laska is truly a special place, and amongst the environs that intertwine to form the fabric of this great state, perhaps none are more special than the isolated encampments that comprise the fly-out fishing lodges of Katmai and Bristol Bay. As a teen in the early ‘80s—and later as a young adult—I was extremely fortunate to work for several seasons in Katmai, first as a lodgekeeper at Brooks Camp and ultimately as a fly-fishing guide at Kulik Lodge. Those were some of the most meaningful and memorable summers I could ever hope to experience, and the lessons learned working there have carried me quite well throughout my professional life.

Fondly recalling my guiding days, I keenly remember the sense of immediacy, focus, and ultimate responsibility I felt towards any client I accompanied on the region’s rivers and streams. However, if I were to be totally honest, I’d have to admit I was likely a little cocky (or at least overconfident) in my ability to handle any situation that might have arisen. Moreover, my recollections are firmly rooted within my own first-person perspective, with little recall or awareness as to how the owners and management staff of the lodges were prepared to deal with the rapid evolution of any emergency.

Fortunately, I’m not some doddering old angler simply reminiscing of days gone by. (Well, not doddering, anyway.) Having retired from two professions in the past four decades—including twenty years as a peace officer and police chief, with a subsequent career in industrial safety and risk management—I’ve had the distinct pleasure of coming full circle these past few years, returning to the Bristol Adventures’ family of lodges to draft and implement comprehensive emergency response manuals for Brooks, Kulik, Grosvenor, and Mission lodges, as well as their umbrella transportation provider, Katmai Air.

While revisiting these special places has been tremendously rewarding, it has also served to underscore the importance of true emergency preparation and planning. And while Alaska’s biggest corporations and organizations are often well-placed to provide additional support and resources toward emergency preparation, I would argue that smaller, minimally resourced businesses are most in need of such planning activity. While it’s often a struggle for any company to appropriately prioritize and financially support emergency preparations (e.g., “Let’s not just respond to current issues facing the company but rather spend valuable time and resources preparing for a bunch of stuff that might never happen.”), it can be done if management makes a concerted commitment to do so.

Luckily, preparing effective response materials for your business or organization doesn’t rise to the level of rocket science. Whether you’re simply auditing and verifying current contact information for key responders or assembling full-blown resource and response manuals, it’s highly likely that you possess the requisite knowledge in-house to prepare such material. Further, by assigning specific staff to periodically review and update your plans, you can rest assured knowing that information will be accurate—and highly useful—when needed.

It may seem basic, but the first step in crafting a user-friendly response guide lies in determining those circumstances that would constitute an emergency or “highly disruptive event” for your organization. Most companies deal with an array of circumstances during any given week and have become adept in responding to out-of-the-norm situations. To prevent response guides from becoming overly broad and unwieldy, senior management and administrative staff should convene and discuss the types of events that might occur, considering the relative impacts of each. Of these, your team should reach consensus on a top ten list of potentially disruptive scenarios (i.e. those things that “keep you up at night”) which you can then prepare to address.

As you work through this process, questions will undoubtedly arise relating to the principles of probability and severity. If there is a high probability that an event will occur but the impact is insignificant, then you’ve identified a relatively routine circumstance that you’re likely experienced in handling and which doesn’t merit inclusion in your response preparations. Conversely, if you identify a circumstance that might rarely happen but has the potential to cause severe disruption if it does, then you should strongly consider developing pre-planned response strategies and materials to deal with such an event.

As you complete the process of risk assessment and prioritization, it can be easy to get caught up in “what-if” scenarios. While one shouldn’t focus on the possibility of ridiculously low-probability events (e.g. an asteroid strike), you cannot afford to avoid preparing for events simply because they have a relatively low probability of occurring—particularly if the consequences would be significant (think a workplace active-shooter scenario). As a general rule, I would offer the following: the lower the probability of a severe event’s occurrence, the greater the need for the availability of a user-friendly response plan, as “low probability” generally translates to staff unfamiliarity, unpreparedness, and/or complete complacency, i.e. “It could never happen here.”

Most companies can easily craft their top ten list of potentially disruptive events, many of which will be dictated by the type of business and facilities involved. For instance, in crafting emergency response plans for remote fishing lodges, scenarios such as aircraft accidents, bear attacks, and remote medical emergencies immediately come to the fore, whereas a chemical plant located within a municipality would likely prioritize incidents such as facility fires, hazardous materials spills, et cetera.

While a specific response plan should be developed for each proposed scenario, all should be formatted in a uniform and consistent manner. I have found that the clearest plans consist of four main sections:

• PURPOSE: A concise statement articulating the hazard/scenario and the need for employees to be knowledgeable and familiar with immediate response actions.
• BACKGROUND and SCOPE: While this section won’t be used during the actual response, it’s crucial to provide such information to managers and employees during their initial training and introduction to the plan, providing further context regarding the necessity of each operational component.
• RESPONSIBILITIES: This section comprises the “meat” of the response plan, articulating the duties and responsibilities for all levels of employees within the organization in response to an emergency event. For every tier of employees, responsibilities may include immediate actions, notifications, or documentation efforts.
• ATTACHMENTS and APPENDICES: There is nothing worse than trying to locate an emergency phone number, facility diagram, or other piece of critical information when responding to a crisis. An effective response plan should anticipate the information and materials required by employees and company managers, as well as that needed by emergency responders, regulatory agencies, and others. Contact numbers, hazardous material safety data sheets, pertinent maps and diagrams, et cetera should all be included as necessary within each individual response plan, ensuring that information will be readily available when needed.

