer was no, and there were no high school representatives at the meeting. The police officer and many others did not believe that prisoners being transported to schools that could be in session or hosting year-round activities presented security concerns. This idea hadn’t been thought of, yet one person’s casual question had identified an enormous gap in a specific plan.

Your assignment for this unit requires you to continue employing your selected real world county (using the pseudonym, but focusing on their real world conditions). In completing the requirements, you may consult members of the actual county EM/HS team to get insight into specific partners and capabilities that they rely on and with whom they develop relationships. You may also read their actual plans and strategies and determine how rigorously they have coordinated with external partners.

In a 5 page detailed outline, you will do the following:

  • List and describe fully your selected county’s central strategy or plan. These are often emergency operations plans with various subordinate annexes and appendices, but because plan designs can vary widely by community, research and report your county’s version.
  • Note that your county will probably have other plans as well, such as a school evacuation plan or a pandemic influenza response plan. You are free to mention and describe these as well.
  • List and fully describe 710 of your selected county’s core stakeholders that it includes (or should include) in its most central plan.
  • Core stakeholders include entities that you would reasonably expect any or all counties to coordinate with.
  • In selecting and describing these, provide depth in explaining the following:
    • Rationale as to why the relationship between EM/HS and the organization or individual does or should exist
    • How specifically coordination and collaboration benefits the EM/HS and each of the external core partners
    • At least three ways that these core relationships will provide the most comprehensive and integrated preparedness and incident response and promote information sharing specifically
  • List and fully describe five of your selected county’s unique stakeholders that it includes (or should include) in its most central plan.
  • Unique stakeholders include entities that you would reasonably expect this specific county to coordinate with. (An example is the prison’s officials in the scenario described earlier.)
  • In selecting and describing these, provide depth in explaining the following:
    • Rationale as to why the relationship between EM/HS and the stakeholder organization or individual does or should exist
    • How specifically coordination and collaboration benefits the EM/HS and each of the external unique partners
    • At least three ways that these unique relationships will provide the most comprehensive and integrated preparedness and incident response and promote information sharing specifically
  • List and describe fully at least three methods for conducting coordination sessions for partners to attend.
  • Include tactics on how to elicit robust participation.
  • Describe measures that the EM/HS team might use to encourage vibrant and productive discussions.
  • Describe what baseline information the county should provide to prospective partners to elicit optimal contributions. (An example might be defining what vulnerabilities are, demonstrating a risk analysis, or brainstorming as to what threats and hazards exist in the county, and how they should be prioritized.)
  • List and describe at least two tactics that the EM/HS team does or might employ to gain viable cooperation from potentially recalcitrant partners.
  • Mention any last lessons you’ve learned while working on this assignment, or advice that you would give the county’s team to aid in their writing or improving their core plan.

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Homeland Security & Crisis Management Planning


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The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina Lessons Learned (February, 2006) recommended that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) establish a National Exercise and Evaluation Program (NEEP). By extension, the NEEP designated the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) as a way to standardize exercise planning and execution across governmental levels and sectors. Not all nongovernmental organizations use HSEEP in full or even partially. However, communities, states, and various federal agencies are expected to adopt and employ its tenets. Certainly, it provides the standard that is employed in the National Exercise Program (NEP). The HSEEP provides a standardized methodology for planners to use in designing, developing, conducting, evaluating, and improving exercises and training.

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The HSEEP also serves as an extensive resource, replete with useful tools, templates, and examples for building exercises and determining training needs, creating training events, and assessing the merits of all related activities. As you know or are learning, training and exercises are ideally integrated, not merely linked. What is the difference between these concepts of linkedand integrated? Exercises that are linked to training may (or may not) draw directly or indirectly from training drills and events. Exercises that integrate training are considerably more dynamic, with training occurring as the exercise unfolds. This latter technique better develops critical thinking, problem-solving, leadership, and decision-making abilities as well.

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The following illustration should clarify this benefit:

Soldiers and law enforcement personnel routinely attend weapons ranges to practice and qualify on their assigned weapons. This training helps them to maintain proficiency or improve in their individual skills. Consider an exercise that links this specific training to other training. The soldiers are completing a special obstacle course in which they run, climb rope ladders, swing over water obstacles, etc. Sometime during the course, they shoot at targets and then dismantle weapons under timed conditions and must achieve a certain score on their target hits. There is linkage to firing weapons accurately to the overall stress-inducing obstacle course.

