Emergency Preparedness

Within the Australian government, the Department of Home Affairs has responsibility for emergency management.  It has a number of resources including a Crisis Appreciation and Strategic Planning (CASP) Guidebook, a National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework and a Disaster Preparedness Framework.  It’s fair to say that none of these documents is especially detailed and none get to the kind of practical level you will need to preserve your operation and help your tenants. 

 

At a more helpful level of practicality is the Emergency Planning Handbook developed by the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience. This handbook provides an outline of the steps to take in preparing an emergency plan, some of the key things to think about, and how to make sure it gets implemented.  However, it still assumes a reasonably high level of knowledge and sophistication.

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State and local governments have a much more direct role in emergency management than the Commonwealth government and most State and Territory governments have frameworks and advice in place for citizens and organisations.  For instance, here is the Queensland Government’s short tips for preparedness. 

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The Australian Red Cross also plays a key role in responding to disasters and it has some handy and accessible information for individuals to help them get ready for a disaster.

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The following uses the framework outlined by the Red Cross and draws on other sources to provide a quick outline of things you need to think about, both for your organisation and for your tenants.

 

Knowing the Landscape

As an organisation it’s important to know, well in advance of any emergency, what risks you and your tenants face, and what systems are in place to manage them. 

• In risk assessment, you will need to understand the specific risks in your community – for instance, if you face flood risk, what locations and tenancies are at risk, what risks do your staff face and what direct impacts would a disaster have on your capacity to do business?

• As part of knowing systems you would need to know:

  • What early warning systems are in place in your communities and how can you ensure you and your tenants are connected to them?

  • Who makes the overall response decisions in your community and how do they communicate these?

  • What resources are in place when a disaster strikes?  For instance where can people get sandbags, what is the number for the SES, where are evacuation centres located?

 

Knowing these things will help you to plan well for any emergencies that might take place.

 

Building Resilience

The second aspect of emergency planning is to build your and your tenants’ resilience so that you are in a position to weather emergencies as well as possible.  It’s not coincidental that these measures can also result in other improvements to your operation and to people’s lives.

 

For your organisation the types of things you need to look at are:

• Your records – the more your records are digitized and stored offsite or on cloud storage, the less risk there is of them being lost or damaged in a natural disaster.

• Your capacity for remote work – if your staff are able to work and collaborate from home then travel restrictions brought about by a natural disaster or other emergency will have less impact.

• Your flexibility around client contact, with alternative ways for clients to contact you if your office is closed, including for those who may not have reliable internet access and have limited literacy.

• Your relationships with partners – people who do essential maintenance on your properties, people who provide associated support services for your tenants, etc.  If you have others you can call on for help (and who you can help in your turn) then this makes your whole community stronger.

 

All these things will help you continue to operate in a crisis and minimize its impact on you and your tenants.  They can also improve your productivity and customer service in other ways, through more flexible working arrangements and more ways for tenants to access your services.  Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic many of these ways of working have now become embedded in organisations’ business.

 

For tenants, as for anyone in the community, the keys to resilience are having strong relationships and having resources for a crisis.  People often get through crises with the support of family, friends and neighbours as much as the support of governments and formal support organisations.  This is particularly important for people like your tenants who have quite limited material resources.  For some, they may have supportive family or good friendship networks in the community they can turn to.  For those who don’t, you can’t fix this but you can help by:

• Fostering good neighbourhood relationships, especially where you have a number of tenants in a complex or a neighbourhood.

• Ensuring your tenants are aware of who to contact in an emergency.

• Helping tenants to make emergency plans so that they are prepared in advance – the Red Cross guidelines  (https://www.redcross.org.au/prepare/) are a good basis for this and you may be able to work with local emergency services to help your tenants with this.

