Homework: Critical Incident Response and Recovery
This homework is worth 30% of the overall grade for the course so it should be taken seriously and a substantial amount of your work should be devoted towards it. Utilize external resources such as online searches, journals, texts, and archived newspapers in answering these question sets. Be sure to give proper attribution by referencing and citing any borrowed work that you utilize in answering these question sets and follow the MLA or APA style for your works cited or references page and in-text citations. Utilize 12 point font, preferably Times New Roman or Arial. Your work should be single spaced and your ideas broken up into appropriate paragraphs. You may use 1 inch margins all around. There are 10 broad question sets that need to be answered. Utilize approximately 1/2 to 1 page worth of material for each question set, therefore your homework should be about 5-10 pages in length.
Critical incident response specific scenario and question sets.
Think up a hypothetical emergency or large-scale disaster scenario that affects a large population of people and a vast area. The scenario can be natural or manmade in nature. Some examples of natural disasters could be hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, tsunamis, floods, infectious disease outbreaks, and forest fires. Some examples of manmade disasters could be suicide bombings, workplace or school shootings, radiological, biological, or chemical attacks, poisonings, water supply contaminations, mass power outages, arsons, building or bridge collapses, and infrastructure or food, water and heating supply sabotage. Use this hypothetical scenario to answer the critical incident response question sets below.
• What are some of the major challenges emergency managers will confront during the response phase of this disaster? Why are these problems? Why are these issues important to resolve? Finally, how can these problems be overcome by the emergency manager and other related actors or agencies?
• Who will be the most critical actors to arrive initially at the scene of the incident? Why are these actors so crucial? What kind of equipment and training should they possess?
• What are some of the major and pressing considerations to consider when dealing with this disaster scenario? What are some hazards that will need to be assessed and overcome? Who will need to be warned or evacuated? Will transportation and shelter arrangements need to be made?
• List the steps that would need to be taken starting with the most pressing needs down to the final details. How will emergency medical care be distributed? Will mass triage need to be established? Will the affected area need to be cordoned off?
• Why is emergency management so important during this phase? Could an unorganized response actually lead to more confusion and chaos? How can resources and personnel be allocated efficiently with a central command post?
Critical incident recovery specific scenario and question sets.
Use the same above scenario to answer the critical incident recovery question sets below.
• What are the initial steps that must be taken before recovery operations can take place? Why is disaster recovery so important? Should we strive to make the area better than it was before the incident?
• How can the public or nonprofit organizations assist in recovery operations? Should volunteers be sought and utilized? How could public donations be collected? How could debris be recovered and removed?
• Is the management of public relations crucial during the recovery process? How could information be relayed to the public to assure them that everything that needs to be done is being done? How could some of the survivor's mental health have been affected by the disaster? Should crisis counselors be sought to deal with the survivors and victims of the disaster?
• How important is it to promote a culture of vulnerability reduction to prevent disasters from occurring in the first place or at least mitigating their consequences if they do occur?
• How can technology be harnessed to smooth the recovery process? What are some tools available to emergency managers for recovery operations? Could the lessons learned from this disaster response and recovery be used in the future to better help communities respond to and deal with a disaster? What are some new and possibly unexpected threats that could arise in the future?
Format your homework according to the give formatting requirements:
• The answer must be using Times New Roman font (size 12), double spaced, typed, with one-inch margins on all sides.
• The response also includes a cover page containing the student's name, the title of the homework, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
• Also include a reference page. The references and Citations should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.