Classifying emergencies

Emergency situation is defined as a sudden, unexpected, or impending situation that may cause injury, loss of life, damage to the property, and/or interference with the normal activities of a person or firm and which, therefore, requires immediate attention and remedial action. Urgent intervention to prevent a worsening of the situation, although in some situations, mitigation may not be possible and agencies may only be able to offer help for the aftermath.

The extreme situations are hazardous ones, they may be caused by nature or by man. To the hazards caused by nature disasters may belong: earthquakes, storms, tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, eruptions of volcanoes, droughts, damages of roads, bridges, buildings, ships sinking, swamping (mashing) soils, avalanches, explosions at chemical enterprises, burning chemical substances resulting in poisonous fumes and smokes, lightning, landslides, glacier slides, ice storms, radiation, drowning, epidemics. To the hazards caused by a man may belong: fires, peril of arable soils in the result of superfluous fertilizes, drying up rivers and other basins, withering plants, crashes of airplanes, poisoning water basins with chemicals, crashes of dwelling houses, disrepair everything connected with electric current, terror acts, strikes, damages of pipelines, clashes of transport vehicles entailing death accidents.

In order to be defined as an emergency, the incident should conform to one or more of the following:

• poses an immediate threat to life, health, property, or environment
• has already caused loss of life, health detriments, property damage, or environmental damage
• has a high probability of escalating to cause immediate danger to life, health, property, or environment.

Whilst most emergency services agree on protecting human health, life and property, the environmental impacts are not considered sufficiently important by some agencies. This also extends to areas such as animal welfare, where some emergency organisations cover this element through the 'property' definition, where animals owned by a person are threatened (although this does not cover wild animals). This means that some agencies do not mount an 'emergency' response where it endangers wild animals or environment, though others respond to such incidents (such as oil spills at sea that threaten marine life). The attitude of the agencies involved is likely to reflect the predominant opinion of the government of the area.

Agencies across the world have different systems for classifying incidents. The first stage of any classification is likely to define whether the incident qualifies as an emergency, and consequently if it warrants an emergency response. Some agencies may still respond to non-emergency calls, depending on their remit and availability of resource. An example of this would be a fire department responding to help retrieve a cat from a tree, where no life, health or property is immediately at risk.

Many agencies assign a sub-classification to the emergency, when incidents that have the most potential for risk to life, health or property. For instance, many ambulance services use a system called the Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System (AMPDS)¹ or a similar solution. The AMPDS categorises all calls to the ambulance service using it as either 'A' category (immediately life-threatening), 'B' Category (immediately health threatening) or 'C' category (non-emergency call that still requires a response). Some services have a fourth category, where they believe that no response is required after clinical questions are asked.

Other systems (especially as regards major incidents) use objective measures to direct resource. Two such systems are CHALET² and METHANE³, which are both mnemonics to help emergency services staff classify incidents, and direct resource. Each of these acronyms helps ascertain the number of casualties (usually including the number of dead and number of non-injured people involved), how the incident has occurred, and what emergency services are required.

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1. The Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System (AMPDS) is the system primarily used in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where it is medically, police and fire approved.

2. CHALET stands for casualties, access, location, emergency services, type.

3. METHANE stands for major incident declared exact location; type of incident e.g. explosion, building collapse; hazards present, potential or suspected; access – routes that are safe to use; number, type, severity of casualties; emergency services now present and those required.

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Answer the questions:

1. What may emergency situation cause?

2. What can prevent a worsening of the incident?

3. How can you understand that the situation is estimated as emergency?

4. Any environmental incident is considered sufficiently important by emergency agencies, isn’t it? If not, why?

5. If the situation refers to non-emergency, you shouldn’t expect the emergency agencies’ respond, should you?

6. What measures do the emergency classifications use in the text?

7. Do you guess other measures for the emergency classification?

Summarize the information from the Text A:

1. the definition of emergency;

2. two main types of emergency;

3. examples of  emergency;

4. the systems for classifying incidents.

Match the word combinations and check in the text: