1. Does the campus have an emergency planning goal? Yes. The goal of emergency planning at Cornell University is to be fully prepared for immediate and effective response to, and recovery from emergencies. These efforts are guided by Cornell’s desire to protect the following, in priority order:
- People
- Research animals and plants and intellectual property, and
- Equipment and facilities
It is our goal to have teaching and research to be "back in business" within 30 days of any interruption. Clearly, the most severe disasters might make this goal unattainable, but top campus leadership regards fast recovery as essential to the preservation of Cornell’s eminence. A long interruption in teaching and research is unacceptable. Closure for a semester could have long-term consequences.
2. Who should do emergency planning?
The effectiveness of emergency planning is dependent upon the development of a comprehensive central plan and individual unit plans. All colleges, schools, departments, and other units that conduct teaching, research, or service MUST have an emergency plan. Campus Essential Services Units who provide essential services to the campus community must also have an emergency plan. If a function performed by your unit would contribute significantly to restarting of teaching, research, or public service during the month or two following a major disaster, you must have an emergency plan.
3. Should we appoint a departmental Emergency Coordinator?
University Policy 8.3 establishes authority and responsibilities of campus officials and staff members, and requires that colleges and major administrative units designate emergency coordinators with the authority to make modifications in emergency procedures and to oversee the coordination of resources for emergency preparedness, response and recovery, as necessary.
4. How long does it take to create an emergency plan?
Think of this as roughly a three-month project. Our experience is that longer time frames do not produce better plans. Most of the three months will be "white space" waiting for meetings to happen and people to come to agreements on priorities and action items. For units that have previously prepared emergency response and recovery information, the timeline should be somewhat shorter.
5. Who should be in the emergency planning group?
Your emergency planning group should be comprised of people that have the knowledge, expertise and authority to plan for and oversee response to and recovery from an emergency (e.g. Upper and middle managers, assistant deans, assistant directors, HR managers, IT managers, key functional
managers, emergency and facility coordinators). These are people who have access to the unit leaders and who understand how the organization operates. Keep the group size manageable.
If your unit is an academic or research department, faculty/researcher input is essential. Try to enlist at least a couple of faculty members into your group.
6. How does the emergency planning group operate?
The group will typically meet & discuss, with little-or-no "homework." In many cases, the emergency coordinator and/or a unit designee will use Cornell’s on-line emergency response and recovery planning tool (usually apart from the meetings), providing the planning group with printed materials when needed for review or discussion. In some areas, it may be more appropriate to have the unit manager, research, or faculty member enter their specific information. The emergency coordinator or designee may interview key people for information. There is no single "right way" to use this tool. It really will depend upon each unit. Even the coordinator’s role should not require a heavy time commitment. Cornell’s approach to emergency planning asks for your thoughtful consideration of issues, not for detailed research or leg-work.
For discussion purposes, Cornell’s on-line emergency response and recovery planning tool can be brought "live" into the meetings (using a data projector) and filled out as the group discusses. This has been done successfully, but requires a cohesive, focused group.
7. How detailed & complete does our plan need to be?
Your emergency plan will never be "complete" because you can’t know what disaster you’re planning for. Cornell’s on-line emergency response and recovery planning tool will prompt you for the appropriate level of detail, and most of those details will be things that your group easily knows or can figure out.
Successful recovery from disaster will hinge largely on the ingenuity and energy of the folks on the spot. Your job in planning for emergencies is to help them by gathering data, identifying resources, and developing some possible strategies. If you find yourself puzzling whether an answer is thorough enough, declare victory and move on!
8. Should we do a plan for an entire college or school, or a plan for each unit within it?
It is the responsibility of each college and major administrative unit to develop and maintain unit emergency plan(s) consistent with the Cornell Emergency Plan and Policy 8.3. This requirement ensures that critical information and resource data will be collected for each department, thus ensuring effective, efficient business resumption in case of an emergency. This same data will be very important in the event that a unit must make decisions around shutting down operations, or prioritizing critical functions. The EPR system has the flexibility to create plans for sub-departments.
9. What assumptions can we make about what the campus will do for us after an emergency?
As part of the central Cornell Emergency Plan, the University has designated several key units that have the responsibility for providing essential services needed during an emergency event. Those units are: Campus Life, Cornell Information Technologies, Cornell Police, Environmental Health and Safety, Facilities Services, Gannett Health Services, Human Resources, Supply Management, Risk Management and Insurance and University Communications. These units have developed two emergency plans: one that describes the services they will provide for the campus community during an emergency, and a second that describes the emergency plan for their specific organization.