While it benefits organizations to develop a library of scenario-specific response plans, each detailing the immediate actions and notifications needed to minimize the impact (and prospective duration) of an emergency event, I firmly believe these plans need to reside under a larger, organizational framework. As initial response efforts must quickly transition into ongoing incident management, your company should have a standardized process for quickly forming a scalable Incident Management Team (IMT) responsible for drafting and implementing a focused Incident Action Plan (IAP).

NIMS is an acronym for the National Incident Management System. ICS refers to the Incident Command System. NIMS reflects the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s comprehensive framework for incident management, applicable to emergencies of all types and sizes. ICS reflects a standardized, on-scene management structure, designed to aid in the supervision of personnel during an emergency event.

NIMS and ICS processes evolved and rose to prominence in the field of wildland fire management in the Lower 48, where multiple agencies had to frequently come together in an organized, coordinated fashion to deal with region-wide emergencies. Almost all governmental and regulatory agencies now utilize NIMS/ICS protocols, as the standardized, scalable nature of these systems allow for the uniform implementation of common-sense command and control organizational structures and protocols.

For those wanting to learn more—and avail themselves of free online training—training.fema.gov/nims. Recommended initial courses for managers and operational supervisors include:

• ICS-100: Introduction to the Incident Command System
• ICS-200: ICS for Single Resource and Initial Action Incidents
• IS-700: National Incident Management System, An Introduction

There is a major benefit for private businesses that elect to structure their response plans utilizing these same protocols: when having to deal with government agencies, either in an oversight capacity or as part of a coordinated, unified-command response, utilization of standardized NIMS/ICS practices on the part of all involved ensures that everyone is “speaking the same language,” facilitating understanding, cooperation, and coordination.

When assembling your electronic library of crisis management materials (I’m a strong proponent of constructing hard-copy binders as backups, as computer networks are often the first casualty in a major emergency), I highly recommend structuring the initial section to reflect the organizational structure and chain of command of your organization. I further recommend providing rudimentary orientation and training to your workforce—particularly all levels of management—in basic NIMS/ICS protocols (see the “A NIMS/ICS Primer” sidebar). Such training will help set the stage for your employees and managers, allowing them to better conceptualize the act of quickly coming together as an IMT, developing an appropriate org chart for the event, and drafting/implementing a coherent IAP to guide continuing actions as the company moves forward.

Toward that end, a solid IAP template, formatted specifically for one’s business and facilities, serves as an invaluable resource for the assembled IMT. A properly formatted IAP template will already contain all critical and necessary company information:

• A brief descriptive overview of the business and facilities;
• Physical facility addresses and emergency contact information for company representatives;
• GPS coordinates and other applicable location identifiers;
• Access considerations, to include nearby airport information, et cetera.

Following the space for a brief event synopsis, the IAP template will then walk team members through the process of considering specific factors that will affect ongoing response efforts, to include weather forecasts, requested resources, and logistical challenges. The template will then serve to clarify overall incident objectives for the specified plan period (note: a significant or long-duration event will likely be managed through a series of sequentially prepared IAP’s, each directing efforts for periods of 24 hours, 48 hours, et cetera), as well as articulating the specific response actions scheduled for implementation. The final section of the template once again serves to prompt the team, providing a checklist of potential attachments for inclusion with the resultant plan (applicable maps, radio frequency lists, supply rosters, et cetera).

In addition to providing an optimal plan to guide company operations, a properly prepared, comprehensive IAP serves two additional (and invaluable) purposes:

• If your organization is dealing with any type of governmental or regulatory entity as part of the overall emergency response, the agency may require review (and sometimes even mandate formal approval) of a formalized plan before granting authorization to proceed;
• From a liability perspective, if issues or claims arise after the fact involving your company’s response to an emergency, a well-prepared IAP will document that your actions were deliberate and well-considered and that you weren’t just “shooting from the hip.”

Whether you develop your own materials in-house or bring in outside resources to assist in the process, I can guarantee one thing: a collection of completed files or binders that sit unused on a shelf, with their contents unknown to managers and front-line employees, is of very little value to your organization. Once you’ve finalized your emergency management materials, it is critical that employees are familiar with their contents and are well versed in the processes involved in incident response and plan implementation.

To satisfy this final requirement, I strongly recommend that one’s workforce be taken though periodic “tabletop” exercises, where scenarios can be proposed, responses talked through, and gaps in information and/or processes identified. A good tabletop exercise should accomplish the following:

• Managers and key employees are presented with a hypothetical occurrence, corresponding with a scenario addressed in their library of response plans;
• Team members, assisted by an exercise facilitator, review the pertinent plan and confirm all initial response actions that need to be undertaken;
• Moving from initial response to follow-up management, members develop an organization chart for an IMT to manage the ongoing situation, assigning position responsibilities as required;
• Using supplied plans, materials, and the company’s IAP template, the assembled IMT should then complete the process of creating a comprehensive IAP suitable to guide ongoing operations.

Lastly, particularly for those companies with extremely limited training time and budgets, I frequently encourage businesses to view the occurrence of real-world, low consequence situations as prime opportunities to initiate and exercise the processes of IMT activation and IAP preparation. (A piece of anticipated inventory didn’t arrive? Use it as an exercise!) As managers and employees gain comfort and familiarity in fulfilling these functions, you can expect their performance will be greatly enhanced when confronted with a true emergency.