Track record: The staff of EDGETrack Solutions has already developed emergency plans for close to 20 municipalities ranging in size from 500,000 to as small as 10-30,000 population, including multiple interdependent cities of 200,000 people, small towns (80,000) and regional districts incorporating small urban and farming communities. These plans were developed as the result of the need to being prepared for natural, technological and human-made disasters including war, missile attacks and terror.

Strategy: A generic plan will be developed that will provide standardized protocol procedures within and across municipalities; facilitate the formation of emergency teams and have a built-in training module to evaluate real-time effectiveness.

Generic Emergency Plan: The plan will incorporate the following features: (1) the ability to coordinate resources within and across various municipal and government agencies, (2) be flexible and adaptable to various size and structures of municipalities, (3) provide a basic set of protocols and criteria that are operational in cases of need for external resources, (4) can be utilized at different levels in the organization, from small work groups and departments to divisional level.

Building Emergency Intervention Teams: The generic emergency plans also calls for developing multidisciplinary ‘intervention teams’ including disaster managers, social-psychological professionals, communications-information personnel, public-municipal liaison groups, and various fist responder teams.

Real-Time Effectiveness: Incorporated into the generic plan will be a series of simulation schedules and exercises to test and evaluate the preparedness of the municipality for an emergency. This includes state-of-the-art tabletop simulations that assess critical emergency functions, intervention teams, first responders and evacuation/medical centers. The simulations provide a mechanism for recording conversations as a basis for critical analysis of decision-making processes, the network and sourcing of information, team coordination and developing an overall picture for managing the emergency.

On-going Evaluation: The generic municipal emergency plan also offers a unique feature by providing a basis for upgrading the plan in light of changing resources (budgetary and manpower) and changing potential emergencies (natural to health or terror). The evaluation module incorporated in the generic plan, when matched against new or changing emergency situations, allows flexibility and adaptation for both short and long-term changes, even immediate emergencies.