CMLP 2.14_English: Serious Injuries and Mass Casualty Events

Natural disasters, industrial and transportation accidents, disease outbreaks, building fires or deliberate hostile human acts such as terror attacks all have the potential to cause mass casualties. Where these occur in less-developed or disaster-struck international locations, complexity can be very significant, as inadequate or overwhelmed local emergency medical services, remoteness of the scene and insecurity compound the challenges of response and management. Mass Casualty Events present a significant challenge to an organization’s fundamental resilience, requiring the activation of the full scope of crisis response personnel and resources, the close coordination of organizational and local incident management teams, accurate and timely passage of information and interaction with emergency responders who, at a point in time, will assume primacy in the local response. All of this must be achieved in the face of an event that will place individuals and teams under acute emotional stress, dealing with events that may have left close colleagues dead or seriously injured. Beyond the fact that such incidents have a life safety component, these events create a range of organizational risks that, unprepared for or poorly managed, have the potential to further affect business continuity, whether involving risk to reputation and legal liability, long term damage to staff morale, maintenance of supply chains or extended periods of lost productivity.