Planning in Pictures— the future of critical incident planning and response
Planning in Pictures— the future of critical incident planning and response
By Keith Germain, COO, Critical Response Group, Inc.
Scan the reports, articles, and official statements in the wake of an active shooter or mass casualty incident, and you’ ll see the same observations and statements show up again and again. Looking at just a pair of airport shootings( one in Los Angeles, the other in Fort Lauderdale) yields the following parallel observations and admissions:“ hampered by poor communication and a lack of coordination between agencies,”“ problems that contributed to a chaotic evacuation and delays reaching victims,”“ deputies were unfamiliar with the airport’ s layout, which caused delays responding,”“ the aviation department denied access to airport blueprints to SWAT teams trying to sweep and secure the terminals,”“ officers arriving at the airport didn’ t know where to go.”
If you continue to dive into the myriad of post-incident reports in the wake of mass casualty incidents in the United States, you’ ll quickly notice the frequency with which we continue to experience these problems stemming from the lack of a common language and lack of spatial awareness.
The reason lies in the inherent difficulty in trying to use text-based plans in the time-compressed chaos of an actual incident. From the days of Columbine, virtually every industry, profession, and institution has endeavored to develop and promulgate emergency action plans. Many highly-skilled and well-intentioned professionals have put their efforts and energy into developing effective plans. Unfortunately, those plans typically reside in dustcovered three-ring binders on a bookshelf( or the modern digital equivalent) in the form of thousands upon thousands of words. In that time-compressed space surrounding an actual incident, these text-based plans predictably fail to be put into action based on the following challenges:
• When an incident occurs, can you locate your binder or digital equivalent in a timely manner?
• If you find it, can you search through the hundreds of pages to find the specific information you need?
• If you can find the information you need, can you disseminate it to the ever-growing number of emergency responders from multiple jurisdictions who are descending upon the scene?
• If you can beat the odds and locate your plan, the page within the plan, and disseminate it to the intended recipients— can they read, understand, and communicate off of the plan in time to mitigate and minimize the casualties?
Objectively evaluating those questions brings to light an unrelenting truth: In order for a plan to be real it must be both accessible and understandable. Accessible means having the ability to easily get the plan into the hands
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