24 + 24 + 24 + 24 = ?

In visiting with hospitals across the country since the unveiling of the new emergency management standards, there’s been an increasing murmur relative to the presence of a certain temporal indicator that you can find under EC.4.12, EP #6.

96 hours. Four days. 5,760 minutes.

That time span brings with it some questions:

• Is this a long time to be without the support of the local community?
• Does it vary within the six critical areas of EC.4.13 through EC.4.18 (communications, resource and asset management, safety and security, management of staff, management of utilities, and management of clinical and support activities)?
• Does it mean I need to have four days worth of stuff in my warehouse?
• What if I don’t have a warehouse?
• How prepared is prepared?

These are all excellent questions for which your organization is going to have to identify answers. For good or ill, there are no correct responses for these questions, and the practical applications are going to vary from organization to organization.

What’s important to remember is that this particular EP is not telling you that you have to do one thing or another (like having 96 hours worth of stuff in your warehouse). What is required is that you have a sense of what would happen if you were cut off from support for those 96 hours. Some organizations might be able to do 96 hours on their own with very little difficulty, while others might struggle to get to 48 or even 24 hours (probably not many in that group, but it is possible). The ultimate questions are: How far can you go? And what do you do when you’ve gone as far as you can go?

One of the clear lessons learned in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is that holding on past the point of reason is, well, not a reasonable strategy. But prior to recent tragedies, it’s almost as if the “defend-in-place” strategy of life safety management was carried across to the annals of emergency response. Right or wrong, getting out appeared to be entertained very infrequently in our response plans.

Now we know that in order to even approximate the safe management of a catastrophic event, we must consider the inconsiderable, think the unthinkable, try to gain some measure of control over situations that are, for all intents and purposes, uncontrollable.

What would we do if faced with an event of such magnitude? How far can we go? How do we tell when we’ve crossed that threshold? All questions to answer—and soon.