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Disaster Planning and Recovery
Welcome to the Heritage League of Greater Kansas City's Disaster Planning and Recovery web pages. Need help right away? Have you just been notified of an unexpected (and unwelcome) water incursion? Did a pipe burst and leak water into your:
- Archives' storage area, leaving you with boxes of wet documents?
- Historic site, leaving you with wooden furniture standing in puddles?
- Museum exhibit, leaving you with damp artifacts?
Or, maybe, another sort of calamity is threatening your collection? If so, this site will provide you with information about where to turn for immediate help by way of immediate EMERGENCY CONTACTS and a wide variety of web and print resources .
Here you will also find the tools to create a new, or expand an existing, emergency preparedness plan for your institution, so you will have the necessary information at hand and ready to access in the event you ever do face a water incursion or another calamity at your cultural heritage institution.
First step: 2009, 2nd Quarter
Institutional Information: "Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters?"
Our first topic, Institutional Information, asks you to gather together, in one handy guide, the contact information for your institution's use in the event you are ever faced with a disaster, whether it be small, medium or big in size or local, regional or national in scope. Who should YOU and your staff call in an emergency?
The Council of State Archivists provides a template for the Pocket Response Plan , the first page of which is an "Emergency Communication Directory, with contact information for staff, first responders, emergency services, utilities, vendors and suppliers, disaster teams, and other essential individuals and agencies." The second page of the template provides an "Emergency Response Checklist: an organized list of those actions that each individual should take in the first 24 to 72 hours following a disaster."
Work through filling out this template and you will be well on your way to organizing your institution's response in an emergency by making it much quicker and more efficient. Your response team will know exactly who to contact, how to contact each other and you will all be on the same page as to what needs to be done to start addressing the situation. Plus, you'll find you have ascended the first rung on the ladder heading toward completion of that comprehensive emergency preparedness plan.
Look at the sample contact list we've developed for Fort Osage .
Where We Go from Here:
Ascent of the Emergency Preparedness Ladder
Since preparation of a comprehensive emergency preparedness plan may seem like an overwhelming and daunting task, we will be breaking it down into more manageable steps. Starting in May 2009, and thereafter on a quarterly basis, the Heritage League of Greater Kansas City will provide you with a new topic on the subject of emergency preparedness planning. If you work through the topics as we go, you will find that you will be gathering together the information for a comprehensive emergency preparedness plan and that the overall task will be much easier to undertake and more likely to be completed.
In general, we will be following the outline of dPlan , an on-line disaster planning tool which is offered by the Northeast Document Conservation Center . Although you may want to take a quick look at the 127 page dPlan template right now, don't let that initial look shy you away from working through the process with us since we are going to start you out with small steps that will provide your institution with immediately useful tools.
The dPlan general outline:
- Institutional Information
- Prevention (the Assessment Survey)
- Response, Salvage & Recovery
- Supplies & Services
- Scope & Goals
- Staff Training
- Distribution, Review & Updating