Emergency Operations Centre (EOC)

What is an EOC?

When an emergency takes place, responders mobilise. Some responders perform immediate, on-scene stabilisation activities, such as firefighting, assessing damage, and conserving property. Others support that initial group. They report to what’s called an emergency operations centre (EOC).

The EOC can be a physical, mobile, or virtual location (or some combination of the three), to which civic and emergency leaders as well as certain responders report and coordinate information and resources in support of on-scene incident management activities.

Physical EOCs have long dominated the space – though virtual EOCs are rising in popularity. Physical EOCs can be temporary or permanent facilities, extensive structures with stadium-like seating and high-tech equipment or humbler in design and execution.

With on-scene work going on, one might ask, why set up an EOC in the first place. The answer is it depends. Government entities, non-profit disaster relief organisations, and private businesses all build EOCs for their own needs. The EOC is usually considered a tactical hub, or eyes, ears, and brains, of the incident response, a means to give on-the-ground personnel the support they need to make the mission a success.

In larger, more established EOCs, the work performed tends to include the collection, analysis, and sharing of emergency information, often large amounts of information from diverse sources. Emergency information comes in to the EOC; it gets distilled by multiple analysts (representing diverse stakeholders) into succinct reports sent out to decision makers, who communicate it out to response personnel in the field. The EOC coordinates plans, determining current and future requirements. The EOC might also be multi-agency, with personnel providing a range of planning services to address current needs, forecast future needs, as well as develop ways to meet them.

Some entities eschew this broader tactical scope, preferring to use their EOCs primarily for resource management purposes, i.e., to locate and deploy resources across the incident zone. The work might include supporting resource needs and requests through allocation and tracking. Of course, most EOCs can analyse data, identify where the shortages are, find and dispatch needed resources, as well as monitor returns. What matters for EOC success, though, is that implementation and deployment match the needs and requirements established by the entity in the first place.

EOC roles and responsibilities

Key to that success will be the personnel staffing the EOC. How, then, to determine EOC roles and responsibilities? How an EOC is staffed depends on what it does; most EOCs provide coordination and policy direction. They also help integrate diverse stakeholders, including senior officials in all levels of government (up to the highest), business, and the non-for-profit world. EOC personnel also have to work with legal counsel, as much of the work they do require legal authorisation. EOCs also disseminate information to the public.

EOC staffing, like the EOC more generally, should support sustained operations. When it comes to staffing specifically, that means outfitting the deepest roster practicable at every available position – not just local personnel either indeed EOCs often also regroup liaisons and representatives that are only present in the facility during incident activations. The precise configuration of the EOC team depends on numerous factors. Those include:

• Jurisdictional/organisational authorities
• Availability
• Representation
• EOC facilities and other resource capabilities
• Political drivers
• Incident complexity

Those factors leave a lot of room to manoeuvre for individual entities. On the other hand, incident management structures, like the Incident Command System ICS, do provide methods for organising EOC management and operations. As many response agencies adhere to ICS or its country-specific derivatives, such as the Australasian Inter-Service Incident Management System (AIIMS), the agencies tend to follow one of the following EOC organising methods:

1. Incident Command System (ICS) or ICS-like Structure. The primary benefits of this structure include familiarity to those with ICS training; this modular configuration most closely aligns with the structure used for on-scene incident management, where leaders are responsible for the functions of unstaffed subordinate positions.
2. Incident Support Model. A variation of the ICS structure primary, the incident support model provides the primary benefits of streamlining resource sourcing, ordering, and tracking. In it, the EOC director is put in direct contact with those conducting situational awareness and information management.
3. Departmental Structure. The primary benefits of this structure consist in minimal preparation and start-up time; department/agency representatives are already operating in the context of their normal relationships.

For those unfamiliar with ICS, key roles and responsibilities follow below:

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency

What is included in an Emergency Operations Plan (EOP)?

Incident planning, consisting of the collection, evaluation, and dissemination of operational information related to an incident, is one of the most important functions of emergency management; the EOC team, however configured, plays an important role.

Under the ICS model, for instance, it is the responsibility of Planning to maintain information, on both the current and forecasted situation as well the status of resources assigned to the incident. The EOC, in turn, helps to ensure that its capabilities and requirements match those spelled out in the entity’s Emergency Operations Plan (EOP).

The focus of an entity’s operational planning, the EOP is a plan for responding to hazards; it defines the scope of necessary emergency preparedness and (broader) emergency management activities for both business-as-usual and complex operations. What goes in the document? It includes:

• An assignment of responsibilities for the carrying out of specific actions that exceed routine responsibility at projected times and places during an emergency
• A delineation of lines of authority and organisational relationships. Shows how all actions will be coordinated
• A description of how people and property will be protected
• An identification of the personnel, equipment, facilities, supplies, and other resources available to the entity, either within its purview or by agreement with other entities
• (If applicable) A reconciliation of requirements with other entities

Emergency operations plan template

The EOP must be sufficiently flexible to suit all emergencies. And so, in format, the EOP will describe the plan’s purpose, situation, assumptions, how it was developed and will be maintained, the concept of operations, administration and logistics, as well as authorities and references. For EOPs that service multiple agencies, the plan will predesignate who will be the lead agency and/or functional area representatives to the incident command, unified command, or multiagency coordination entity; this arrangement serves to facilitate responsive and collaborative incident management.

The precise form the EOP takes depends again on the needs and specificities of the entity, a product of governmental structure (for public entities) and/or the results of a risk assessment (for everyone else). Provided it fits the entity’s emergency management strategies, policies, resources, and capabilities, the EOP format is a decision taken at the entity level. Incident management structures rarely prescribe compliance with certain EOP template formats, though policymakers might. What are the most common EOP templates? They include:

Finally, emergency operations differ greatly from the routine work of governments, non-for-profits, and private organisations. Indeed, emergencies necessitate timely decision-making, reliant on a leader’s ability to sift through emergency information quickly. Centralising those operations in an EOC, whether physical, mobile, or virtual, has proven one of the best means for entities to coordinate effectively and better direct the emergency efforts crucial to successful response and recovery. Topping it all off is emergency management software, like Noggin Emergency, that operationalises the work of EOCs with virtual EOC functionality.

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Sources:

Ready Government: Incident Management. Available at https://www.ready.gov/incident-management.

Federal Emergency Management Agency: National Engagement for Draft Emergency Operations Center (EOC) How-To Quick Reference Guide. Available at https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_eoc-how-to-quick-reference_guide_0.pdf.

Federal Emergency Management Agency: Developing and Maintaining Emergency Operations Plans. Available at https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/developing-maintaining-emergency-operations-plans.pdf.