- Home
- Government
- Departments
- Emergency Management
- About Department of Emergency Management
- The Emergency Management Cycle
The Emergency Management Cycle
The Emergency Management Cycle illustrates the on-going process that organizations utilize to plan for, respond to, and recover from disasters. As a cyclical process, it is never complete. Best practices and improvement areas in one phase can influence evolution in another phase. The four phases that make up this cycle are mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Mitigation involves reducing risk to prevent future emergencies. Preparedness includes developing, training, testing, and maintaining emergency plans, procedures, and equipment. Response focuses on the immediate actions needed to save lives, stabilize the incidents, and minimize damage. Finally, the Recovery phase helps rebuild and restore communities. To learn more about each phase, please see the detailed descriptions below.
Mitigation
Mitigation is the effort to reduce the loss of life and property by implementing long-term, sustainable measures that prevent and/or alleviate the impact of disasters and emergencies. This phase of the emergency management cycle involves physical and legal measures. Physical mitigation activities may include enhancing the structural integrity of buildings, flood control projects, raising building elevations, and clearing areas around structures. Legal mitigation activities most often entails adopting/changing building codes and forbidding property development in areas prone to frequent flooding, wildfires, or sinkholes. Mitigation seeks to break the cycle of disasters: disaster, damage, reconstruction, and repeat.
Preparedness
Preparedness is a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, and taking corrective action in an effort to enhance an organization's capabilities to mitigate against, prepare for, respond to, and recover from any threat or hazard, both natural and manmade. This phase of the emergency management cycle focuses on the following elements:
- Planning
- Procedures and Protocols
- Training and Exercises
- Personnel Qualification and Certification
- Equipment Certification
Typical preparedness activities include developing mutual aid agreements and memorandums of understanding; facilitating training opportunities for personnel and citizens; conducting exercises to test capabilities; and promoting preparedness through community outreach campaigns.
Response
Response is the reaction to the occurrence of a catastrophic disaster or emergency consisting of immediate actions aimed at saving lives, reducing economic losses, and alleviating suffering by meeting basic human needs. It addresses the short-term, direct effects of an incident. This phase of emergency management consists of the coordination and management resources utilizing the Incident Command System (ICS). It involves the execution of emergency operations plans and of mitigation activities designed to limit the loss of life, personal injury, property damage, and other unfavorable outcomes.
As indicated by the situation, community coordinated response actions may include activating the emergency operations center; evacuating threatened/affected populations; assisting and promoting the opening of shelters; communicating with media and the public in a consistent and timely manner; and coordinating mass care, emergency rescue and medical care, firefighting, and search and rescue. Additional response activities may involve applying intelligence and information to lessen the effects or consequences of an incident; increasing security operations; investigating the nature and/or cause of the incident; ongoing public health and agricultural surveillance; and working to preempt, interdict, or disrupt illegal activities.
Recovery
Recovery efforts consist of those activities that continue beyond the emergency period to restore critical community functions and begin to manage stabilization efforts. The recovery phase begins immediate after the threat to human life has subsided and the incident is stabilized. The goal of the recovery phase is to bring the affected area back to some degree of normalcy. Typical recovery actions that emergency management will support and/or coordinate includes debris management and cleanup programs; facilitation of financial assistance for individuals, property owners, cities or communities; collaborate with public works on plans to rebuild roads, bridges, and key other facilities; and coordinate with county departments and community partners for sustained mass care for displaced human and animal populations. Additional recovery activities may involve the reconstitution of government operations and services; implementation of additional measures to stabilize a community's social, political, and economic environment; evaluation of the incident to identify lessons learned; drafting of post incident reporting; and development of initiatives to mitigate against the effects of future incidents.