Response
Response begins when an emergency event is imminent or immediately after an event occurs. Response encompasses all activities taken to save lives and reduce damage from the event and includes:

· Providing emergency assistance to victims.

· Restoring critical infrastructure (e.g., utilities).

· Ensuring continuity of critical services (e.g., law enforcement, public works).

In other words, response involves putting preparedness plans into action.

One of the first response tasks is to conduct a situation assessment. Local government is responsible for emergency response and for continued assessment of its ability to protect its citizens and the property within the community. To fulfill this responsibility, responders and local government officials must conduct an immediate rapid assessment of the local situation.

Rapid assessment includes all immediate response activities that are directly linked to determining initial lifesaving and life-sustaining needs and to identifying imminent hazards. The ability of local governments to perform a rapid assessment within the first few hours after an event is crucial to providing an adequate response for life-threatening situations and imminent hazards. Coordinated and timely assessments enable local government to:

· Prioritize response activities.

· Allocate scarce resources.

· Request additional assistance from mutual aid partners, as well as the State, quickly and accurately.

· Obtaining accurate information quickly through rapid assessment is key to initiating response activities and needs to be collected in an organized fashion. Critical information, also called essential elements of information (EEI), includes information about:

· Lifesaving needs, such as evacuation and search and rescue.

· The status of critical infrastructure, such as transportation, utilities, communication systems, and fuel and water supplies.

· The status of critical facilities, such as police and fire stations, medical providers, water and sewage treatment facilities, and media outlets.

· The risk of damage to the community (e.g., dams and levees, facilities producing or storing hazardous materials) from imminent hazards.

· The number of citizens who have been displaced as a result of the event and the estimated extent of damage to their dwellings.

Essential elements of information also include information about the potential for cascading events. Cascading events are events that occur as a direct or indirect result of an initial event. For example, if a flash flood disrupts electricity to an area and, as a result of the electrical failure, a serious traffic accident involving a hazardous materials spill occurs, the traffic accident is a cascading event. If, as a result of the hazardous materials spill, a neighborhood must be evacuated and a local stream is contaminated, these are also cascading events. Taken together, the effect of cascading events can be crippling to a community.

Good planning, training, and exercising before an event occurs can help reduce cascading events and their effects. Maintaining the discipline to follow the plan during response operations also reduces the effects of cascading events.