Comprehensive Community Bio-Event Resilience​ Action Plan

At the grassroots level, there is increasing concern about potential largescale emergencies and the need to make communities more bio-event resilient — improving capabilities to prepare for, respond to, and recover rapidly from events and disasters with limited impacts to health and safety. This interest at the local level is also a priority at the national level, highlighted in national policy strategies recently issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Health and Human Services Department (HHS). In 2009, the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region’s (PNWER) Center for Regional Disaster Resilience was asked by the DHS Office of Health Affairs to work with Puget Sound Region stakeholders to develop a template that can be customized by communities nation-wide to improve their bio-event resilience. The Puget Sound Region was selected for the Pilot Project because of its well-established culture of collaboration and coordination among government, private sector, and other stakeholders and proactive and innovative approaches to all-hazards disaster preparedness.

The resulting Comprehensive Community Bio-Event Resilience Action Plan provides a roadmap, checklist, and gauge for progress. The Action Plan takes into account and builds on the Puget Sound Region’s already strong emergency management and public health capabilities, providing a set of activities that local jurisdictions, private sector, non-profit, and other organizations can undertake depending on available resources. The Action Plan was developed in a year-long process that involved creating a work group of key stakeholders; holding meetings, workshops, and a tabletop exercise; conducting a survey, focus groups, and interviews; and open source research to develop an extensive baseline assessment of capabilities, findings, and needs. Because of the Puget Sound Region’s interdependencies and public health ties across the U.S.- Canadian border, the process included Canadian provincial, private sector and other representatives.

Read the Comprehensive Plan Here

*It is important to note that the dominance of social media that we see today was not present at the time of this planning effort and would need to be included in adapting this plan to today's situation. 

The Action Plan identifies needs and recommends more than six dozen activities to meet these needs in 12 focus areas. It provides a template in matrix format that stakeholders can use to prioritize these recommendations and determine lead and partner organizations for each activity. This matrix offers a tool for stakeholders to use to take the next step to create work groups to identify project requirements and sources of potential funds and expertise for implementation. Lastly, the Action Plan includes guidance on how stakeholders can create a sustainable, continuous improvement process through incorporating into the Plan new bio-resilience needs and activities based on lessons learned from events and exercises. This continuous improvement process will provide a means to measure progress as Action Plan activities are completed.​

​This document describes a holistic, systematic approach for determining needed actions to improve regional capabilities to withstand bio-events that significantly impact community health and safety, and to rapidly recover to normal or new normal conditions. The geographic focus of the Comprehensive Community Bio-Event Resilience Action Plan is the Puget Sound Region of Washington State, which includes the Greater Seattle Area, the Pacific Northwest’s largest metropolitan area. The Action Plan is the culmination of a federally-sponsored pilot project led by the Center for Regional Disaster Resilience of the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region (PNWER), a bi-national statutory non-profit organization comprised of Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. The Action Plan provides a template that can be readily customized for use by states and localities with key stakeholders to gauge the current level of preparedness to deal with anticipated and unexpected incidents and disasters.

This Action Plan was developed by a broad stakeholder group of public health, emergency management, and other government officials, and utility, business, and non-profit representatives. The approach used was a multi-step process developed by the PNWER Center for Regional Disaster Resilience that has been employed in other parts of the nation and Canada to bring cross-sector and multi-jurisdiction representatives together with experts from diverse disciplines to examine vulnerabilities, consequences, and preparedness gaps for all-hazards incidents and disasters. This facilitated process enables stakeholders to work with government partners to develop and conduct a series of educational workshops, a tabletop exercise and a baseline needs assessment to collectively determine areas of improvement and cost-effective solution options. While the Action Plan is focused on bio-events, the same template can be adapted for any hazard to identify, prioritize, and develop requirements for activities that can provide a dynamic, flexible, and ongoing path forward to enhance community resilience.