Scope of the Plan

The Disaster Management Plan should spell out the roles and responsibilities of departments, teams units and personnel during emergency situations. It should address various specific kinds of emergencies on an individual basis, giving guidelines for the stabilization and recovery from the incident.

These involve emergency instructions and references in a concise format for the individuals designated to manage the resources.

It should encompass the preparation, response and recovery of utility personnel and resources for emergency situations.  It should facilitate inter- agency coordination among responding agencies. The major thrust of the plan should be to make the utility employees familiar along with the several kinds of emergencies and disasters that could affect the power sector and the action plan to tackle them.

The basic emergency process is designed to protect lives and property by effective use of the available resources both of the utility and the community.  Because an emergency might be sudden and without warning, these process should be designed to be flexible in order to accommodate contingencies of several types and magnitudes.

The plan should be made for three levels and kinds of emergencies:

•  LEVEL 1 -

MINOR INCIDENT:

A minor incident is defined as a local event along with limited impact that does not affect the whole functional capability of the organisation.  Planning response is carried out at a limited local level (e.g. in a building/zone/grid). The Disaster Management Plan would not be activated at this level.

•  LEVEL 2 -

EMERGENCY:

An emergency is described as a serious event in which significantly disrupts one or more operations of the utility.  In this multiple locations/area are included: the Disaster Management Plan would be activated to the extent essential.

•   LEVEL 3 -

DISASTER

A well-defined and comprehensive Disaster Management Plan should classically involve the subsequent three kinds of response elements:

• Operational response - to get the disruption under control as quickly as possible so which normal operation is resumed.

• Management response - to allocate resources and make critical decisions needed to resolve the situation.

•  Communication response - to communicate along with employees, their families, officials, other agencies and media.

The plan should facilitate the setting up of an appropriate system for disaster management in the utility.