The Colorado Emergency Preparedness Partnership will include the private sector in emergency preparedness and homeland security.
The private sector will play a role in communication between public, private and non-profit sectors in the event of a disaster.
The partnership will play a role in the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
The partnership is a public-private enterprise created by the Denver InfraGard Members Alliance, the Denver Police Foundation, Business Executives for National Security and the Philanthropy Roundtable.
For the first time, members of the business community have joined forces with the public sector and the philanthropic community to address preparedness issues in Colorado, says Jane Norton, executive director of the Denver Police Foundation.
We know that no one sector can be successful on its own. Denvers successful bid to host the DNC is a great catalyst for us to work together, but the foundation of the partnership has been laid to strengthen our communities long after the convention is over.
The objectives of the partnership are to integrate private sector and government resources, validate new operational capabilities and establish a relationship of trust between public, private and non-profit sectors before, during and after a major disaster.
The Democratic National Convention is a great springboard to get people focused on emergency preparedness.
We are confident that Denver will provide a safe and secure environment for the convention, but we want to ensure that if something does happen that the private sector can take responsibility for itself to some extent, and therefore take some of the burden off of first responders and public safety officials in general, says Pamela Pfeifer, executive director of the Colorado emergency partnership.
One of the key programs that will come out of the partnership will be the development of a voluntary registry of private sector resources, which could be used during a crisis.
The registry will be a secure, web-based catalog of private-sector resources in the metro area.
The InfraGard Members Alliance will work with the city and state emergency managers and FEMA to catalogue the private-sector items that could be useful during the DNC in case of an emergency, such as refrigerated trucks, heavy equipment, warehouse space, temporary housing and office space.
This database will be run by state or local emergency management agencies.
In an emergency many of the needed resources are available only from the business community and almost all of them are in short supply, and more often than not their location is unknown.
The public sector, private sector and philanthropy sector each bring resources and capabilities that together strengthen Colorados security and resiliency, says Norton.
Businesses that wish to participate in the resource registration can do so by registering their resources. The hope is to reduce response time, save lives and speed the economic recovery in the event of a natural disaster, terrorist attack or other catastrophic event. Businesses can register their resources at: [email protected] or get more information at www.thecepp.org.
It will never be the government that is the sole first responder or the last. It is the resiliency of any given community as a whole that will mitigate the impact of any disaster, says Pfeifer.
