Even though the analysis addressed the actions managers take during response operations, as is clear from the recommendations throughout the report, effective safety management predominantly depends on actions taken before a disaster occurs. Protecting responders during an event depends on the measures, systems, relationships, and capabilities put in place long before, during disaster preparedness activities. Consequently, the majority of the recommendations are aimed at strengthening safety management during preparedness efforts. Even recommendations addressing actions during response operations—such as improved scene control or implementation of sustainability measures—rely on preparedness efforts to make them possible once a disaster occurs.

The recommendations described in this report lead to a range of potential implementation paths for response organizations at all levels of government, nongovernmental organizations, and in the private sector. Some present short-term, more immediate payoff opportunities to improve safety, while others require long-term implementation efforts but could result in broad-reaching and large safety benefits.

Immediate Implementation Opportunities

Based on the lessons of the disasters examined during the study, there is a clear need to integrate responder safety management more effectively into preparedness planning. To carry out all phases of the safety management cycle, responder organizations must define their safety requirements should a disaster occur in their community. In each area this includes determining the following:

• What information and resources will be needed for particular disaster circumstances?
• How can those needs be filled?
• If providing needed resources and information relies on others, what is required to access them and manage their efforts during a response operation?
• When they become available, how can the safety resources be linked to response management?
• Are implementation and decision processes in place to effectively utilize them when they become available?

Such planning concerns are not dissimilar to those that must be addressed to prepare to carry out response operations in general. However, because the requirements for safety management can differ considerably from those for operational response activities, it is critical they be included in planning.

Within this overall framework, a significant number of the recommendations described in the preceding chapters could begin to be implemented immediately by individual response organizations, groups of organizations, or as a component of local or regional preparedness efforts. Such steps can build on relationships and planning processes that are already under way in many jurisdictions and areas for both safety and operational reasons. Efforts can be initiated to do the following:

• Put Hazard Monitoring Capabilities in Place—Relevant steps include addressing monitoring needs in plans, procuring needed technologies for high-priority hazards, locating external expertise and capabilities, and determining how information will be collected, coordinated, managed, and used at an incident.
• Address Personnel Accountability Needs—While improvements in technology may provide better strategies to maintain personnel accountability in the future, interim steps utilizing scene control and organizational procedures could be implemented to provide more information to Incident Commanders on responder positions, activities, capabilities, and training.
• Develop Mechanisms to Provide Medical Care to and Monitor the Health Status of Responders—Coupling better information collection on responder health status with efforts to provide needed care can help address both the health needs of responders and the information needs of Incident Commanders.
• Put Necessary Procedures in Place to Make Safety Decisions and Implement Safety Policies—Many measures focused on the operational needs of disaster response can also provide safety benefits. Improved communication, scene control, and personnel management benefit response effectiveness as well as safety. Others, such as procedures to determine what safety equipment is needed and to ensure it is available, are safety specific and must be addressed separately in planning.
• Begin to Move Toward an Integrated, Multi agency Approach to Safety Management—To begin to build better safety coordination, responder safety issues should be included in interagency preparedness efforts. Mechanisms should be developed to ensure that organizational roles are well defined and that relationships and agreements are in place to draw on the other organizations’ safety assets and capabilities.

Steps taken by individual responder organizations to bolster capabilities in these areas could produce immediate safety management benefits in future response operations.

Long-Term, Potentially High-Payoff Safety Implementation Opportunities

Other courses of action recommended in the previous chapters require long-term efforts to put into practice. In some cases, the recommendations themselves are conceptual, and specific application strategies remain to be developed. As a result, pilot projects and evaluation efforts are also needed to validate the potential for changes in management processes or the application of new technologies to improve responder safety management. For other recommendations, Multi agency implementation efforts are necessary. To build a core group of disaster safety managers or to fully integrate responder safety into disaster exercises requires the efforts of multiple response organizations and levels of government. Lastly, some study recommendations require leadership and coordination at the national level to significantly benefit responder safety. While these long-term recommendations may require sustained efforts to be put into practice, they have the potential for broad and large benefits in improving responder safety management.

