Friday, September 20, 2013

Communicating In A Crisis Is Essential And Requires Specialized Emergency Communication Equipment

By Dawn Williams


Dealing with the chaos, fear and danger of a major contingency relies on preparation and knowledge. Those charged with managing such crises must have the training to understand the unique challenges that crop up when the normal operation of society are interrupted. As with most things human, coherent discourse is essential to action, and that depends in large part to emergency communication equipment.

Social animals, from lions to elephants, rely on a leader to help everyone survive in a crisis. In Severe drought, the matriarch elephant leads the group as far as it takes to get water. Similarly, when roaming lions attempt to take over a pride, the pride depends on the dominant lion to fend off the attack off, and human societies have an analogous response.

Each city and state, as well as the nation as a whole, depend on their leaders to be ready for such crises, and to guide the rest when it happens. Regardless the source f the crisis, natural or created by man, society holds leadership responsible for reacting to it. The problem has grown over time as cities become larger and more complex.

Over the years, each community has developed a way to set themselves up to handle the variety of likely problems they may face. Some of these methods come from the experience of long time residents, others from shared experiences with other communities, and some from books. Private companies also have their own internal methods for handling crises.

For the most part, the responsibilities and tasks are assigned to people who do something entirely different as a job. When an emergency occurs, the ease of response and recovery depends in large part to the skills of those individuals assigned to act. How well these individuals can actually respond is a matter of training, exercises and experience.

Large corporations and the armed forces also have a stake in crisis response and have developed systems to deal with them. The military run numerous realistic exercises each year to keep their command staff skilled at handling all manner of crisis, natural or military. Each branch of the service, each company and each city usually have completely different methods.

When a contingency occurs that is small enough the an individual group can handle it alone, their systems and experience serve them well and the responses are often accomplished efficiently and well. But the nature of contingencies is that they are often too large for an individual organization to contain. Sometimes the event simply involves more than one organization at a time.

Contingencies and crises are quite often bigger and impact more people and larger areas than any single group could anticipate, easily overwhelming the resources and capabilities available. Within the last few decades, following such crises as the Alfred Murrah Federal Building bombing and hurricane Katrina hitting the New Orleans area, a standardized National Incident Management System was developed. With standardized emergency communication equipment, communities can now work together and respond more successfully.




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