5. Ad Hoc Actions

5.1. Concept

The major goal for scripting our pre-planned actions is to free up time and attention for unplanned activities.

One of the key responsibilities of the Operations Section is to collect, prioritize, dispatch, and review status of these tasks.

There’s no way to predict the particular tasks that might come up, but we can prepare to dispatch and track status of those tasks.

There are several ways Ops might receive a task: from the IC, from an incident report, from the town EOC, etc.

Ops needs to work with the IC to set priorities, and then send task assignments out. If the assignment is to be performed by a field team, the assignment should be sent to the Recon team to be communicated and tracked.

5.2. Procedures

The Ops team should send the new task assignment to the Recon team for assignment (with a copy to Planning/Scribe). Recon should make an entry on the Ad Hoc tracking form and assign a team to perform the task.

Here is additional background on non-timestamped form fields:

• Request Time and Date: when the form is filled by Ops

• Request Id: unique identifier from ops; typically a monotonically increasing integer

• Task Priority: importance of this task relative to others in the queue:

  • 1: highest priority; should preempt existing assignments

  • 2: don’t preempt an existing survey, but assign before starting new pre-planned surveys.

  • 3: same priority as pre-planned surveys; do when convenient

  • 4: lower priority than pre-planned surveys

• Linked Incident: If this task is to address a received incident report: put the incident id in this field and attach a copy of the incident report.

• Task Description: enough background of the request so the field team can accomplish the task

• Recon Notes: Any progress notes needed, or results to report back to Ops

Once the task is complete the Recon team should return a copy of the completed Ops Assignment form to the Ops team and Planning/Scribe