My experience in developing plans and programs to prevent and respond to emergencies date back to the mid 1970's. At the time I was working for Imperial Oil and the plans mainly focused on preventing and responding to spills at petroleum bulk plants as well as truck, rail and marine transportation spills. There were no specific standards for the response plans and each company used their best efforts to develop their own plans.  As there were some mutual aid agreements among companies and some spill response cooperatives these organizations tried to develop common procedures to enable companies to work together when responding to emergency incidents. At that time there was no formal incident command system (ICS) and every company established their own organizations and positions which added to the challenge of working together. 

As time progressed standards were developed for specific aspects of response such as for responding to hazardous materials emergencies and in time ICS and other command models were developed and to various degrees adopted by companies and response organizations. 

Today, if one is charged with the challenge of developing a program to not only respond to emergencies but to try to prevent them, there are a number of standards avaialble which are very useful to help one develop an effective program. The first one I worked with is the National Fire Prevention Association NFPA 1600 standard on disaster / emergency management and business continuity programs.   Quite a number of years later the Canadian Standards Association issued  CSA Z1600 standard for emergency and continuity management programs. I have, for many years, been a member of the technical committee that developed the Canadian standard.

Both CSA and NFPA work closely with each other and other standards writing organizations and with the International Standards Organization to share new ideas and best practices. I was recently added to the Canadian delegation that works with the ISO/TC-292 Security technical committee which focuses on emergency and continuity management related standards on an international level. I hope to share information on some of the work they are doing in my next blog article.