Ready for Anything: A Disaster Planning Manual for Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs

What disasters would I most likely face?

To effectively plan for a disaster, you must develop individualized response plans for those disasters most likely to affect your facility. Doing so requires that you first assess your risk. Do you live in an area where hurricanes are common? What about earthquakes? Is your facility located in an area considered at high risk for a terrorist strike? And what about smaller-scale disasters, such as medical emergencies and structural fires?

By carefully assessing the real-life risks you face from both large- and small-scale disasters, you can allocate your valuable time toward developing detailed plans for only those scenarios you are most likely to face. There will always be the threat of completely unanticipated disasters, but your overall preparedness should enable you to effectively deal with those situations when they arise.

Large-scale disasters

In its guidebook Are You Ready? An In-Depth Guide to Citizen Preparedness, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, known as FEMA, divides large-scale, region-affecting disasters into three basic categories: Natural, Technological, and Terrorism. Individual disasters within each of these categories are listed below. Circle the disasters you believe represent a realistic threat to your facility.

All of these large-scale disasters are beyond your ability to prevent. However, the planning you’ve done will go a long way toward ensuring that you can adequately respond to each of these disasters when they occur.

Small-scale disasters

While many people tend to think of the huge, region-affecting disasters listed above when they think about disaster preparedness, the reality is that most disasters are much more localized. Consider, for a moment, which of the following crises could realistically take place in your facility, and circle those you think apply to you:

Did you circle them all? You should have. These are the types of “disasters” that youth facilities can reasonably expect to face on a daily basis, and any one of these events could occur anywhere, anytime. Each one of them can also have a significant impact on your facility’s daily operations. Preparing to cope with these small-scale disasters is at least as important as preparing for the larger ones.

Can you think of other small-scale disasters? List them in the space below.

Moving on

By this point, you’ve accomplished a great deal in your disaster planning. You’ve prepared your facility, your staff, and your young people. You’ve considered issues of supplies, transportation, and shelter. You’ve thought about communication, maintenance, and safeguarding critical records. And you’ve considered which disasters pose the greatest risk to your facility.

Now, it’s time to begin drawing up specific response plans for the disasters you’ve just identified. You’re ready to move on to the next section of this manual, “Response.”

Response >>