CIP Update

December 23, 2005

This newsletter is for cities, counties and communities involved in public-private partnerships for joint emergency preparedness, planning and prevention. 

Michigan State University produces the newsletter through the Critical Incident Protocol (CIP)-Community Facilitation Program under a grant awarded by Grants & Training, Preparedness Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  This newsletter provides ideas, suggestions, best practices and lessons learned to establish critical incident protocols using public-private partnerships.

Please go to www.cip.msu.edu for more information about the program.

Participating Communities
Allentown, PA / Annapolis, MD / Bethlehem, PA / Brooklyn, OH / Carroll County, MD / Casa Grande, AZ / Clark County, NV / Evansville, IN / Hoover, AL / Marquette County, MI / Milwaukee, WI / Monroe County, MI / Northampton County, PA / Oakland County, MI / Perkiomen Valley, PA / Redmond, WA / Racine, WI / Richmond, VA / Rockville, MD / Sandy City, UT

We are currently working with 20 communities and will work with another 24 cities, counties or communities over the next couple of years.  Of the 24 available CIP Programs, we are in contact with 10 communities.  Is there a location in the nation that you think may be interested in building a public-private partnership for joint emergency preparedness?

CIP Website / WWW.CIP.MSU.EDU
Please take a few minutes to look at our website and we encourage you to share the web link with others, which is at www.cip.msu.edu.

There are a number of features, including the availability of past issues of the newsletter on the website.  If someone else you know wants to sign up for the newsletter they can do that.  Recently, we updated the PowerPoint presentation, which provides an overview of the CIP Program, along with listing the goals, deliverables, resources, and other information.  Feel free to download the PowerPoint program.  Show it to prospective organizations or develop your own PowerPoint presentation for your community and incorporate some of the information from the CIP program.

The Critical Incident Protocol – A Public and Private Partnership publication is on the website, and can be downloaded.  If you are discussing risk or threat assessment, take a look at the tool we use, which also has step-by-step directions on how to conduct a risk assessment.

Lastly, if you have any suggestions for the website, please contact the CIP staff.

Public-Private Partnership Program:  Community Preparedness Planning Process
MSU is always looking for examples of public-private partnerships for joint emergency preparedness that we can share with you.  Following is a vibrant, grass roots program that incorporates long-term guidance using local resources.

The Regional Institute for Community Policing (RICP) based out of the University of Illinois at Springfield developed the Community Preparedness Planning Process (CPPP) program.  The CPPP program supports and guides a local community planning team through a process by creating a preparedness plan that is current, multi-disciplined, and works toward national compliance.  The overall goal of the program is to provide participants with information to help their community become stronger, and better prepared to respond to any kind of disaster or major incident.  This broad multi-disciplinary experience is what makes this public-private partnership program dynamic and sets it apart from other programs.

RICP facilitates the creation of intra-community planning teams that focus on preparedness, in addition to creating plans where gaps exist, communicating these to vested stakeholders, and educating residents about community-wide preparedness.  By utilizing a community policing, problem-solving model, community leaders and members respond to threats through preventative measures and the assessment of community resources. 

There are five sessions over a period of four to six months.  Session One involves a commitment from elected and key officials, ensuring all relevant entities will be involved and verifying participant expectations.  Session Two includes a community assessment questionnaire, information sharing and a tabletop exercise to identify gaps.  Session Three involves an extensive review of the tabletop exercise.  Sessions Three and Four involve proceeding through the analysis and response stages of the problem-solving model.  Additionally, strategic planning development begins to take place at this point, including the development of mission, goals, objectives, and performance measures.  Session Five concludes with an additional tabletop exercise and an explanation of the intra-community plan.  The second tabletop exercise determines if previously identified problems have been rectified and continues to identify other/new areas for improvement.

The RICP is part of a national network of 27 regional institutes across the country and is supported by funds from the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.  For more information on this program, please contact the Regional Institute for Community Policing at http://ricp.uis.edu

A Few Stats on the CIP Program
On February 20, 2002 the first CIP Program was initiated, which was in Monroe, Michigan

Since that date we kicked off the program in 20 communities and committed to bring it to another 24 communities through 2007. 

A total of 983 people have attended these workshops!

Currently, the CIP Update is distributed to 1000 subscribers, who forward it throughout their networks.

 

Using social capital surveying the average pre and post test indicate the following on participating organizations:

-increased from 83% to 96% in those who have a critical incident response plan.

-increased from 44% to 71% in those who participated in joint public-private sector meetings focusing on risk reduction.

-increased from 64% to 82% in those who adopted a common incident command system for public-private sectors

Another Voice on Public-Private Partnerships
The CIP staff has found another resource on public-private partnerships for joint emergency preparedness.  We are fortunate to have connected with someone who is proficient in this domain, in addition to other areas of expertise.  John Laye, FBCI is managing partner and principal consultant of Contingency Management Consultants with a practice exclusively in emergency management, recovery, and mitigation.  We met John through mutual organizations in California.

