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This paper outlines the context of emergency management in Canada and identifies some of the key factors that have contributed to public emergency preparedness initiatives reaching a saturation point. Readers will gain insight and actionable suggestions from the proposed Community Resiliency Framework. Readers will learn how emergency management agencies can engage and collaborate authentically with communities and leverage existing preparedness initiatives with new methodologies to increase community resiliency.

This paper describes how Hurricane Ida exposed gaps in emergency preparedness planning and coordination in New Orleans, particularly related to the health and safety of the residents of multi-storey independent living facilities designated for seniors and persons with disabilities, where at least ten lives were lost due to the power outages and extreme heat that occurred following the storm. As this paper discusses, New Orleans Health Department leaders responded by taking swift policy action, working with the mayor, city council and community stakeholders to ensure better coordination, preparation and accountability for owners and operators of certain independent living facilities. The article recommends that states and localities with individuals living in independent living facilities should consider similar policy interventions as part of their disaster cycle planning activities.

Nursing home residents experience death and injury at a disproportionately higher rate than other populations during and after a disaster. This paper addresses the complex chronic conditions of vulnerable residents that will become even more challenging due to compounding effects from continued disasters and rapid population aging. In 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) established national emergency preparedness requirements for long-term care (LTC) and skilled nursing (SN) facilities. The problems facing nursing facilities created by an increasing population to serve, present a challenge to meeting the highest level of requirements and responsibilities for healthcare preparedness. This paper argues that nursing facility personnel are required to participate in an unfamiliar culture of operational processes, using terminology foreign to their profession, in an environment requiring planning and decision-making skills using organisational concepts they most likely have never experienced. Furthermore, unlike hospitals, LTC and SN facility staff have not had extensive access to standardised training to meet the current requirements. The paper concludes that this environment adversely affects emergency managers and unnecessarily increases their planning and operational burden.

Nearly one fifth of the US population has a disability that impacts their communicative, mental or physical function. There are often not enough opportunities for people with disabilities to receive basic emergency preparedness training to help them be more resilient in times of crisis as preparedness education typically targets the general population. The Kent County Health Department, in collaboration with local disability advocates and preparedness educators, developed an inclusive preparedness programme to provide basic preparedness training for the whole community. This paper describes the evolution of the programme along with lessons learned by the participants and instructors.

Active shooter-type attacks are low-probability/ high-consequence incidents that must be a part of every organisation's all-hazards emergency preparedness programme. All too often, law enforcement is viewed as the only viable response, and while law enforcement's role is imperative, on-site security can do a great deal to prevent and mitigate this ever-growing threat. This paper argues that security officers should be trained and empowered with tools to help them identify Pre-Attack INdicators (PAINs) and those elements of first timer's syndrome that are exhibited prior to an attack. An understanding of PAINs combined with courteous, proactive and engaging interactions, will improve overall security value and provide early recognition and faster response in the unlikely event of an active-shooter type attack. Current active shooter response best practices embrace the runhide- fight survival options. The run and hide options are lower risk, and typically far more effective. Early recognition, and a thorough understanding of their environment, empowers security officers to provide clear and immediate run or hide instructions to others before the emergency occurs.

The paper discusses why resilience is increasingly important for companies to measure and address, thinking about relevant issues such as climate change and extreme weather. It gives insight on how companies measure their resilience and that it is more than a business continuity issue; indeed, it is a board issue. The paper looks at the role of regulation for companies with national critical infrastructure in putting in resilience guidelines and discusses the benefits of regulation in resilience, presenting a case study of the UK Water Services Regulation Authority resilience guidelines.

Global trade and commerce requires products to be securely contained and transferred in a timely way across great distances and between national boundaries. Throughout the process, cargo and containers are stored, handled and checked by a range of authorities and authorised agents. Intermodal transportation involves the use of container ships, planes, railway systems, land bridges, road networks and barges. This paper examines the the nefarious nature of intentional disruption and nefarious risks associated with the movement of cargo and container freight. The paper explores main threats, vulnerabilities and security measures relevant to significant intermodal transit risk issues such as theft, piracy, terrorism, contamination, counterfeiting and product tampering. Three risk and vulnerability models are examined and basic standards and regulations that are relevant to safe and secure transit of container goods across international supply networks are outlined.

In January 2012, the World Economic Forum made cyber attacks its fourth top global risk. In the 2013 risk report, cyber attacks were noted to be an even higher risk in absolute terms. The reliance of critical infrastructure on cyber working has never been higher; the frequency, intensity, impact and sophistication of attacks is growing. This trend looks likely to continue. It can be argued that it is no longer a question whether an organisation will be successfully hacked, but how long it will take to detect. In the ever-changing cyber environment, traditional protection techniques and reliance on preventive controls are not enough. A more agile approach is required to give assurance of a sufficiently secure digital society. Are we faced with a paradigm shift or a storm in a digital teacup? This paper offers an introduction to why cyber is important, a wider taxonomy on the topic and some historical context on how the discipline of cyber security has evolved, and an interpretation on what this means in the new normal of today.

This paper presents cyber resilience as key strand of national security. It establishes the importance of critical national infrastructure protection and the growing vicarious nature of remote, well-planned, and well executed cyber attacks on critical infrastructures. Examples of well-known historical cyber attacks are presented, and the emergence of 'internet of things' as a cyber vulnerability issue yet to be tackled is explored. The paper identifies key steps being undertaken by those responsible for detecting, deterring, and disrupting cyber attacks on critical national infrastructure in the United Kingdom and the USA.