Pilot and Validation Efforts
Many of the study recommendations can be implemented in a number of ways. In some cases, several different strategies could accomplish similar safety goals. In others, the recommendations described are conceptual in nature, and there is either no obvious strategy to put them into practice or no consensus in the response community on the most promising approach. In most cases, the study research did not suggest individual strategies to implement recommendations. This is because differences among response organizations, geographic areas, jurisdictions, and risk environments may result in different solutions being more effective. The diversity of responders included within the scope of this study—career and volunteer, traditional and nontraditional, full time and disaster or hazard specific—carries with it a diversity of implementation challenges that need to be addressed in efforts to improve safety management. Further efforts are required to determine the specific needs of particular areas and situations, and how those needs can be addressed in the context of a broad, consistent approach to managing responder safety.

As a result, implementing these recommendations will require significant pilot efforts to determine, under realistic conditions, which strategies are most effective to improve responder safety. Such pilot efforts would be intended to develop prototypes to serve as a model for broader implementation in responder organizations. To ensure that courses of action are applicable to the full range of the response community, pilot efforts should be held in several different locations, from large metropolitan to rural areas.

Pilot and experimental efforts are also critical to evaluate the potential of technological approaches to improving responder safety. Although technology evaluation was not a central aim of this study, a number of management tools and technologies were described in the course of project discussions that could improve safety management for individual responder organizations and as elements of an integrated, incident- wide approach to safety management. As a result, a range of technical opportunities exist that could contribute to improved safety management. They include

• information and planning resources such as guidelines, checklists, and contact lists
• hazard monitoring technologies and assessment aids
• databases to manage safety-relevant information such as hazard data, responder accountability or capability information, and response logistics inventories
• responder identification, credentialing, and accountability technologies
• improvements to protective equipment, addressing interoperability problems, improving functioning in post-disaster situations, or bolstering usability
• communications technologies to aid the effective exchange of information among responders and response organizations
• technologies facilitating responder health status monitoring and collection of injury or exposure information.

In each area, a wide range of technology options exists to implement the desired function. For example, for hazard assessment guidelines and decision aids, the desired functionality could be built into low-technology options such as laminated cards for responders to carry or into much higher-technology systems such as portable computers and decision-support software. In many of these areas, potential solutions exist, but their operational feasibility, affordability, and timely availability must be carefully assessed within the responder community. Some have been developed specifically for the response community; others could come via technology transfer from other organizations such as the military. Because its focus was on management concepts and processes rather than specific management or safety-related technologies, this research did not address the particular advantages or disadvantages of any individual system or solution. However, in the course of the study, the potential of such systems—and the need to continue to improve and adapt them to better meet responders’ needs in post-disaster environments—became clear.

Building a Core Group of Major Disaster Safety Managers
Because of the central role that individual safety managers could play in coordinating the efforts of multiple response organizations, building a group of such individuals is an attractive initial goal. Doing so would require defining the body of knowledge needed for safety managers to effectively spearhead an integrated safety management function and developing a curriculum to serve as the basis for training. Development of such a curriculum could be accomplished by a variety of groups within the response community, including professional organizations and standards bodies, or via cooperative national-level planning efforts.

Once the preparation needed for disaster safety managers is defined, implementation mechanisms must be developed to identify individuals from the responder community to fill the roles. The results of this study do not suggest any particular model for implementation. However, it is clear that selection criteria must be defined that ensure that individuals trained to be safety managers are appropriately distributed geographically to ensure that they can rapidly respond to a disaster. Preliminary estimates of the number of such individuals needed to provide national coverage are relatively small; a few safety managers based in each state would allow rapid response to most potential disasters.¹

The managerial demands of major disaster response also indicate that the individuals trained to be disaster safety managers must have significant management skills and leadership capabilities. Taking a central role in coordinating the efforts of many different organizations is challenging and requires skillful leadership to be carried out successfully. As a result, it is critical that the position of disaster safety manager be approached as a high-level appointment, to ensure that the responders filling the role possess the necessary authority and influence.

