Emergency management planning tutorials

Every school and early childhood service that creates an Emergency Management Plan is required to have an area map, and an evacuation plan for each building.

This page provides access to document editing tutorial videos and instructions to assist schools and early childhood services with completing parts of their Emergency Management Plan document that require graphical content such as area maps, evacuation diagrams and communication/IMT trees.

Software

The tutorials are aimed at people with moderate computer skills who have access to Microsoft Office applications PowerPoint and Word.

Some tutorials refer to the MS Paint application available with the Windows platform.
On Windows 7 and prior versions, Paint is typically available under Start / All Programs / Accessories. Alternative image editors or screen grabbers may be used in place of Paint. The application is simply used to view an image and select, then copy, a part of it.

There are many ways to build a graphic or diagram in MS Word, some more advanced than others. The tutorials aim to provide one approach that is as simple and as straight forward as possible. 

The Word documents used in these tutorials are based on Emergency Management Plan templates available on the Early Childhood Emergency Management information page. The EM Plan Guide and checklist are also available there.

Where appropriate, there are separate tutorials for MS Word version 2010 (applies to MS Word 2007 and above) and MS Word 2000 (applies to MS Word 2003 and older).

• Emergency Management Plans for Government Schools are maintained online. 
• Online EM Plans require all diagrams, plans and maps to be added as image files.
• Refer to the 'Saving your diagram image' section below for instructions on how to create image files.

The video below explains what is meant by copy/paste terms used in the tutorials: Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V and Alt+PrtScrn.

 Video transcript (rtf - 30.36kb)

Creating an area map

​You will need to develop an area map to show the location of your facility and offsite assembly points.

How you construct your map is up to you as long as it provides the minimum information.

These tutorials cover simple methods for producing the map for your EM Plan that may include textual information about a point such as an external assembly point and evacuation paths to those points. 

You will need moderate computer skills and access to MS Office.

The topics regarding call outs, text boxes, lines and arrows can be used for ANY diagram you need to compile in your MS Word document.

Topics:

• Adding an area map image to your EMP document
• Adding a call out to your area map in your EMP document
• Adding a text box to your area map in your EMP document
• Adding lines and arrows to your area map image in your EMP document

Creating evacuation diagrams

When you develop your Emergency Management Plan, you should ensure that there is one evacuation diagram for each building on your site.

How you construct your diagram is up to you as long as it provides the minimum information.

These tutorials cover simple methods for  producing a diagram for your EM Plan that may include equipment icons, evacuation paths, assembly points and relevant textual information.

You will need moderate computer skills and access to MS Office.

The tutorials will make use of MS PowerPoint to build the diagrams, because it has built in functions to add text and lines over an image. Once the diagram is complete, the diagram is copied from PowerPoint into your EM Plan document, using MS Paint to crop the image.

Topics:

• Prepare an EM Plan document for an Evacuation Diagram
• Add a plan image to PowerPoint
• Add equipment icons to your PowerPoint evacuation plan
  
• Add text to your PowerPoint evacuation plan
• Add evacuation paths to your PowerPoint evacuation plan
• Copy your evacuation plan from PowerPoint to you EM Plan document

The 'icons' tutorial refers to a document that contains the icon images required.
Use this link to open the document: Images for EMP Evacuation Diagrams.

Creating a communications tree or IMT structure

A communication tree allows staff to easily identify who will contact relevant persons e.g. parents, emergency services, regions etc. during an emergency.

The tree is a top-down representation using text boxes to identify staff, and lines to show the communications paths.

An Incident Management Team (IMT) structure indicates who will fill the team roles.

To assist with developing your diagram, you can download and use the Communications Tree template for Schools or the Communications Tree template for Early Childhood Services.

These are single page documents with just a typical tree diagram that you can then adjust for your situation, and then copy and paste into your EM Plan document.

You can also adapt these to produce your IMT structure.

Right-click on the template link that is relevant to you, select Save target As and then save it somewhere such as your My Documents folder.  

Also right-click this Instructions document, select Save Target As and then save it somewhere such as your My Documents folder. 

Open each document, and follow the instructions.

Tutorial videos on how to draw new text boxes and lines are available on the Tutorials for creating an Area Map page, although the templates should contain everything you need.

(The tutorials describe the typical steps to adding boxes and lines in MS Word and apply to any diagram, not just Area Maps. Just scroll down to the video that applies to what you want to do.)

Saving your diagram image (Government School EM Plans)

This section applies to Government Schools only.

Where these tutorials refer to pasting an image into your EM plan document, follow these steps instead to create image files that can be added to your online EM plan:

• At this point you would have copied your diagram (Ctrl+C) as per the video.
• Open MS Paint, available under Start / All Programs / Accessories.
• Make sure the blank area is small by
• selecting the first tab (File or Paint); 
• selecting Properties;
• setting Width and Height to 50 PIXELS (not Centimeters).
• Press Ctrl+V to paste the image in. The image will be resized automatically.
• Select the first tab (File or Paint) and then select Save As and save the image as a PNG or JPG file, giving it a descriptive name and placing it in an appropriate folder.
• Close MS Paint.