Homeland security fusion centres serve to gather, analyse and share threat-related information among all levels of governments and law enforcement agencies. In order to function effectively, fusion centres must employ people with the necessary competencies to understand the nature of the threat facing a community, discriminate between important information and irrelevant or merely interesting facts and apply domain knowledge to interpret the results to obviate or reduce the existing danger. Public health and medical sector personnel routinely gather, analyse and relay health-related inform-ation, including health security risks, associated with the detection of suspicious biological or chemical agents within a community to law enforcement agencies. This paper provides a rationale for the integration of public health and medical personnel in fusion centres and describes their role in assisting law enforcement agencies, public health organisations and the medical sector to respond to natural or intentional threats against local communities, states or the nation as a whole.

This paper examines the evolving and dynamic field of homeland security in the USA. Included in this analysis is the evolution of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, an overview of the National Warning System, a summary of citizen support groups, and how the field of homeland security has had an impact on the location and architecture of public buildings and facilities. Also included are website directories of citizen support groups and federal agencies related to the field of homeland security.

The recent use of social media by protesters in Iran, Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere has focused new attention on this communications medium. Government agencies and businesses, as well, are using social media to push information to their stakeholders. Those who are on the front lines of this information revolution, however, realise that social media is most effective when the communication is two-way. Unlike other media, social media allows information sharing. This, in turn, provides emergency managers with new situational-awareness resources when trying to mitigate an incident. As Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Craig Fugate told Information Week on January 19th, 2011: 'We can adjust much quicker if we can figure out how to have (a) two-way conversation and if we can look at the public as a resource. The public is putting out better situational awareness than many of our own agencies can.' This paper provides examples of how social media can be used as a situational-awareness resource and specific 'tools' that can be used to assist with this task.

Can the same numbers and letters which are the life blood of modern business and government computer systems be harnessed to protect computers from attack against known information security risks? For the past seven years, Foreign Service officers and technicians of the US Government have sought to maintain diplomatic operations in the face of rising cyber attacks and test the hypothesis that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As eight out of ten attacks leverage known computer security vulnerabilities or configuration setting weaknesses, a pound of cure would seem to be easy to come by. Yet modern security tools present an unusually consequential threat to business continuity - too much rather than too little information on cyber problems is presented, harking back to a phenomenon cited by social scientists in the 1960s called 'information overload'. Experience indicates that the longer the most serious cyber problems go untreated, the wider the attack surface adversaries can find. One technique used at the Department of State, called 'risk scoring', resulted in an 89 per cent overall reduction in measured risk over 12 months for the Department of State's servers and personal computers. Later refinements of risk scoring enabled technicians to correct unique security threats with unprecedented speed. This paper explores how the use of metrics, special care in presenting information to technicians and executives alike, as well as tactical use of organisational incentives can result in stronger cyber defences protecting modern organisations.

In an age of political turmoil and mistrust of governments, having an outlet for creative problem solving that involves all aspects of communities during disasters is critical. Additionally, there is a need for outlets that save taxpayer money for particular projects, such as road construction or infrastructure protection. Public-private partnerships are one way to accomplish these goals. Utilised correctly, a public-private partnership is a win-win situation for all participants. This paper will make the case for the continued support from all sectors for public-private partnerships. A description of public-private partnerships will be given to show the broad spectrum of opportunities for such a partnership. In addition, a case study of a public-private partnership called SAFER Santa Rosa is explored as the programme is oriented towards disasters, but keeps the community engaged all year round. Finally, an example is presented of an initiative that not only exemplifies the spirit of public-private partnerships, but has attracted international recognition because it is simple, replicable, cost-effective and valuable to both the private sector and the public sector. The Business Emergency Response Toolkit bag is a true public-private success story. It is hoped that the reader will be able to replicate the ideas discussed herein in their own community.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is developing indices to better assist in the risk management of critical infrastructures. The first of these indices is the Protective Measures Index - a quantitative index that measures overall protection across component categories: physical security, security management, security force, information sharing, protective measures and dependencies. The Protective Measures Index, which can also be recalculated as the Vulnerability Index, is a way to compare differing protective measures (eg fence versus security training). The second of these indices is the Resilience Index, which assesses a site's resilience and consists of three primary components: robustness, resourcefulness and recovery. The third index is the Criticality Index, which assesses the importance of a facility. The Criticality Index includes economic, human, governance and mass evacuation impacts. The Protective Measures Index, Resilience Index and Criticality Index are being developed as part of the Enhanced Critical Infrastructure Protection initiative that DHS protective security advisers implement across the nation at critical facilities. This paper describes two core themes: determination of the vulnerability, resilience and criticality of a facility and comparison of the indices at different facilities.

In the domain of emergency management and homeland security there is a lack of a formal planning process at the local level when it comes to special event planning. The unique nature of special event planning demands an understanding of the planning process for both traditional and non-traditional planning partners. This understanding will make certain that local governments apply due diligence when planning for the safety of the public. This paper offers a practical roadmap for planning at the local level. It will address those 'special events' that are beyond routine local events but not of a sufficient scale to be granted National Special Security Event status. Due to the infrequency of 'special events' in most communities, it is imperative that deliberate planning takes place. Upon conclusion, the reader will be able to construct a planning process tailored to the needs of their community, guide both traditional and non-traditional planning partners through the planning process, determine priorities, explore alternatives, plan for contingencies, conduct a confirmation brief, facilitate operations and assemble an after-action report and improvement plan.