I was expecting it to be much more about the actual response, which is covered to some degree in the podcast, but I appreciated the focus on the “Before, During and Aftermath” of an incident — with a great deal of emphasis on the “aftermath.”
And I’m not talking about the shooter being dead and the transport of victims or the investigation. It is the long-term mental trauma that first responders and survivors can experience. This is not only part of the immediate aftermath, because it can go on for many years.
When you think about what types of emergencies and disasters we can focus on in our careers, I would say that flooding is the most common natural hazard. If you are thinking about a human-caused event, it would likely be a hazmat incident, but I would rank, at the rate we are going, a mass casualty event as moving up on the scale of what we might have to deal with.
With that type of event, we as emergency managers are not going to be on the front lines with the police, fire and emergency medical services (EMS) addressing the active shooter or providing direct medical care and transport of the injured to hospitals.
One of the things we could be doing is lining up the people and organizations that can help with critical incident stress debriefings. Yes, this may be a departmental function, but for a much larger event with scores of first responders, victims and survivors. The surge capacity for that does not exist in most planning and operational readiness scenarios.
It is a meaningful role for our Emergency Operations Centers (EOC) to have and to resource. Plan now so that you can execute it later, if and when it is needed.