An effort to build a group of disaster safety managers as a national asset must also ensure that these individuals will be available to fulfill their roles during both disaster operations and preparedness activities. For the safety managers to be effective, they must be able to respond when disasters occur. Such responses may involve participating in operations outside their immediate area, which requires a commitment by both the responders and their home organizations to ensure that they can respond when called on. Beyond disaster operations, many of the potential benefits of such a group of trained safety managers involve their participation in preparedness activities throughout their regions, helping bolster preparation for safety management and laying the groundwork for effective coordination during response efforts. Implementation efforts must also include developing mechanisms to support a portion of these individuals’ time to make that participation possible.

Integration of Safety into Disaster Exercises
Because of the importance of disaster exercises as a route for building both inter organizational relationships and testing capabilities, integration of responder safety issues into disaster exercises is a particularly attractive early step for improving safety management. To do so, safety information and scenarios must be developed that facilitate the inclusion of these issues in exercises at all levels of government and in large-scale Multi agency, multilevel disaster drills. In addition to exercises involving both operational and safety-related organizations, exercises focusing primarily on safety issues and organizations could be valuable to improving coordination among safety specialists within responder organizations. Because of the diversity of disaster exercises, implementation of this recommendation could also benefit from pilot efforts to test different mechanisms for including safety in these activities.

Areas Requiring National Coordination and Leadership
For some recommendations, the majority of the benefits to safety management will occur only if common practices are developed and adopted by a large percentage of the responder community. Implementation of a number of the recommendations described in this report would require coordination and leadership at the national level. These areas include

• consistent organizational structures for safety management
• common terminologies
• standards for equipment and other technologies
• hazard and risk assessment guidelines
• responder credentials
• training curricula.

Such national-level leadership could come from a range of sources, including the federal government, responder community and governance organizations, multidisciplinary standards organizations, or partnerships built among multiple agencies or organizations. In some cases, these efforts are already under way. For example, the ongoing federal effort to implement a National Incident Management System initiated by HSPD-5, 2003, represents a major opportunity for ensuring the use of common organizational structures during disaster response. Similarly, standards and policy efforts already in place are considering or could consider many of the equipment, training, and other issues relevant to these safety concerns. Just as this study often highlighted safety needs without identifying particular implementation routes, the research was not focused on where national coordination of these issues should originate. However, the need for such leadership, both to heighten focus on these safety concerns and to bridge the significant diversity that exists within the response community, is clear.

Concluding Remarks

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the risk of terrorism and the demands of homeland security must be a central component of any discussion of protecting emergency responders. Although the information developed over the course of this study does indeed indicate that some things have changed in this post- September 11 era, many things have remained the same. The nation still faces the risk of hurricanes, earthquakes, large industrial incidents, and other natural disasters. Often striking without warning, such events can overwhelm local response capabilities as effectively as intentional acts of our nation’s adversaries. In responding to their effects, responders face the risk of physical injury, traumatic stress, and hazardous exposures. Effectively addressing such risks requires bringing together the capabilities of a range of response organizations from agencies at all levels of government, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector.

In the context of such an all-hazards approach, bolstering preparedness efforts aimed at protecting emergency responders can therefore benefit national preparedness against both terrorism and the inevitable consequences of natural or technological disasters. Doing so requires putting the capabilities in place so safety managers have access to the information, the resources necessary to protect responders, and the management structures necessary to address safety during Multi agency response operations. While the demanding circumstances that exist during disasters will likely present unforeseen challenges to responder safety, the recommendations described here represent promising opportunities to improve safety in future response operations. It is our hope that this research, by bringing together safety management concerns relevant to both natural disasters and the potential effects of terrorism, can contribute to efforts in all parts of the response and homeland security communities to strengthen protection of the nation’s emergency responders.

¹ Depending on the specifics of the conditions within particular states, the total number of such safety managers would be in the very low hundreds for the nation overall.