Planning
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Planning
is the
Key |
| Girl Scouts try freeze-dried emergency storage food. | |
"It's not the plan that's important, it's the planning."
- Dr. Gramme Edwards
Everyone plans on some scale. Your dinner at home tonight depends on you planning ahead enough to fill the freezer with meat or fish and the vegetable bin with lettuce, tomatoes, carrots and green peppers. Those are the ingredients of a simple dinner.
If you wanted a more elaborate dish, you most likely studied recipes over the weekend, considered who the dish would feed and their likes and dislikes, thought about the cost of ingredients and the time involved in preparation and cooking, and wrote down all the ingredients in the recipe you chose so you could buy everything you need at the grocery store. For a good meal, planning ahead is a must.
So planning for an emergency just makes sense at every level. Planning for emergencies is hard because emergencies happen with no warning. Hurricanes, ice storms, infectious disease and terrorists don't consult us about the day and time they'll wreak disaster.
At the government level, planning is continuous. FEMA trains people from local fire fighters to incident commanders how to respond to disasters, work together for the best outcome, save lives, rebuild and restore lives and communities.
That training returns to local levels, in our case the five northern counties. It develops into ever-evolving emergency response plans for each county, for school districts and colleges, hospitals, businesses, the Panhandle Health District.
When H1N1 Influenza emerged in spring 2009, PHD followed pandemic flu response plans the health district had built and worked on continuously for more than five years. Those plans included how to provide vaccinations for thousands of northern Idaho residents, where to store fragile vaccines, how to get important flu information to the public and how to keep the flu's spread to a minimum.
The plans helped northern Idaho weather the flu outbreak in good form because the plans were ready when the outbreak hit. PHD has plans for any number of public health disasters that could happen in the five northern counties. They're updated constantly as population, environment and circumstances change.
Individuals need plans, too. No one can plan how your family will get through a disaster successfully except you. You know who you trust to care for your children and pets. You know which medications your parents can't live without.
Businesses need plans, too. No one knows how your business operates, what it needs and who's on your staff better than you. Luckily, there is plenty of help available. Visit the following links to get started on your emergency plan now.