Integrating the weapons training might look like the following: Soldiers, equipped with laser-emitting weapons, and wearing special sensors on their helmets and vests, commence to move in tactical formations proceeding through wooded (or desert, jungle, etc.) environments. Another group of soldiers, also equipped with special weapons and sensors, plays the opposing force. The two groups engage in realistic combat operations requiring accurate weapons fire, plus evasive movement, simulated first aid, evacuation of casualties, and other assorted requirements. In this case, firing a weapon potentially has an offensive and defensive role, yet is one part of a whole scenario. (You might substitute law enforcement training for an active shooter scenario, or firefighters directing the main water supply at a fire, as other examples.)

The HSEEP describes the preparedness cycle extensively. As you review HSEEP’s volumes, you will read more about this cycle in Volume 1, Chapter 4. Like most planning cycles, the preparedness cycle includes (among other steps) stages of planning, exercising, evaluating and improving plans. These steps are fairly common within planning cycles for what should be obvious reasons. Plans require a careful and comprehensive approach. Once they are complete, they must be exercised as thoroughly and realistically as possible. During and after exercises, observations and lessons must be collected, assessed, and most importantly, acted upon. These actions should include the refinement or modification of the initial plans, as necessary. Then the cycle begins again.

Too often, managers and leaders are satisfied with the initial establishment of plans that remain untested, are never properly validated, or do not undergo regular review and revision. Well-designed exercises of plans can solve all of these insufficiencies. Yet, exercises take expertise to develop, cost money to execute, and require time to prepare for and conduct. Again, the HSEEP is an excellent resource to aid homeland security professionals in selecting and conducting relevant training, and for developing appropriate and realistic exercises.

Take into consideration the following scenario:

You are still a planner with the County Office of Emergency Management. Since your arrival, you have reviewed all of the plans that the office maintains. The director has asked you for your candid assessment on the county’s plans; he requests that you select one plan as a priority for the planning team to focus upon, and one you can also use as an illustration for how plans should be designed, exercised, evaluated, and refined. You have decided to choose a subject-specific plan rather than the county’s broader emergency operations plan. You will select your illustrative plan from those pertaining specially to pandemic influenza preparedness, information sharing, critical infrastructure identification and protection, or continuity of operations. In simulating your county’s plan, consider it potentially inadequate, having never been tested or refined, and being at least seven years old.

For your assignment, using any program or media resource(s), you will prepare a formal presentation (complete with extensive notes) that educates and trains your county EM colleagues. Complete the following steps:

In 8 pages:

  • Choose one of the types of plans listed above; describe what this type of plan is intended to do in contributing to the county’s preparedness. (You will need to research these types of plans independently if you are unfamiliar with them.)
  • Communicate the status of this plan. This will require some imagination as you depict a hypothetical state for it; make the plan as strong or weak as you desire, but be clear in your presentation and notes as to how you assessed the plan and why you selected it for a priority for testing or revision.
  • Fully explain the preparedness cycle to your teammates.
  • Design a model (or employ an existing version) creating or using a picture, graphic, representation, etc., to illustrate the cycle.
  • Explain what capabilities and activities each stage in the cycle promotes to contribute to the overall effectiveness of all plans.
  • Explain what capabilities and activities each stage in the cycle promotes to contribute to the overall effectiveness of this particular plan—be specific (e.g., consider how activities that are promoted by the cycle’s stages might differ for critical infrastructure protection vs. pandemic influenza planning).
  • Describe in detail at least three important facets for designing a valid and relevant exercise.
  • Explain the importance of these facets for any and all planning.
  • Directly relate these facets to testing or improving the plan you have reviewed.
  • Choose and describe at least five important stakeholders or partners with whom county EM planners should work.
  • State who they are and why are they important, especially in developing, exercising, evaluating, and refining this plan.
    • Make at least one of these prospective partners a private sector representative (real or notional).
  • Provide recommendations for ways the county should draw these stakeholders into contributing to the preparedness cycle’s activities.
    • What incentives might the county specifically offer each partner to elicit enthused collaboration?
    • What capabilities might the county expect each partner to bring to bear?
    • Suggest ways in which each partner could be integrated into an exercise for this specific plan.
  • Prepare final recommendations for a way ahead, focusing the county on those steps to be undertaken to eventually result in a validated plan.
  • All resources that are used should be appropriately cited.

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