FEMA’s National Integration Center distributed notice of a national engagement period on two new Emergency Operations Center (EOC) related documents: EOC References and Resources Tool and the EOC How-To Quick Reference Guide. This seems to be the initiation of an EOC Toolkit, which I conceptually think is a great idea. My first impression of these documents is that they both have good information and are logically organized. The documents are good, but I’m also not particularly impressed by them.

First up is the EOC References and Resources Tool. The document indicates that the audience is ‘EOC leaders and staff’, and the intent is to provide them with ‘a set of best practices, checklists, references, links, and essential guidance related to EOC operations and administration’. This is a two-page document, seemingly formatted for printing (It’s a PDF), but mostly useless in print form as it has an abundance of internet links to sites and documents which provide much more information. The document itself isn’t really a ‘tool’, per se. It doesn’t have, on its own, any intrinsic utility other than referring you to other sources of information. While the description indicates that this document has checklists, it does not, though several of the documents linked from this document do have checklists. The center of the first page provides a link to the EOC Toolkit website, but it’s not particularly highlighted. To be honest, I think this document should, in essence, be the format and content of the EOC Toolkit site.

The second document is the EOC How-To Quick Reference Guide. This is an 80 page document. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything labeled a ‘quick reference guide’ be that long. If anything, the EOC References and Resources Tool document (discussed previous) is really the ‘quick reference guide’, while this document is more of a ‘tool’. There is solid information in this document, nothing that from a quick review I have any quarrel with. The content areas are fairly comprehensive, giving information on hazard, vulnerability, and capability assessment; EOC site selection; EOC capabilities and physical design; information management; and preparedness. That said, it doesn’t give you much content within any of the topic areas. It almost feels like a literature review.

As with the other document, this document is formatted for printing, but is full of hyperlinks to sites that expand greatly on the information provided. So it’s not really anything I would recommend printing and putting in a binder. Electronically, it does make it a good compendium of resources, but with how rapidly things change and the frequency of new sources of good information becoming available, I think this document is also best organized as a website that can be updated in real time as new information comes available. As soon as one link changes, the document becomes obsolete. That said, the resources they link to are all good and worthwhile. An attachment to this document provides a fairly comprehensive EOC self-assessment tool; though the tool doesn’t really address partially or fully virtual EOC operations and remote access; and while it goes to an extent of detail asking about certain things (such as a helicopter landing pad), it completely misses some functional things...

And you thought 2020 was bad already…

Never in our almost 40 years of crisis management experience have we seen an America more prone to erupt in new crises than right now. No one likes to look at hard truths, yet part of our job as crisis management professionals, and that of those in related fields such as risk management, is to look for trouble before it occurs and, if we can, help our employers or clients head it off. If we can’t, take advance steps to mitigate the damage. In that spirit, the following may make you wince – and it may save you a whole lot of stress and financial woe.

Take a look at this list of the types of crises that could routinely affect just one of the industries with which we’ve done a lot of work, followed by my comments as to why the chances of each type of crisis have been exacerbated at this time in our nation’s history. Even though this list was created as part of our planning for food industry clients, we’re sure you’ll see how much of the same applies to your own organization – regardless of industry. It’s pretty common sense, and though it may be painful to consider what could go wrong, if you do think ahead you’ll be able to do more to mitigate the threat.

The following are crises that could impact food industry businesses, with the notes in italics highlighting how the risk of such crises increases as a result of stressors ranging from Covid-19 to natural disasters to massive social unrest about various topics to unemployment and, of course, unprecedented political divides: