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Due to the wide range of circumstances
which a council may be called upon to deal
with, it is neither event nor site specific but is
generic in nature. The flexibility that this
approach assumes has stood the test of time.
The MEP is supported by a department
emergency plan, which outlines the procedures
to be adopted within each department.
Those departmental plans and those of their
contractor partners, standardize the layout
and ensure a corporate style which everyone
understands. MEP and departmental plans are
reviewed annually.
For a local authority a major emergency
exists where the required council response, at
the scene or elsewhere, is in excess of that
which can be provided by the council operating
under normal day or night conditions
and/or where special mobilization and organization
of council services is necessary.
Many emergencies are dealt with by
departments under their own departmental
emergency arrangements, without the need to
activate the major emergency plan. However,
whilst events which occur during normal
working hours may be dealt with perfectly
adequately from within available resources,
the same event arising during the early hours
of the morning, or at the weekend, may
require a major emergency response due to
the reduced resources immediately available
to deal with it.
Back in 1916, the concept of forecasting
and planning were called ‘purveyance’ by
Fayol who saw it as one of five divisions of the
administrative function, while administration
was one of six operations to be found in a
business, namely technical, commercial,
financial, security, accounting and administration.
Together these activities are what today
we term management. However, Fayol could
never have imagined the complexity of managing
organizations today when routine
organizational activities are disrupted not only
internally but externally by what Florence and
Kovacic (2001) call ‘the interconnected
actions of the major stakeholders’ and when
‘organisational crisis truly become the public
concern when defined and influenced by the
mass media’. They quote Thurow’s conceptual
framework of ‘punctuated equilibrium’,
which depicts an organizational crisis as ‘rapid
developments characterised by flux, this equilibrium
and uncertainty’. Zhu and Blood
(1997) offer a four-stage universal model:
1 The build up or pre-crisis period where
the symptoms are detectable, such as
repeated messages or persistent sets of
clues.
2 Crisis breakout – acute crisis which are the
initial stages.
3 Abatement or chronicity of the crisis with
charges, counter-charges, demonstrations,
inquiries, legal actions and the continuing
coverage by the mass media.
4 Termination where the organization
attempts to get back to normal and where
the crisis is no longer a threat to an organization’s
operational environment or its
constituent publics. The media set the
agenda in terms of communication during
the crisis lifecycle.
Third parties such as the media, play a key
role in assessing risk which evolves from
research and corporate intelligence. This
requires a high degree of trust and confidence
as Figure 18.1 indicates.
Managerial perception
Communication managers often confuse risk
assessment with risk perception during message
design and implementation, (Susskind
© 2004 Sandra Oliver for editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters, the contributors