IAEM AEM flashcards
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32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- All-hazards planning
- An approach that prepares for the full range of natural, technological, and human-caused hazards using common functions and capabilities rather than separate plans for each hazard.
- Comprehensive Emergency Management
- The integrated management of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery across all hazards and all levels of government and society.
- Whole Community
- A preparedness philosophy in which individuals, businesses, nonprofits, faith groups, and government all participate in building resilience rather than relying on government alone.
- IAEM AEM credential
- The Associate Emergency Manager certification offered by the International Association of Emergency Managers, recognizing professional competency through education, experience, and examination.
- Stafford Act
- The primary US federal law authorizing disaster assistance to states and localities after a presidential declaration, including public assistance and individual assistance programs.
- Risk formula
- Risk is commonly expressed as the product of threat or probability, vulnerability, and consequence or impact; reducing any factor reduces overall risk.
- THIRA
- Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment: a process that identifies hazards, estimates consequences, and sets capability targets compared against current capabilities.
- Vulnerability
- The characteristics of a community or asset that make it susceptible to harm, including physical exposure, social factors, and infrastructure dependencies.
- Risk matrix
- A tool plotting probability against consequence to rank hazards; documented assumptions make rankings defensible and repeatable across planning cycles.
- Cascading effects
- Secondary consequences that follow an initial hazard, such as power loss disrupting water treatment, communications, and healthcare across interdependent systems.
- Emergency Operations Plan
- A jurisdiction's document describing how it will respond to emergencies, organized around functional and hazard-specific annexes supported by standard operating procedures.
- Continuity of Operations
- Planning that ensures essential functions continue during disruption, covering orders of succession, delegations of authority, alternate facilities, and vital records.
- EMAC
- The Emergency Management Assistance Compact, a mutual aid agreement allowing states to request and provide resources across state lines during declared emergencies.
- Corrective action tracking
- A process assigning each exercise or incident finding to a responsible owner with a due date and tracking it to closure so lessons are institutionalized.
- Capability assessment
- A structured comparison of current capabilities against target capabilities to identify gaps that drive planning, training, equipment, and grant priorities.
- Incident Command System
- A standardized, scalable on-scene management system with modular functions, common terminology, and management by objectives used across agencies and jurisdictions.
- Incident Action Plan
- The written plan for an operational period, stating incident objectives, strategies, tactics, organization, and resource assignments, produced by the Planning Section.
- EOC activation levels
- Tiered staffing levels, such as monitoring, partial, and full activation, that match coordination intensity to incident scope and complexity.
- Span of control
- The number of subordinates one supervisor can effectively manage, typically three to seven in ICS with five as the working target.
- Joint Information System
- A structure coordinating public information across agencies and jurisdictions to ensure consistent, accurate, and timely messaging during an incident.
- Recovery Support Functions
- Organized functional areas, such as housing, economic recovery, and infrastructure, that coordinate recovery assistance and align with national recovery frameworks.
- Hazard mitigation
- Sustained action to reduce or eliminate long-term risk from hazards, through measures such as land-use regulation, building codes, acquisition, and infrastructure hardening.
- HMGP
- The Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, which provides post-disaster federal funding for mitigation measures following a presidential disaster declaration.
- Damage assessment
- A tiered process of windshield, preliminary, and detailed inspections that estimates impacts and informs assistance determinations and recovery priorities.
- Debris management plan
- A pre-established plan identifying staging sites, removal contractors, environmental clearances, and disposal methods to accelerate post-disaster debris removal.
- PACE communications
- A redundancy approach establishing primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency communications paths for each critical function.
- IPAWS
- The Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, which distributes alerts through Wireless Emergency Alerts, the Emergency Alert System, and other channels.
- Common operating picture
- A single validated picture of situation, resources, and damage shared across agencies to support coordinated decisions in an emergency operations center.
- HSEEP
- The Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program, a cycle of plan, conduct, evaluate, and improve that produces after-action reports and improvement plans.
- Tabletop exercise
- A discussion-based exercise in which participants talk through a scenario and validate plans, policies, and procedures without deploying resources.
- Full-scale exercise
- An operations-based exercise involving actual deployment of resources and personnel to test plans, equipment, and coordination under realistic conditions.
- Emergency declaration authority
- The legal power, defined by statute, that allows officials to take specific actions such as evacuation orders, curfews, and resource requisition during emergencies.