CONTENT:
The Need for an Integrated Emergency Management PlanNameUniversity An Emergency Management Plan is a mechanism for anticipating, predicting, and avoiding a disaster risk, or dealing with it when it occurs. The plan involves putting in place measures to deal with a potential disaster before, during, and after it occurs. A key aspect of an effective emergency management plan is that it should be cyclic, by integrating the four phases of the plan namely; mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Although each phase is implemented at a given point during a disaster management, the planning and decision making process should connect across all phases to ensure effective coordination and transition from one phase to another. For instance, the designing of a mitigation phase is informed by theory and statistical data about the frequency and severity of a specific disaster in a given place. The application of a mitigation plan, such as taking steps to avoid or minimize the risk of a disaster, may overlap with the response strategies. For example, constructing buildings further inland is a mitigation plan for floods and hurricanes. In the event of a hurricane, the response and rescue team may evacuate people and move them even further inland if the hurricane is determined to be strong. The point is that the disaster information used during the mitigation phase may come in handy during the response phase. In this regard, it is beneficial to design a disaster management plan as a “nonstop process” that integrates the whole strategy, rather than planning each of the four phases in iso...