Canton on Emergency Management

Emergency Management Solutions - July 2023

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Featured Articles

Functional Annexes: The Backbone of Your Emergency Plan

    by Lucien Canton

 

Formalizing Emergency Management as a Profession

    by Tim Riecker

 

Aligning Crisis Management Strategies with Objectives

    by Erik Bernstein

Functional Annexes: The Backbone of Your Emergency Plan

In my last two articles I briefly discussed the basic plan and hazard-specific annexes and problems I have encountered in helping to develop emergency plans. Each is important and an essential element of a good emergency operations plan. However, I would argue that they would be ineffective without the support provided by functional annexes.

Why are functional annexes so essential? Where the basic plan contains the overall strategy and concept of operations of how the organization will respond to a crisis, functional annexes describe how that strategy will be implemented. The basic plan describes the “what” while the functional annexes provide the “how”. Where the hazard-specific annexes address agent generated needs, functional annexes form the basis of all-hazards planning by detailing how the organization will deal with the response generated needs common to most disasters.

Unfortunately, functional annexes are often overlooked. It’s been my experience that limited funding for emergency planning is more often applied to “updating” the basic plan than to refining functional annexes. While basic plans should be regularly reviewed and updated as needed, the rarely require substantial changes and an update usually results in some minor changes and reformatting. The money spent on going through the entire planning process and developing a “new and improved” basic plan would, in many cases, be better spent on developing a process to update functional annexes.

Part of the reason for this neglect is that each annex requires a major planning effort with input from multiple agencies and organizations. Since this planning is usually the responsibility of the lead agency, the level of effort and quality of output is dependent on the commitment of that lead agency. Further, functional annexes are dependent on the existence of departmental plans, standard operating procedures (SOP), and field operations guides to implement the tasks specified in the annex, something that also requires commitment on the part of the lead agency.

In preparing a functional annex, try to keep two things in mind. The first is that the annex is not a SOP. It does not provide the user a high level of detail but instead should incorporate by reference existing SOPs and operational guidelines. Consider, for example, a functional annex for something as complex as resource management. Including the process for ordering and distributing urgently needed supplies would expand the annex to the point where the EOP becomes a multi-volume set. Further this process may change in response to new procedures or changes in technology. The same could be said of tracking financial data such as overtime and equipment costs.
The second thing to keep in mind is the needs of the user. Write for the user, not the reviewer. Commonly used topics like scope and purpose may serve to satisfy a reviewer who is not familiar with the plan or the planning process, but they are meaningless to a user in a time of crisis. They will skip over this stuff to get to the information they need. Indeed, an early study by Thomas Drabek suggested that users rarely refer to plans in a time of crisis. Keep it simple and focus on essential information.

Your functional annexes should, at a minimum, answer the following questions:

• What are the main tasks I must accomplish? What do I need to do and why is this important? Who is dependent on my accomplishing my assigned tasks? You should distinguish between high priority and immediate tasks and those for which the user has responsibility but are not of immediate urgency.
• Who’s in charge? The basic plan identified a lead agency for this annex, but the user needs to know specifically who from that agency will be the principal coordinator.
  What authority do I have? Who can make decisions to commit resources? Is it the representative at the emergency operations center, the lead at the department operations center, or the department head? Certain functions, particularly those related to financial obligations, often require specific delegations of authority. Who has these or how to obtain them are critical to the user’s ability to perform their tasks.
• What resources do I have? The basic plan usually includes a list of support agencies but normally does not specify why they are in support. The annex should include this information and specific points of contact for the resource. Resources are not limited to just supporting agencies. Our EOC in San Francisco included a computer with specific software requested by the city attorney, two dispatch consoles to support police and fire departments, and a specialized radio system allowing communications with aerial assets provided through the sheriff’s department. Also be aware of resources that might be sensitive and not included in the annex. For example, on client I worked with maintained kidnap and ransom insurance that included provisions for a trained hostage negotiator. We need not include this in our kidnap annex for security reasons but did include it in training for coordinators assigned to implement the annex.
• On whom do I depend? This question is often overlooked. We do not operate in a vacuum and there are inherent expectations that everything will go as planned. This is often a forlorn hope in a disaster so it is critical that dependencies that can affect assigned tasks are known up front.

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that any component of the emergency plan is more important than the others. They are intended to work together and address the needs of a crisis. The basic plan provides the overall concept of operations, the functional annexes address the response generated needs likely to be encountered in most disasters, and the hazard-specific annexes fine tune the methodologies of the functional annexes to address the agent generated needs of a particular hazard. What I do suggest, however, is that we expend a lot of effort focusing on the basic plan but often neglect the other annexes. The result is that we can easily fall prey to what Dr Erik auf der Heide refers to as the “paper plan syndrome”, the belief that just because we have a good basic plan, we are ready for crisis.