Emergency Services Sector Resilience Development Program

The strategies needed by first responders to identify risks and protect critical infrastructure are unlike any found within the other 15 sectors. While most of the other sectors are focused on security and resilience for fixed facilities, these measures fall short of the Emergency Services Sector (ESS) response goals and priorities. Success for the ESS, from a critical infrastructure perspective, requires that responders' ability to plan, mitigate, and respond must be greater than locally and regionally calculated risks.

There is no such program which proactively coordinates a unified effort to assist in critical infrastructure resilience and continuity of operations for the Nation's first responders. The lack of such a program directly affects pre-incident mitigation and planning, response efficiency and effectiveness, and rapid recovery. These conclusions are rooted in open and closed source research and direct input from the ESS partnership and first responder community.

The Emergency Services Sector Resilience Development Program is a suite of existing resources and best practices that are specifically tailored to meet the unique resilience needs of the first responder community.

Emergency Services Sector Resilience Development Webinar Series

The Emergency Services Sector Resilience Development Webinar Series (ESS RDWS) is facilitated by the Emergency Services Sector Management Team and is a quarterly webinar series that focuses on topics of interest to ESS stakeholders.

Emergency Services Sector Continuity Planning Suite

The Emergency Services Sector Continuity Planning Suite (ESS CPS) provides a centralized collection of existing guidance, processes, products, tools, and best practices to support the development and maturation of continuity planning for the first responder community. The ESS CPS was created through a partnership of the Emergency Services Sector Risk Management Agency (SRMA) and Sector Coordinating Council (SCC). First responders can use the ESS CPS as it suits their organization to evaluate and improve their continuity capability and enhance their preparedness for emergencies.

Education: Why Continuity Planning is Important

Continuity planning is simply the good business practice of ensuring the execution of essential functions through emergencies. Without the planning, provision, and implementation of continuity principles, first responders may be unable to provide services to help fellow citizens when needed the most. Continuity planning enables first responders to maintain their essential functions and fulfill their mission to save lives, protect property and the environment, assist communities impacted by disasters, and aid recovery from emergencies.

Evaluating Continuity Capability

The core of the ESS CPS is an easy-to-use and uniform method for evaluating continuity capability to identify and fill continuity gaps. Through identifying and addressing these gaps, viable continuity programs can be established that will help keep organizations functioning during emergencies. ESS organizations can use the entire Emergency Services Sector Continuity Capability Evaluation (CCE) to complete an evaluation, or they can evaluate selected elements of continuity capability based on their organizations’ needs. Worksheets and templates are provided for filling gaps identified when evaluating continuity capability.

Knowledge Validation: Testing, Training, and Exercising Continuity Planning

Applying continuity capability and plans through exercises and training validates the efforts invested in continuity capability-building and can help identify opportunities for improvement. The ESS CPS provides templates and resources for conducting and documenting exercises for emergency events, as well as references for training available to first responders to improve continuity capability.

Emergency Services Sector-Specific Tabletop Exercise Program

The Emergency Services Sector-Specific Tabletop Exercise Program is a tool allowing critical infrastructure partners to develop interactive, discussion-based exercises for their communities of interest, be it at the sector or facility level. The Program affords the opportunity for public and private critical infrastructure stakeholders and their public safety partners to exercise information sharing processes and incident management plans, programs, policies, and procedures in order to address potential gaps, vulnerabilities, and other pertinent issues.