Severe weather incidents, are certainly examples of a Natural/Human-Made major incident. They undoubtedly will have adverse impacts on your organization, as well as your workforce. They can also adversely impact your suppliers and customers. EMINT is needed for incidents with notice (when you have advanced warning of the potential incident and its impacts) and those no-notice incidents when you do not. EMINT helps organizational leaders select which planning elements to activate. EMINT helps determine what actions their own staff should take, for their own safety in many cases. Sometimes it is sheltering-in-place and sometimes it is evacuating to somewhere else, which is safer.
And sometimes it can start out as one action, and then end up the other. We are pretty sure when hear the phrase human-made incident, emergency, or disaster, their thoughts go right to acts of violence at the workplace - everyone jumps right to an ‘active shooter’ or worse terrorism.
FYI: we are part of a group of pracademics who are moving towards the phrase ‘active assailant’, since sometimes these attacks do not involve a gun or guns.
And we prefaced these incidents with the word ‘major’ – which is really in the eye of the beholder. What is a disaster for us, may not have any impact on you. Our usage of the word major is to incorporate outside groups (public safety, partners, etc.), as well as more than one internal worker being impacted. For example, when a worker has a medical emergency and is transported to the hospital via ambulance, is that a major incident? Is your organization’s continuity of operations impacted? That depends on a lot of other factors, but we imagine you can already gauge for yourself what scenarios would be considered major in your lives and in your organization.
In most of these incidents, the causality (i.e., who is to blame) is less important than the actual threat (or threats) and its hazards. The hurricane is the threat; flooding, wind damage, power outages, etc. are the hazards. Your organization probably has very little impact or blame either way on Climate Change’s impact to that specific storm (sea level rise, ocean temperature rise, etc.).
When the bridge collapses, unless your organization was the one who built it or is going to repair it, the causality is not relevant to the adverse impacts to your organization. And when the active assailant attacks your office complex, the “why’s” mean nothing to those who were harmed or worse. What counts is what your organization – and its people – do next.
What actions you take in this priority order, based on the emergency management intelligence you have: to help preserve life safety, support incident stabilization (i.e., do not do the things that make it worse), and then proceed to perform the actions to protect your property and assets.
That is what counts. That is what it means to put people ahead of profits. That is a fundamental principle of Emergency Management.
Those three priorities – L = Life Safety, I = Incident Stabilization, and P = Property/Asset Protection, form the top objectives for emergency management response officials. Look at wildfire response as an example. Based on EMINT, government officials will order the evacuation of people in harm’s way and make sure all the response teams are properly outfitted and accounted (L). They might ignite small fires (controlled burns) in one area to stop the major fire from moving to another area or expanding beyond the control of the responders (I). Last, but not least, they will try to protect the buildings nearby (P). Farmers need to evacuate themselves, their families, and their livestock first.
Now is not the time to harvest the crops. Companies in a wildfire impact zone need to communicate to their workforce to evacuate, or not to come in – and shelter-in-place somewhere safer. Failure to preserve and protect life safety can be both deadly and costly to organizations. EMINT is critical for leadership to make informed decisions in both the short-term and the long run.
The Center for Emergency Management Intelligence Research (CEMIR) is pleased to engage with both industry professionals from law enforcement and security, as well as professional associations such as the Strategic Consortium of Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), to promote this new concept of EMINT; and to partner with CEMIR. The direct and continuous connection of any and all forms of Intelligence to Emergency Management benefits every community and organization impacted by major incidents, including those which are started with natural/human-made threats.
Please check out our Substack - where this post is found! - which covers EMINT, and currently has a micro-focus on crisis communications, continuity, IDEA, and the threats and hazards around K12 (Primary) Education and Child Care organizations. Other more general aspects of EMINT can be found on our website at www.cemir.org.