Emergency Preparedness Plan
We must have an emergency preparedness plan in place to address various scenarios that may impact ORCA’s operations or impact ORCA members. Everyone should familiarize themselves with this plan and know their roles and responsibilities.
Potential emergencies could include:
- Cybersecurity Breaches: Unauthorized access to sensitive data, systems, or networks, resulting in data theft, manipulation, or disruption of services.
- Natural Disasters: Events such as earthquakes, floods, fires, or severe weather conditions that can cause physical damage to facilities, disrupt operations, or pose risks to everyone’s safety.
- Infrastructure Failures: Critical failures in IT infrastructure, such as server outages, network disruptions, or hardware malfunctions, that impair the organizations’s ability to conduct or deliver services.
- Physical Security Threats: Incidents involving violence, unauthorized access to campus premises, or threats to personal safety and security.
- Health Emergencies: Outbreaks of diseases, medical emergencies, or public health crises that require immediate action to safeguard employee well-being and ensure business continuity.
If you encounter an emergency situation, follow these steps:
- Assess the Situation: Remain calm and assess the severity of the emergency
- Alert Others: Notify nearby team members and evacuate the area if necessary
- Contact Authorities: Call campus security or emergency services as appropriate
- Provide Details: Provide clear and concise information about the emergency and your location
Levels of Emergency
- TYPE 1 - A catastrophic emergency event involving complete loss services, or a physical the entire campus and surrounding community (Example: complete deletion of ORCA Organization on Github, flooding, major hurricane, etc.)
- TYPE 2 - A major emergency that impacts a sizable portion of ORCA, the campus and/or outside community (Examples: loss of a single repo, hacking of the social media account, potential data breach, active shooter, bomb threat, extended power outage, etc.)
- TYPE 3 - A one dimensional event that has a limited duration and impact to the campus community (Example: Closing of a building for safety reasons, important but not critical bug in a repo)
Initiation of a Emergency Status
Only authorized members, which is the VERSO Director and the Leads, should declare an emergency unless there is an immediate danger to someone’s physical safety (ALSO REACH OUT TO CAMPUS SECURITY OR CALL 911 at that time). Anyone else should route emergencies through Leads. Because we are not a company with full-time employees, we will not have an on-call team. This will slow our responsiveness and require reaching out to team members to find who can help.
Remember, we only report it as an emergency if we can verify it is happening, if you cannot verify it please check with others before starting this process.
- Reporting Member posts an @here post in the #emergency channel in slack with the following information:
- Date and Time: Record the date and time when the emergency is declared to establish a timeline of events.
- Type of Emergency: Clearly specify the type of emergency, such as cybersecurity breach, natural disaster, infrastructure failure, etc., to provide context for responders and stakeholders.
- Severity Level: Assess and communicate the severity level of the emergency, ranging from minor incidents to critical crises, to guide response efforts and resource allocation.
- Description of the Situation: Provide a detailed description of the emergency, including the cause, impact, and any relevant information about affected systems, personnel, or assets.
- Reporting Member starts a Time Line document (this is a Google Drive or Microsoft Onedrive doc that can be shared with others) to record actions taken and the time stamps of important events
- Reporting Member reaches out to the VERSO Director and determines who need to be contacted
- A Slack Huddle is started for people to join to troubleshoot the problem
- When a resolution is reached, a final @here in the emergency channel declaring the Emergency as resolves with the Date and Time and a Description of the solution that was executed.