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International audienceThe recurring heavy precipitations which have struck the south of France these last few years highlight that the affected cities have little pertinent information on how to manage these emergencies, and therefore appear powerless. In response, the development of a local emergency operations plan (EOP) for communities threatened by natural and technological hazards was made compulsory by French law in 2004. This article describes a systematic risk analysis approach for local EOPs. This method is based on a functional model that represents a local EOP as a set of interacting functions, each of them using resources and controls. This decomposition facilitates the identification of the human, technical, and organizational resources that are essential to safeguard the inhabitants of a community threatened by a hazard. This model provides a precise frame for performing an exhaustive and rigorous risk analysis of a local EOP. Based on this model and this risk analysis, potential failures are identified and organized into fault tree for each function. Then assessment checklists of the functions of the EOP are structured via these fault trees. By using these checklists, the analysis of a local EOP becomes more rigorous, exhaustive, and systematic, which makes it possible to broadly study the criticality of the plan. Therefore, this method enhances the potential success of the pre-planned actions during a disaster. This is the first step of a decision support system for city emergency managers who are designing their local emergency plan

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for the analysis of the robustness of industrial internal and external emergency plans, established by the European Union SEVESO II Directive. This methodology is based upon a systemic, hierarchical and generic model of an internal or external industrial emergency plan. The process generally found within an internal and/or external industrial emergency plan is identified through the model, thus allowing for a modular representation of the plan. Each process integrates the functions/activities performed, the resources necessary for performing these functions/activities, the resources generated or affected by these functions, the supports required for each resource and the interactions (inputs and outputs) of each process. An explicit specification of these elements for a generic plan was provided through an ontological approach. An analysis of the plan model is performed to estimate a priori the failures that can potentially occur in the emergency response phase, when the plan is put into action. An extensive experience feedback analysis has also been performed to identify a posteriori the failures that have already occurred during the application of the plan. Some 160 accident reports have been consulted, and 31 internal and external emergency plan exercises were followed. This double analysis (a priori and a posteriori) has led to putting in place assessment checklists, structured via the systemic model for each of the plan's process. Each checklist provides an indicator of the level of accomplishment (performance indicator) for the respective function. The logical combination of the function performance indicators results in a comprehensive assessment of the robustness of the industrial emergency plan. This methodology can hence be used as a toolbox, both for the assessment of existing plans and also for the iterative development of industrial emergency plans.

International audienceThis paper presents a methodology for the assessment of the performance of industrial hazardous materials emergency plans. This approach is based on a structuro-functional model of the emergency plan, which highlights the plan's functions, resources, support services and interactions. A resource taxonomy is used to manage the complexity of the emergency response system. The model can be used both as a planning guide and for the analysis of the performance of the emergency response system, based on the risk assessment of the system. The failure probability is estimated through the plan's functions and resources fault trees. The failure severity of each function is determined by using the facility's hazard study. The failure criticality of each function is hence obtained

Disasters create overwhelming demands to affected communities and pose unique problems that complicate efforts of orchestrating the response. It is in such environments of uncertainty, operational friction, time-constraints and the need for interagency coordination that disaster and crisis managers are required to develop incident plans to address multiple demands. Based on observations from 50 disaster exercises, we have identified twenty critical points in incident planning, that is, those incident planning activities which are most challenging for emergency managers, are poorly implemented or otherwise constitute an area for improvement. The most challenging components of the incident planning process were information gathering from the field, running estimates of the situation, response-generated demands, resource capabilities and mobilization time, course of action development and analysis, and decision-making under uncertainty. In addition, this study identified three good practices in incident planning. First, the process is iterative and planners revisit several steps in a back-and-forth fashion. Second, both rational and intuitive decision-making processes are likely to be used during the course of any one incident, based on the time available for planning. Third, better plans are produced when flexibility is built into courses of action to address expected developments of situation or when decision-making is decentralized.