What is situational awareness?

What is situational awareness? It as been the catch phrase in many of  the discussions but what is it? How do you achieve it after a disaster? How do you retain it during the operational phase?

In the chaos of a disaster. What specific steps should be taken to gain situational awareness for yourself and your team? There has to be a formal set of procedures to gain a complete picture of a disaster. You cannot simply say you need to have it without a structured set of policies and procedures you implement to attain it and retain it. What do you and your organization use to sort and prioritize the flood of information that will be generated after a disaster into an accurate and understandable shared situational awareness for yourself and your team.

In my book Disaster Operations and Decision Making I lay out a specific set of steps to gain the type of situational awareness needed during a disaster. It is a structure for the information to sorted, prioritized and shared so the whole team understands not only their own specific challenges but the situational as a whole. The following is an outline of that set of procedures.

Essential Element of Information (EEI)- what specific resources, and critical infrastructure in your community or organization is vital to your response and to make decisions on how to use those resources. What  specific facilities i.e. hospitals, schools, nursing homes and the myriad of other high priority life hazards have been affected. This can be as long and as complex as needed then divided ESF’s  specific responsibilities. 

Visualization- turning the Essential Elements of Information into a actual picture of resources, damage and operations.

Common Operating Picture (COP)- once a picture of the entire disaster has begun to emerge then the EOC team can begin to have a COP of the disaster. A COP is created by a common visualization showing the whole picture not just the narrow view of a single ESF.

Shared Situational Awareness- once a COP has been obtained then a shared situational awareness for the EOC team has been achieved. Now informed decisions can be made but a disaster is a moving target. The ground truth will continue to change, continue to evolve so the previous steps must be continuously updated so the COP is always changing. As your information changes then priorities and decisions can change to meet the new challenges based the best and most important information available. 

Is emergency management dead?

Someone in one of the discussion group asked if emergency management is dying. His point really was “is it changing into something we will not recognize in the future”. Emergency Management is not dying but it is changing. As always in a rapidly changing environment their are growing pains.  One of my favorite gripes is there is no recognized professional ladder for these recent college gradates to leave school and begin their careers. There are a myriad of ways to eventually get in but it is difficult for them to crack the field. Other professionals in those discussion groups suggest everything from getting CERT trained to volunteering at the local office. We do need a recognized and accepted path into the field for new graduates or we are going to loose them.

In the public sector, my experience, the jobs are few and far between and many times they are still a political appointment that can change from election to election. The easiest example is at the national level. When President Bush came into office he replaced James Lee Witt with his campaign manager. This happens at the state and local levels everyday. Add to that the lack of staff for these local and state offices In my county alone due to the present climate the county the staff has been cut in half. I live in Florida where we should have learned the lessons of not having emergency management infrastructure. Yet we are not seen as part of the community's public safety team. While the fact is we are  the leader of that team during an disaster.

Now lets something clear I do thing that the private sector is opening up for these graduates. This is a comment from the outside I have no experience in private sector emergency management. My heart has always been in the public sector so my comments are aimed at my side of the fence. Yet I would argue that climate is much the same in private sector based on what I have read.

So as a profession as a whole we do need to be asking ourselves a number of hard questions. How do we create a way for new college graduates to be given the opportunity to begin their careers? How can they gain the experience they will need for the leadership role they will play? How do we make emergency management more relevant to corporation president, elected and appointed officials and seen less as a have to do and more as critical to operations?

We all have a ways to go. I been in it for over thirty years. I remember the creation of FEMA. So those of us who have been in the profession that long have helped created this profession but the future is really up to all us