 

Making Plans

As well as steps to build resilience, you will want to have detailed plans for when an emergency hits.  Once the emergency is under way, it’s too late to plan because you will be reacting quickly – so if you have a ready-made set of plans you can draw on this will help you be more systematic in your responses – although every emergency is different and you will still have to think on your feet.  One way of thinking about such plans is in four phases

1. Responding to the immediate emergency

2. Cleaning up

3. Recovery

4. Learning

 

In the Responding phase, you need to be thinking about your own staff and operation, and about your tenants.

• Knowing whether it is safe to still operate from your office, or if you need to evacuate your office and work form elsewhere.  You need an office evacuation plan, and a plan for how to keep essential operations going without your office – what operations are essential, and how do you sustain them?

• You need an efficient system for checking on your staff, making sure everyone is safe and OK, and finding out who is personally affected (and hence needs to attend to their personal situation and can’t work) and who remains available to keep essential tasks going.

• One of your most essential tasks is to check on the wellbeing of your tenants.  It helps to have a plan for this that you can put into action quickly – a list of all your tenants, their locations, contacts and some key information about their supports and vulnerability factors (e.g. disability, health issues, social isolation).  This way you can quickly identify the tenants most affected by the incident, prioritise them based on their vulnerability and assign the job of contacting each of them to your staff.

• You may also need an evacuation plan – for your office and your tenants.  If tenants need to be evacuated, where can they go?  If your office needs to be evacuated, what is the priority to take with you and how would you operate without it?  For your tenants you won’t necessarily need to find temporary accommodation for all of those evacuated – many will have family or friends they can stay with in the short term and this may be a more supportive, comfortable environment.  However, you do need to prepare for the fact that some of your tenants will have no alternative place to stay.  Often in the short term, local governments work with voluntary organisations to set up evacuation centres and your tenants may be able to stay there in the immediate disaster, but may need help getting there or knowing the opportunity exists.

 

In the Cleaning Up phase, it is difficult to plan too far ahead as you don’t really know what you will be facing.  It involves:

• Assessing the damage – seeing what has happened and what needs to be fixed.

• Immediate clean-up and safety/security – cleaning up any immediate mess (e.g. power lines, fallen trees, mud) and making the site or sites safe.

• Assessing the recovery process – working out what needs to happen before the site can be used again, and what might be involved in this.  This will include contacting insurers and working out assessment and remediation processes with them.

 

This can sometimes take some time and it is important that you communicate clearly and often with affected tenants and staff about this as you go along.

 

In the Recovery phase you will be rebuilding, repairing and preparing your sites (housing and offices) for re-use.  Depending on the nature of the damage, this could be a few weeks for some minor repairs up to a couple of years for a major rebuild. 

• For tenants in homes that have experienced significant damage, you will need to support them to work out where they can go while the repairs are in progress.  You need to bear in mind that going through a natural disaster can be a significant trauma for any person, and this can be compounded for tenants who have experienced other traumas in their lives already.  This may mean that even if the repairs are relatively simple the tenant may be reluctant to return to that home, and you may need to be open to considering another arrangement.  If the repairs are likely to be lengthy, the same may apply – the tenant may prefer to accept the offer of another property if this is possible.  If they do wish to return when the property is repaired, you need to work out with them where they can stay in the meantime.

• For your organisation, you need to consider whether it is a better strategy to fix the asset, or to take the insurance payout and move elsewhere.  If your property is in a high risk zone – e.g. in a flood-prone area – it might be better to dispose of it an replace it with something less exposed.  However, this can create a financial dilemma for a cash-strapped NGO – the value of a high-risk property (especially right after a disaster) is likely to be substantially lower than a comparable one elsewhere.

• For your office the same considerations apply although obviously in a different way.  You may be easily able to return, or the place may need extensive repairs.  If you rent it, this can be an opportunity to move elsewhere, and whatever you decide, you need an interim plan while you are waiting.

 

In all this process, good communication is key, both with your tenants and your staff.

 

Finally, in the Learning stage you will evaluate your response and see what you did well and what you’d like to improve for the future.