I read his article on Public - Private Coordination - Are We Doing it Wrong? and recalled the challenges that CIP communities encounter in developing strong coalitions.  Laye made reference to Lord Peter Levene, Chairman of Lloyd's, "More than half of U.S. corporations don't have crisis-management plans, even though 40 percent of companies hit by a disaster will fail within five years (Laye, 2005).”  Unfortunately, just one devastated company can have a crippling effect on a community.  The question becomes what can we individually and collectively do for the private sector in our communities?

When trained communities focus on joint preparedness they can mitigate the impact of disasters, and as Johns states, "Most policy-makers realize that when a major disruptive event occurs, a community's revenues, self-image and quality of life depend on public and private coordination, cooperation, and performance together to restore interrupted services and get the community's economic drivers back on line  (Laye, 2005).”  You can see that Laye is intimately familiar with public-private partnerships for joint critical incident management.

It is nice to hear another voice in this arena.  John Laye can be contacted via e-mail at johnlaye@businesscontinuity.com

CIP Community Happenings
Here are a few activities going on in the CIP Communities. 

Allentown Pennsylvania is polling the private sector to see what organizations do not have an Emergency Operations Plan.  Annapolis Maryland updated their membership list, looking to locate a business or non-profit willing to be the “target” for an upcoming tabletop exercise and continues to meet regularly.  Racine Wisconsin distributed a Business Pandemic Influenza Planning Checklist, profiled the CIP Program in the county’s Becoming Disaster Ready newsletter and at the last meeting, the private sector provided an overview of crisis management.

Exercising
The School of Criminal Justice offers a certificate in Homeland Security studies, which is a credit or non-credit three (3) course program.  One of the courses is the Public-Private Partnerships for Emergency Preparedness, which is taught by Rad Jones, founder of the CIP Program.  One of the modules in the course is on exercising, which is a valuable tool for the CIP communities to use in joint public-private partnership operations. 

When looking at the purpose of exercising, Jones states, “Why exercising?  Because training exercises are crucial to the preparedness process.  Exercises can accomplish the following:  clarify responsibilities, identify roles, enhance skills, assess capabilities, evaluate performance, measure resources, motivate employees, build confidence, and gain public recognition and support (Jones, 2005).”

Exercising can also reveal planning weaknesses and identify areas that need improvement.  Exercise development should be from a strategic perspective with the objective of training personnel and assessing readiness.

Lastly, an important component of developing exercises is creativity, but balanced and designed in terms of real life situations (Jones, 2005).

Recent Postings to CIP Information Exchange Website
To enter the "CIP Information Exchange" website, please go to https://angel.msu.edu and enter your user/password ID (or use msu.msu@angel in the User/NetID and "partnership" as the password to log in).  Click on CIP, which goes to the main menu.

Located in the folder "Bulletin Board - Information for all Communities" are just a few of the following postings:

 

“Security Grants to be Based on Risk”

“Incident Command: Failure to Establish a Unified Command Structure”

“Study Shows Americans Poorly Prepared for Emergencies”

“Business Continuity Planning and the Media”

There are numerous other resources located on the website.  To locate a specific topic, use the "search" function, which can be found on the main menu page on the right-hand side in the green task bar.

Corrections
In the last newsletter of 12-05-05 we made a mistake in the article CIP Initiatives.  The 2006 seminar in Utah should read as the Winter Summit “A Gathering of Eagles” for Utah Emergency Management Association.

Starting a CIP Program
Feel free to make a referral to the MSU staff about possibly starting a CIP Program elsewhere in the United States.  We can use your assistance! 

Past Newsletters
If you are interested in viewing past CIP Update newsletters, please go to www.cip.msu.edu and select “Newsletters” from the main menu.   

Closing
If you have any topics and/or ideas for a future CIP Update newsletter, please contact Brit Weber at weberbr@msu.edu or (517) 355-2227 or other MSU staff members.  About every three weeks you will receive this newsletter via email.  If you no longer want to be on this list, please reply to this email.

 

Sources

Laye, John.  (2005, August 31).  Public – Private Coordination  Are We Doing it Wrong?  From Continuity e-Guide online newsletter.

Jones, Radford.  (2005).  Public and Private Partnership for Emergency Preparedness and Homeland Security.  Instructor Comments.

 

 

Brit Weber

School of Criminal Justice

Michigan State University

1407 S. Harrison Rd., 335 Nisbet Bldg.

East Lansing, MI 48823

Work:  (517)  355-2227   Cell:  (517) 206-1640

weberbr@msu.edu

Visit our website:  http://www.cip.msu.edu