Emergency Operations Center in Action – Georgia EMA SITREP

DEM Blogger

February 11, 2014

While monitoring the country’s ongoing winter weather, we came across a recent situation report (SITREP) from the Georgia Emergency Management Agency (four-page PDF, saved here). GEMA published this document on its website this morning. We’re presenting it to you because it’s a good public window on the variety of activities that DEM and other emergency management agencies coordinate during major events.

Some of the SITREP’s information is specific to how GEMA does business, but our own state partners at Kentucky Emergency Management operate in a similar fashion. When Kentucky has a severe weather threat or other potential disaster, KYEM activates the Commonwealth Emergency Operations Center (CEOC) in Frankfort to monitor the situation and coordinate statewide preparations and response. On a smaller scale, we here at DEM do many of the same things when we activate our own EOC to deal with incidents affecting Fayette County (and this is quite familiar to those of us who worked the EOC during the 2003 and 2009 ice storms).

In this SITREP, “ESF” stands for “Emergency Support Function.” Defined in the federal standards that guide emergency management across America, ESFs are specific government or private-sector functions that have critical roles to play in emergencies. As you can see from the GEMA SITREP, some ESFs have larger shares of the job than others, depending on the nature of the incident. The largest ESF section of the report is for ESF-6 (Mass Care, Housing, and Human Services), which focuses on the Red Cross and Salvation Army efforts to care for Georgia citizens whose homes have lost power. We expect that if Georgia receives a lot of ice, the ESF-12 (Energy) section of the next report will have quite a bit of information on power restoration efforts.

If you’d like more information on the winter weather currently bearing down on Georgia, you can visit GEMA’s full emergency info page for this storm system. Our thoughts are with Georgia’s responders and citizens.