ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the decision points for declaring a disaster. It looks at some aspects of declaring a disaster. From a management point of view, one of the ways of detecting a slow-motion disaster is to graph falling efficiency. In a real disaster, the stages of assessment, escalation, and recovery may have to repeat several times. The interesting thing about a disaster is the ripple affect. All employees must receive training so that in the event of discovering a disaster situation they would know the procedures to sound the alert. The on-duty recovery manager decides if the situation is a disaster, by using the chart. Training and testing exercises should be as close to the anticipated events and actions that might occur during a real disaster as possible. A small expense for overtime pay could save a lot of grief in case of a life-threatening disaster.
