Columbia University Medical Center

Emergency Response Plan

DO...

• Set up emergency headquarters as quickly as possible after disaster.



• Provide briefing for employees returning to work. Advise them of danger zones, special safety requirements, compensation, and provisions for eating, personal comfort, and first aid.



• Make an effort to return from emergency operation to normal procedures and practices. Thus you minimize extraordinary responsibility on personnel and simplify the supply system. Also, you limit the establishment of precedents that are difficult to overcome.



• Give some thought to emergency-work pay plan for employees. Decide on basis of company policy, company resources, and prevailing practice in your area. During flood, some paid regular rate, some straight hourly rate for all, others time-and-one half, still others regular rate plus a bonus for completion of recovery ahead of schedule. Take your choice.



• Accelerate efforts to make locker rooms, service rooms, and toilets usable.



• Keep employees informed of conditions and extent of recovery. Tell them when you expect to call them back and on what basis. When calling them advise of shift hours, pay rate, whether to bring lunch, type of clothes.



• Guard remote areas to prevent hazards, pilferage, looting, and the natural tendency for crowds to gather at a colorful operation such as bulldozing or blasting. Use a pass system to determine who will enter area.



• Make one person responsible for health and sanitary conditions. Have him tag drinking fountains, toilets, and washbasins, approved for use.



• Have another person supervising safety practices; perhaps your safety engineer. Make this a full-time job. Unusual tasks, plus excitement and fatigue creates unusual hazards.



• Maintain routine records. Later on you’ll need them to settle insurance claims, tax deductions, legal questions, payroll arguments. Assign people to gather required data; take photos. How about out-of-pocket expenses?



• Judge people by what they accomplish; not by display activity alone.



• Encourage imagination. Only real ingenuity will solve many of the problems. Think of similarities, differences, and substitutions, between objects that might serve some emergency purpose.



• Check all grinding wheels and other high-speed, rotating equipment prior to using it after exposed to heat or water. If in doubt, return to maker.

Do... Continued

• Keep close control on internal and external temperature when drying electrical equipment. Insulation may break down above 190 to 200°F.



• Weigh the cost of unwrapping each package, cleaning, drying, testing, and inspection for confidence against superficial estimate that raw rap only is needed. How will this affect operations and customers later on?



• Send as much damaged equipment as possible back to the manufacturer for overhaul or, at least, send it to a service shop. You will need all of your availability, talent, and space for things that can't be sent out.



• Tell employees true extent of your insurance coverage.



• Minimize strange notions that insurance covers everything; that nobody loses.



• Assign long-range responsibilities, beyond the immediate emergency. Make sure that temporary repairs are redone to permanent specifications as soon as possible. Audit your condition as soon as you are in full operation, then again in 90 days. A heating system won’t be missed all summer -- until the first freezing day in the Fall. Beware of cold weather.



• Take time out after the first crisis to re-evaluate your situation -- to briefly plan next phase. List the jobs you want done. Chart your temporary emergency organization. Compare the two. Thus you won't overlook anything or assume that "someone is taking care of it"



• Put someone in authority in charge of night activities. Important decisions must be made then too. Use more than enough guards and be specific about what you want watched.



• Try to help employees at home.

DON'T

• Jump to conclusions based on hearsay. If time doesn't permit thorough checking, at least get some facts before making important decisions.



• Be over-critical of people and work. All of you will be anxious, tired, and tense. Exercise self-control. Show appreciation for effort. Give clear instructions. Many tasks will be new and unusual to the workers.



• Waste time trying to reclaim unsolvable items or items cheaper to replace then reclaim. In this category, wet cardboard, stationary, contaminated oil, some softened cutting tools, and much instrumentation.



• Forget the danger of spontaneous combustion. Wet rags, paper, etc., can start to burn within 24 hr if ignored and conditions are right. Clear out dark, damp, corners; paper stores; rag bins; also adjacent combustibles.



• Wait too long for local services and supplies. Place orders outside of your geographical area. Ask your suppliers to help you locate sources.



• Lift emergency precautions too soon. Recovery to 100%-safe condition takes longer then you think.



• Spend man-hours on routine clean up until key jobs and critical situations are under control. Plenty of time for scrubbing floors later.



• Believe lightning can't strike twice. Protect against recurrence -- tomorrow, perhaps. For instance, flood silt raises river bottoms; makes the danger of recurring floods even greater.



• Quibble with the union over small change during initial stages, but get policy back to normal quickly. Most unions will cooperate in recovery.



• Be overcautious. Use good judgement. Weigh the risk of shutdown or slight damage to a questionable system against its value if it works and/or the cost of tear down to be certain.



• Work crews over 12 hr to regain production loss. Use two or three shifts instead. Provide time off and vacations as soon as people can be spared, to allow them to recover after the ordeal and the recovery effort.



• Ignore your own health. The road ahead will need strength, courage and vitality.