Industrial Incidents: Does Your Facility Have a Mutual Aid Agreement?

Mutual aid is an agreement among emergency services to lend assistance to industrial organizations should an incident occurs at one of their facilities. This may occur when emergency response efforts exceed the capability of local resources, such as a disaster or a multiple-alarm fire. Mutual aid may be ad hoc, requested only when such an emergency occurs or it may be a formal standing agreement for cooperative emergency management on a continuing basis.

Environmental incidents, such as an oil well fire or chemical spill, can cause major headaches for companies. The fallout can be wide-reaching, with pollutants quickly spreading to affect waters, buildings, and other amenities.

The Benefits

• Enhances response capability and safety of communities.
• Creates an effective and consistently understood response system.
• Encourages the transfer of best practices and continuous improvement.
• Standardizes procedures and spreads awareness of everyone’s operational plan.
• Ensures growth of collaboration and interoperability.
• Sharing of resources including physical resources, technical and knowledge bases.
• Grows an approach of “we are all impacted”. Emergencies don’t recognize boundaries.
• Removes the difficulty of pooling all the resources without an already developed alliance/relationship.
• Eliminate confusion by having one notification system.
• Improves public confidence in the industry.

How to Manage a Collaborative Response Effort

When a large mutual aid incident occurs, interagency collaboration and communication can be difficult to manage. It is important that companies have plans in place in the event that things go wrong at the operational level. Emergency preparedness and response planning is an essential management tool that enables companies to prepare for and quickly respond to accidents when they take place in order to minimize social, environmental, and financial impacts.

D4H Incident Management is a real-time incident management platform that enables the coordination of an effective response to any situation. Industrial facilities and public safety teams can easily create a common operating picture, communicate objectives, and collaborate on a resolution using forms, tasks, logs, maps, and status boards.

All parties can view incident plans and access the software during an incident to instantly achieve situational awareness. Any additional external agencies can also be kept in the loop with D4H Incident Management’s ‘Share by Public Link’ or feature, which creates a secret URL for any status board, task board, or form in and updates in real-time. Check out how Clinton County Emergency Management Agency uses this functionality when cooperating with local utility companies during an incident.