By the Numbers: 10 Tips for Emergency Response Plans

Being prepared for an emergency is part of your employers and your responsibility. For help developing your emergency response planning, Ready.gov offers the following guidance.

10. Identify Objectives: Review preparedness and response planning performance objectives for your company or site’s program. Objectives may include regulatory compliance, hazard prevention/deterrence, risk mitigation, emergency response and business continuity.
11. Perform a Risk Assessment: Review hazard or threat scenarios identified during a risk assessment.
12. Identify Response Resources: Identify the availability and capabilities of resources to help stabilize the situation including people, systems and equipment within your facility, as well as external sources.
13. Create Incident Management Team: This requires response plan knowledge, role specific training, and an effective synergy between team members and external responders.
14. Evaluate Applicable Regulations: Determine which response planning regulations pertain to your facility and how you can ensure compliance within your site-specific plan.
15. Develop Protective Action Response Procedures: Evaluate and include life protective action procedures such as evacuation, shelter, shelter-in-place, lockdown.
16. Establish Hazard-Specific Response Procedures: Depending upon the response planning structure and required content, hazard-specific information may be either included within the response plan or created as a separate stand-alone plan.
17. Coordinate with public emergency services: Work with public emergency services such as fire, police, HAZMAT teams and emergency medical services to share knowledge of your facility and its hazards, understand their capabilities to stabilize an emergency, and determine their response time to your facility that would be needed to stabilize incidents at your facility.
18. Emergency Response Training: Training is essential so that everyone on site knows what to do in an emergency or disruption of business operations. Training should include, but not limited to:
    • Response plan familiarization
    • Individual roles and responsibilities
    • Plan review training whenever a substantial change or revision is made to the plan that affects organization, procedures, roles and responsibilities, or response capability.
    • Refresher courses, as necessary
19. Response Drills and Exercises: Corporate preparedness drills and exercises, which may include fire and evacuation drills, should be designed to test response plan components and participants’ knowledge of expectations and required duties to deploy response strategies and tactics, and restore operations.