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Rip Off and Duplicate (ROAD)

No need to reinvent the wheel — every time!

The concept is not a new one. If you read a plan, participate in an exercise, find an organizational structure, and Emergency Operations Center (EOC) procedure that you like, we all have in some form or fashion adopted all or some elements of what we saw for our own programs.

I had not heard of the process as being called ROAD (rip off and duplicate) until recently. The queen of this back a number of years was Phyllis Mann — now retired. A county-level emergency management director (and, past president of IAEM), if she thought something was a good product — she would ROAD it.

My only caution to those who think this is a quick way to accomplish many aspects of your program is that as I recall, it is not the goal to have plans and procedures sitting on a shelf. The real power of the effort is in the preparing documents — the process of getting to your final product, etc.

Lastly, if you are just into "duplicating," be sure you scrub the new document and change "city" to "county" and expunge all the names of the previous organizations.

Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.