What are the ABC's for emergency management?

Like the ABC's used in EMS for every patient; airway, breathing and circulation. What are the first three most important things an emergency manager must know to begin their response to any disaster? Are there three over arching pieces of information that should guide emergency managers in the initial hours or days of a response.

In my book using the Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA Loop) as my guide I came up with What do you have? What do you need to do? What do you need to do it? Repeat. Repeating the Three Questions would keep everyone in a constant state of evaluation until a clear picture has been established. My objective was try to find out how to begin. What do you do every time no matter how big or small the incident (a tornado or tsunami or earthquake) in the first minutes, hours or days to be able to properly size up and respond to an event. But I still feel as if there is a better more complete set of questions or basic principals out there. 

Part of the answer has to be the ICS/EOC interface. The people with their feet on the ground are your only assets in the beginning. One of the answers it would seem to me is: what assets are still capable of responding and what are they doing. This would include fire, law enforcement, public works, hospitals etc. What is their condition and have the been impacted by the incident and have they begun operations. This would be reported by the IC or if the incident was large enough multiple IC's. It goes back to the old question we used in the field when we walked up on an incident. What you got?

Essential Elements of Information during a Disaster

Milton Fire Rescue and Law Enforcement Agencies The link is an excellent learning/training tool. It is the radio traffic of the law enforcement and fire departments just before and after the tornado struck. The messages, their timing and the information that can be gleaned from there is an excellent example of the confusion and fragmentary nature of the information that an emergency manager will receive after such an event. How should you prepare to pull together the information? There will be other information sources in addition to the radio traffic you hear how do you sort it and begin to get a picture of your community and what has been done?

A list of Essential Elements of Information would be an ideal tool for your EOC. EEI's specific to each ESF and for the community as a whole would be a good first step. This list should be specific to your community and developed long before a disaster strikes. It should be a check list with a simple grading system to allow for a quick size up. It could be as simple as green, yellow and red. Green would mean the asset or facility was up and running and in service. A yellow would mean that it was damaged but still capable of performing most of it's duties. A red would mean it either destroyed and out of service. Everything should be considered a red until information proving otherwise was obtained. This simple system would go a long way to preparing a community for a sudden disaster.