Continuity of Operations

Wrote the City of Jacksonville technology department’s Continuity of Operations Plan: two hundred pages, all-hazards, aligned to the county’s Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan and written against Duval County’s identified top hazards — tropical cyclone wind and storm surge, flooding, terrorism, hazardous materials, wildfire at the urban interface, tornado and pandemic health emergency.

Built on Incident Command System doctrine in three phases — initiation, alternate operations, reconstitution and termination — with time-phased implementation, delegation of authority, orders of succession, and devolution of command and control.

Made usable under duress rather than merely complete: mission-critical functions with recovery timelines, separate procedures for each operating group, alternate site strategy with an initiation checklist, drive-away kits, vital records identification, critical equipment and vendor contact lists, damage assessment forms, and evacuation accountability rosters by building and floor. Its first instruction is to skip the plan and go straight to the appendices if you are already in an emergency, because a continuity plan that has to be read cover to cover during a hurricane is not a plan.

A pandemic influenza annex was added in 2009 — eleven years before most organisations discovered they needed one.

The first COOP was written years earlier, for the Florida National Guard at Coleman Technologies.