Here are some reasonable assumptions:
- Access to buildings. If campus officials have reason to suspect that a building is hazardous to enter, they will immediately close the building and call in trained EH&S inspectors. In the worst case (a major incident with many buildings damaged), the response and inspection process alone could take weeks, with hazmat cleanup and repairs taking much longer. You may be unable to enter your building for an extended period of time.
- Locating temporary space. This will be a huge challenge for the campus, so any arrangements you have made ahead of time will serve you well. For example, make an agreement with another department in a separate building or with colleagues in another institution. Anything you can do within your own unit will be to your benefit, such as sharing labs and offices that remain accessible.
- Computing infrastructure. Restoration of our many centrally-supported IT applications and administrative systems will be of highest priority after any disruption. Examples would be email, internet connectivity, PeopleSoft HR/Payroll, as well as the physical campus data network. Many resources continue to be directed toward hardening our IT systems to minimize damage and aid quick recovery. Definite predictions, of course, are not possible. Within your unit, you should be working with your IT Manager to take steps to back-up data and make plans for restarting your own servers and applications.
- Communication protocol. General communications with students, faculty, staff and the public will be handled by University Communications, and will be tightly managed so that messages are consistent. As your unit resumes functioning, communications of an operational nature will be your responsibility.
- Contacting your staff. Each unit should keep a list of staff. The PeopleSoft HR/Payroll system serves as the repository employee contact information. Departments should be maintaining staff emergency contact lists. This will be a departmental responsibility.
- Care of staff. Many staff issues arise during disaster recovery: pay, temporary leave, and temporary alterations of assignment, safety, benefits, layoffs, work-at-home, stress, and family issues. You should assume that the Office of Human Resources will be available with guidance and mechanisms to assist departments in these complex areas. Conversely, departments should seek guidance from OHR when uncertain how to act in these matters - both before a disaster and after it.
- Temporary staffing. Mechanisms will be available (operated by OHR) for hiring temporary staff and for redeploying existing staff. Available staff less-critical to your operation may be redeployed elsewhere.
10. What help and money can we expect from the state and federal governments?
Outside assistance for disaster recovery will be forthcoming from both state and federal governments, but it is impossible to say before any disaster exactly what form it will take. It is important to know that the federal government never ADVANCES funds to institutions like ours for disaster recovery. Reimbursement is the path, and it is always a long one.
Cornell will be reimbursed for repairs and reconstruction costs, but it will take years of negotiating with the state and federal governments. Many real losses may not be reimbursed. So the more capable we are, individually and collectively, of taking care of ourselves, the better off we will be.
11. The instruction says to identify our critical functions, not processes. What's the difference?
Processes are the steps needed to accomplish a function. For example, the function "provide meals for residents of university housing" is accomplished through the processes of "food buying, food storage, cooking, serving, and cleanup". We focus on major functions because processes are too specific and detailed for our level of planning.
12. How can we craft a plan to handle unknown circumstances?
The methodology that we employ for emergency planning mostly avoids discussion of particular causal events that could interrupt our mission. All such causal events (inclement weather, fire, pandemic, human sabotage) will affect our functioning in similar ways: temporarily prevent us from using resources to which we have become accustomed.
These resources include:
- space (our classrooms, labs and offices)
- infrastructure (power, water, sewer, networks, phones)
- people (our staff)
- equipment (libraries, computers, etc.)
- funds (our income stream).
Our planning focuses on:
- identifying the resources that are critical
- safeguarding critical resources against loss (backup of systems & data, safe storage of research items)
- actions that will lessen the impact of losses (pre-arrangements with other departments, schools, or sister campuses for mutual aid)
- replacing resources quickly (contracts with vendors)
- performing critical functions without some of those resources (teaching via distance learning technology)
- providing our people with the information they will need, post-disaster, to get the campus back in action.
At best, an emergency plan is not a step-by-step cookbook, but rather a jumping-off point for ingenuity. In addition to capturing essential information about critical functions and resources, planning is about establishing contacts and relationships.
When an emergency event happens, what's on paper will not be as important as the processes, conversations, and relationships developed during the emergency planning process.