Campus Emergency Management Plan
The purpose of The University of Georgia (UGA) Campus Emergency Management Plan (CEMP) is to establish policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities and an organizational structure for responses to a major emergency. The UGA CEMP incorporates operating procedures from the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and Incident Command System (ICS) for handling emergencies resulting from various potential disasters that could impact the UGA campus. Developed in March 2004, NIMS establishes a uniform set of processes and procedures that emergency responders at all levels of government will use to conduct response operations.
The UGA CEMP has been designed as a strategic plan to provide the administrative procedures necessary to cope with most campus emergencies. Any University’s overall ability to respond to an emergency will rely upon building emergency plans and business continuity plans developed by its individual departments.
The purpose of any plan is to enable emergency responders and staff to perform essential emergency planning and response functions that will save lives; establish responsibilities necessary to performing these functions; prevent, minimize and repair damage; and ensure continuity of operations so that essential services may continue to be provided to the University and its clients.
The UGA CEMP assigns roles and responsibilities to departments and units that are directly responsible for emergency response efforts and critical support services and provides a management structure for coordinating and deploying essential resources.
Emergency Notification Plan
Emergency notification is based on the desire to inform people about dangerous situations that may have serious impacts. Notifying individuals of dangerous situations allows people to take action to protect themselves and the people around them.
The University of Georgia (UGA) Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) is responsible for many facets of emergency notification on the UGA campus. The UGA Emergency Notification Plan is a summary of the methods used at the UGA by OEP and other campus partners to notify the campus community of an emergency. The plan emphasizes redundant forms of notification. Some notification methods in the plan are passive in that no planning is needed on the part of the community member, however; several methods require students, faculty and staff to register for a service.
An Emergency Notification Advisory Committee assists the Office of Emergency Preparedness in determining the most appropriate methods of notification to reach the campus community. This committee provides feedback and suggestions on how to best reach the campus population and gives advice on what types of notification should be included.
The most widely publicized notification system is UGA Alert. The system uses voice phone calls, text messages, and emails to inform the community about an incident. UGA Alert is complemented by many other systems such as outdoor warning sirens, UGA cablevision screen capture, NOAA weather radios, the main UGA home page, RSS feeds, UGA Alert Desktop Alerting, and other systems.
It is important to note two disclaimers associated with this plan. The first is that this document is not a crisis communication plan. The UGA Crisis Communication Plan can be found here. Secondly, this plan merely mentions ―Timely Warnings as prescribed under the Jeanne Clery Act. Under the Jeanne Clery Act, institutions must make timely warnings to the campus community about crimes that pose an ongoing threat to students and employees. Timely warnings are handled and issued by the UGA Police Department. More information may be found at http://www.police.uga.edu/.
In addition, there are two versions of the UGA Emergency Notification Plan, a public version and a confidential version. The confidential version of the plan contains specific emergency system activation procedures for the Griffin and the Gwinnett campuses and emergency contact numbers for several campus administrators. The confidential version of the plan is not widely distributed.
National Incident Management System (NIMS)
National Incident Management System (NIMS) establishes a single, comprehensive approach to domestic incident management to ensure that all levels of government across the nation have the capability to work efficiently and effectively together using a national approach to domestic incident management. NIMS provides a consistent nationwide approach for federal, state and local governments to work together to prepare for, respond to and recover from domestic incidents, regardless of the cause, size or complexity. Those agencies that do not establish such system shall not be eligible for state reimbursement for any response or recovery related expenses.
Effective March 28, 2006, the University of Georgia (UGA) adopted the National Incident Management System (NIMS) as established under a Presidential Directive and the Official Code of Georgia (O.C.G.A. 38-5-57) as its system of preparing for and responding to disaster incidents and directs all incident managers and response organizations within the University of Georgia to train and exercise and use these systems in their response operations.
The Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) manages UGA’s NIMS compliance, maintains NIMS training records and coordinates on-campus training sessions. All NIMS online training class certificates should be sent to OEP for record keeping purposes.
The UGA’s NIMS Training Plan was created to formalize OEP’s approach to address NIMS compliance in a consistent manner on campus. Furthermore, the plan will provide details on how OEP will notify, train, and maintain the records of the thousands of identified campus personnel who will need NIMS training in support of our campus compliance efforts.
This NIMS Training Plan is a campus-level plan intended to identify appropriate UGA personnel on the University of Georgia main campus, its extended campuses and personnel on any other UGA owned or leased property or facility who are required to participate in NIMS training courses.
The plan is a fluid document and will be updated on yearly basis or when appropriate guidance is provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the State of Georgia or local government that necessitates changes or additions to the plan.
The main objective of the UGA NIMS Training Plan is to provide details on the University of Georgia’s approach to promote NIMS compliance on campus. As a result campus personnel have been identified that are required to complete predetermined NIMS training levels. Additional long-term campus NIMS objectives are consistent with local and state agency NIMS objectives.
The NIMS policy can be found under the University of Georgia Polices.
Pandemic Flu Plan
Since 2005, representatives from the UGA Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP), University Health Center, and UGA Police Department have been involved in pandemic influenza planning in conjunction with local, state, and federal emergency planning and response agencies. The community-wide planning efforts are ongoing. However, the overall ability of the University to respond appropriately to an influenza pandemic will also depend on the readiness of individuals and departments within the University of Georgia to respond appropriately. Therefore, to aid departments in their planning efforts, OEP has created a UGA Pandemic Flu Response Plan. However, the current plan is being revised. Please send any comments to [email protected].
Pre-Disaster Hazard Mitigation Plan
The UGA Pre-Diaster Hazard Mitigation Plan (PDM) is the product of a thorough planning process that relied on the skills and expertise of many campus departments as well as the Athens-Clarke County government.
In order to promote consistency of information between the Athens-Clarke County Pre-Disaster Hazard Mitigation Plan and the University of Georgia Pre-Disaster Hazard Mitigation Plan, most of the natural hazard vulnerability information was utilized from the Athens-Clarke County PDM Plan and remains virtually intact in the UGA PDM Plan. In fact, most natural disasters that impact Athens-Clarke County will likely impact the University of Georgia due to its location and size within the county. The UGA PDM Plan will vary in the approach to the Technological Hazards section of the plan as the campus is a research institution having over 1,400 research laboratories in close proximity to one another on the main campus which presents different and unique challenges. The plan was developed for the main campus located in Athens-Clarke County. In addition, the University of Georgia Pre-Disaster Hazard Mitigation Planning Committee decided to include all of the buildings in the inventory of assets, all of which are vulnerable to various hazards.
