Page 23 - College Planning & Management, April/May 2019

you may need to store emergency food at your location and move it with the students and faculty when you leave the campus.
Lopes’ fire-safety plan was tested in a 2017 fire. The plan worked successfully. No one was hurt.
“The fire started on a Sunday,” she says. “The emergency manager on our campus received a call at 2:30 a.m., and we im- mediately set up an emergency operations center—which followed guidelines set by California’s Standardized Emergency Man- agement System, known as SEMS.”
Emergency Management
SEMS was developed by California’s emergency planners, who used the federal National Incident Management system (NIMS) as a model.
According to the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, SEMS forms the basis of the state’s emergency manage- ment system. SEMS incorporates four key services:
• Incident command system (ICS)—
This is a field-level emergency response
system.
• Multi/inter-agency coordination—
Affected agencies working together to coordinate allocations of resources and emergency response activities.
• Mutual aid—A system for obtaining additional emergency resources from non-affected jurisdictions.
• Operational area concept—County and its subdivisions to coordinate damage information, resource requests, and emergency response.
“Each section has been trained to man- age its particular area,” says Lopes. “The system was set up to run emergency opera- tions for 10 days—which is a very long time for an Emergency Operations Center.”
The steps that Lopes took reflects the widespread concern about and activity pursuing fire safety among fire services all across the country.
Dorn adds that a solid wildfire safety protocol includes the protocol for hazardous
materials sheltering. “There are clouds of smoke coming during such a fire,” he says. “If the area hasn’t been cleared, no one should be outside. Everyone should shelter in place. Normally, there will be a command center capable of communications across the area.”
In the end, Dorn emphasizes that it is
important to include fire-safety in your col- lege’s emergency operation plan. Of course, fire-safety planning should cover fire inside the school and fire in buildings around the school. And if you are located in a rural area with forests, then the plan should certainly address forest fires. CPM
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