We all have emergency plans designed to keep us safe while we are at school. That being said, having a plan to keep you safe doesn’t automatically make you secure. This week, we will talk about putting those plans into action. As a company, we started out digitizing Emergency Operations Plans. We were told that the three-inch binders did no good sitting on a shelf behind some administrator’s desk. Our customer asked us if we could digitize these EOPs and put them on a phone so people can take the plans with them during an emergency. That is the short story of how CrisisGo was born. The problem arises when you're in the middle of an emergency, trying to figure out what to do by searching through the binder for instructions. We had to reduce the EOPs from three inches of pages full of information to a series of checklists that gave them only the information they needed. To this day, we provide emergency checklists at the tap of a finger to guide school staff through almost any emergency you can think of. So why are we struggling to keep our school safe? The short answer is that we wait until the emergency occurs to look at the situation and learn what we should do from those checklists.
Historically, we have addressed emergency situations from a response, or reactive perspective. The vast majority of our checklists start with “there’s an emergency.” From that perspective, we are always behind the response curve and put ourselves in a position that makes it impossible to prevent the incident from occurring. It has already started. If we look at the “Pathway to Violence”, we can easily translate that pathway to any emergency we might face. As a reminder of the “Pathway to Violence”, there are seven steps which take place leading to the attack: Victimization, Grievance, Violent Ideation, Research and Planning, Preparation, Probing and Breaching, and the Attack. They rarely deviate from this pathway. Understanding this process and the warning signs presented every step of the way, we are presented with opportunities to prevent the attack anywhere along the pathway; up to and including once the attack has started. I know what you are thinking: ‘Kelly, you just said, once the attack has started, you can no longer prevent it from occurring.’ While that is true, once an attack begins, our goals and objectives must shift from preventing the attack to preventing/mitigating fatalities and injuries.
Understanding the significance of the pathway, and translating it to other emergencies we are more likely to face, is simple. Every emergency has a pathway. That pathway is determined by examining what is necessary for that emergency. This is true for all emergencies, even those you can not control or prevent from occurring; for example, earthquakes and weather events. However, we can prevent/mitigate the impacts they have once they have started down their pathway. Let’s take a look at a hurricane as an example: We understand that hurricanes generally start as weather patterns with conditions that, if they come together, will form a hurricane. However, there is a progression, typically over several days and sometimes weeks. If we live in hurricane prone areas, we begin to follow these systems. As the pathway of the storm systems gets closer and evolves into a categorized hurricane, the more we tend to pay attention to that system. It can start to develop off the western coast of Africa, move west into the Caribbean Ocean, then turn northwest towards the Gulf of Mexico, then straight towards landfall.
While this is just one example of the pathway of a hurricane, as emergency managers and school safety professionals, we have to study the hurricanes and their impacts they might have on our schools and communities. Based on the status of the hurricane at various steps within the pathway, we have decision points. At some point, we have to decide whether or not we are going to close the schools, or keep them open. If the hurricane is far enough away from your school, you might choose to keep it open, or open it as an emergency shelter. If it is going to directly impact your school, you will likely close it altogether. While you can’t prevent the hurricane from coming, you can prevent it from impacting students and staff at your school. After all, that is your responsibility. Preventing or mitigating the hurricane’s impacts on the rest of the community is someone else’s responsibility.
To activate or operationalize your emergency plans, you must create a “pathway” for each emergency that includes steps to recognize the early warning signs and stages of the emergency. Once that is accomplished, early decision points can be identified and put into motion before the situation becomes life threatening. Creating a series of “if this happens, then we do this or that” decision guides. While I am generally against creating decision matrices, I am in favor of creating points of consideration to help guide people in the right direction. There are simply too many variables to create a matrix that can account for every scenario. However, if you understand the nature of these emergencies, you can use these guidelines to help point you in the right direction.
The key to operationalizing your plans is incorporating these decision triggers into your plan before the emergency starts. If you incorporate these triggers into your plans and train your staff appropriately, you can give yourselves the best opportunity to prevent incidents from occurring, or mitigate its impacts if you can’t prevent it from occurring. This happens because you are aware of its potential before it becomes an emergency, it is not a surprise to your team, and you are likely already taking steps to respond to it appropriately. Remember the “Left of Bang” timeline. Here we are moving as much as we can to the left as we possibly can. The further left we can identify and address the early warning signs, the better our chances of surviving the emergency, regardless of what it is.
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