Single Points of Failure-Emergency Management Single Points of Failure.pdf

Emergency Management Single Points of Failure

1. Dr. Todd A. Smith
Emergency Management Single Points of Failure:
Disaster management at the local level encompasses every aspect of public administration.
Local emergency management practices using jurisdictional authority are central to protecting
communities during incidents and events. Although contemporary emergency management
plans, procedures, and policies are methodically developed over time, a single point of failure
may cause preventable issues that result in a measurable loss of time, funding, or opportunity. A
single point of failure can be any moment where a process, action, or detail was either
overlooked or executed incorrectly and caused local emergency management challenges.
Public administrative professionals should explore local emergency management single points
of failure and create intervention processes that are strategically developed to minimize or
eliminate identified failure impacts. Those appropriate public administrative strategies are best
created from comprehensive effective exploratory research, qualitative method instruments,
data collection, and analysis. Those new strategies can then assist other local emergency
managers in understanding and preventing related potential failures and further determining
single points of failure commonalities among new independent variables. Real-world issues can
also be linked to those gaps specific among single points of failure in the public administration of
local emergency management. Disasters are often the primary encounters in which local public
administration emergency management programs provide the community with needed
resources. Local governments are the first level of oversight of these incidents and events, and
the likelihood of single-point challenges is significant. When incidents unfold, the local
responders make the most crucial decisions and must rely on their existing emergency
management plans. Although local emergency management organizations are structured
differently and vary in their responsibilities, they all have similar local expectations. Local
emergency managers who seek a better understanding of single failure points may help avoid
their negative public administrative consequences. Each emergency management team’s
practices drive the results of the national primary mission areas of prevention, protection,
mitigation, response, and recovery for each local community. Insights learned from single points
of failure can help create innovative, practical tips and strategies for real-world application. The
problem is that when outcomes are unfavorable to the whole community being served, those
outcomes may often unknowingly result from an unanticipated single point of failure. Honest
programmatic evaluation can provide an analysis of those unfavorable outcomes. Tracing
causal influences also helps formal emergency management plans to identify and fill single
point of failure gaps. The significance of evaluating single points of failure is that because local
emergency management programs are uniquely structured to meet the local authorities’
expectations, programs may not connect similar industry failures due to technically different
settings. Working with targeted coordinating and cooperating partners can greatly improve,
among other things, the conditions to conduct disaster operations, the lives of those in a given
community, and the work environment of local emergency managers by providing findings that
can be applied at the local level. When emergency managers approach the broader scale to
affect change to help a wider group of people across interactional segments.