The Truth is out There: 911? 511? 411? 311? ….?

摘要

When I first started addressing and managing, then researching and gathering information onEmergency Management, it quickly became clear that there were dramatically different levels ortypes of emergencies. Although managing those situations – labeled broadly as emergency -might well bring in to play standardized approaches, resources and skills sets, the situationsthemselves clearly fell into a number of different categories. These categories ranged from fullscale emergencies to serious situations down to more moderate or milder incidents. There wereso many sub-categories within these categories, I found they needed to be further classifiedbythe characteristics of the situation: who was affected; how they were affected; who wasinvolved; how situations were handled; the timeline for handling, including “during” and “followup;” and any special situational concerns and/or skills sets needed by those involved. Iultimately realized as I tried to categorize within those areas, however, there was no single setof definitions or scale of emergency situations in general, so these elements could be applied inso many different ways that a manager preparing for a disaster vs. an emergency vs. animportant or critical situation was “all over the map.