The Emergency Planning Process Emergency planning is not a one-time event.

Rather, it is a continual cycle of planning, training, exercising, and revision that takes place throughout the five phases of the emergency management cycle (preparedness, prevention, response, recovery, and mitigation). The planning process does have one purposethe development and maintenance of an upto-date Emergency Operations Plan (EOP). An EOP can be defined as a document describing how citizens and property will be protected in a disaster or emergency. Although the emergency planning process is cyclic, EOP development has a definite starting point. There are four steps in the emergency planning process: 1. Hazard analysis. Hazard analysis is the process by which hazards that threaten the community are identified, researched, and ranked according to the risks they pose and the areas and infrastructure that are vulnerable to damage from an event involving the hazards. The outcome of this step is a written hazard analysis that quantifies the overall risk to the community from each hazard. Hazard analysis will be covered in Unit 3. 2. EOP development, including the basic plan, functional annexes, hazard-specific appendices, and implementing instructions. The outcome of this step is a completed plan, which is ready to be trained, exercised, and revised based on lessons learned from the exercises. EOP development will be addressed in Units 4, 5, and 6. 3. Testing the plan through training and exercises. Exercises of different types and varying complexity allow you to see what in the plan is unclear and what does not work. The outcomes of this step are lessons learned about weaknesses in the plan that can then be addressed in Step 4. 4. Plan maintenance and revision. The outcome of this step is a revised EOP, based on current needs and resources (which may have changed since the development of the original EOP). After the EOP is developed, steps 3 and 4 repeat in a continual cycle to keep the plan up to date. If you become aware that your community faces a new threat (e.g., terrorism), however, the planning team will need to revisit steps 1 and 2.

Although training and exercising and plan revision will be mentioned briefly, the scope of this course covers steps 1 and 2.