vendredi 13 septembre 2013

Standardized Emergency Communication Equipment Makes Successful Disaster Response Easier

By Dawn Williams


How well a community reacts when faced with a disaster is largely dependent on knowledge and training. The people elected or selected into positions which will have to deal with such crises must have the unique skill set designed for such events. One of the most critical capabilities necessary is accurate verbal interaction, which requires 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.

When a population elects leaders, they imbue them with the authority to deal with huge problems, and hold them responsible for dealing with contingencies. The source of the contingency does not matter, as a lone gunman or an earthquake are equally dangerous to society, and leaders need to be able to handle either. This makes for a long and complicated list of possibilities groups must be able to deal with.

Throughout the nation, each community has developed a way to deal with disasters. While information and experience sharing have always been a part of the process of developing contingency response systems, there was no standard way of getting things done. Some organizations, both public and private, also have set methods for dealing with contingencies.

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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