Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Team: Team Development
Step 1. Reach out to engineering firms in your community as well as to military organizations and veterans organizations to recruit volunteers for the Water Sanitation Hygiene Team. You might also find volunteers through other organizations like Rotary Club.
Step 2. Identify a Team Lead.
Step 3. Have volunteers take FEMA IS-100 (An Introduction to the Incident Command System) and IS-700 (An Introduction to the National Incident Management System).
Step 4. Develop education materials that address the following:
Calculating water needs (Include pets)
How to store water safely
How to treat water
Viable water supplies
Emergency sanitation/hygiene (including personal cleanliness, Street cleanliness, doing laundry, taking showers, and why it matters
Dealing with waste in an emergency
How to create privacy for sanitation/hygiene after a disaster
How to prepare your well for a disaster and check it after
Step 5. Work with your Anytown Prepares’ Outreach Team to educate the public about water needs and readiness.
Step 6. Participate in educational events and fairs to teach the public about water, sanitation, and hygiene.
Step 7. Develop partnerships with local businesses to carry the WASH gear that people will need, including two-bucket waste systems and water storage containers and treatments.
Step 8. Work with the Disaster Hubs Team, the MRC, the Domestic Animal Care Team, and the Child Safety & Reunification Team to ensure their facilities are prepared in terms of water, sanitation, and hygiene.
Step 9. Work with the Access & Functional Needs Team, Domestic Animal Care Team, and the Business Continuity Team to help them prepare their target populations for water, sanitation, and hygiene.
Step 10. Find out if your state has codes that allow for commandeering of assets. To determine whether this is the case in your state, go to the state legislature website and search for keywords like emergency and commandeer. This means that emergency organizations can take over water stores during extreme scenarios like public emergencies in order to distribute food to people in need. Most larger states don’t have such codes, but they often have some level of activation. Even states that do have these codes, however, will only permit commandeering as a last resort. Even if commandeering is allowed, proceed through all the following steps.
Step 11. Identify the local water supply owners and administrators in your community. Regardless of whether your state allows for commandeering of assets, you always want to make arrangements with owners in advance of an emergency to ensure the process goes smoothly. These will include owners of restaurants, grocery stores, and bottling facilities as well as administrators of public swimming pools, rivers, water towers, and water treatment plans.
Step 12. Involve trusted community leaders in the effort. They can serve as ambassadors to the owners/administrators, helping to explain the mutual benefits of a distribution program.
Step 13. Prioritize the list. The following information gathered for each supplier on the list should help you:
How many other communities they provide for and whether these communities would also be using these resources during an emergency.
How much they have in storage at a time and whether the water needs to be treated.
How far away the supply is from the neighborhoods you're trying to protect.
How many generators they have and how powerful they are.
Whether the supply is structurally sound and would hold up in a disaster likely in your part of the country.
Step 14. Meet with candidate supplier partners to get a sense of how open they are to cooperation. Invite them to an open house or a presentation in person or online. Use our talking points to help. Establishing relationships at this point is essential to the success of the future agreement, so take your time to make this step effective. Don’t be afraid to reach out. Explain how this arrangement will benefit them as well as the community.
Step 15. Work with interested supplier partners and an attorney to begin to draft MOUs. Each MOU will be determined by the partner and their circumstances.
Step 16. Identify potential distribution sites. Churches are often good options because they tend to be adjacent to people’s usual routes. Senior centers are often open to serving as distribution sites. Parking lots are great places to hand out food because they are flat, open, and usually not heavily damaged by a disaster. Stadium parking lots and fields are effective for larger communities.
Step 17. Create rationing protocols. You can prioritize those at high risk (people with disabilities, the elderly, and children), but, as a rule of thumb, you should set up an equal rationing baseline for survival. Once you’ve distributed the baseline survival amount, you can increase the ration equally according to what’s left.
Step 18. Proceed with interested supplier partners to the negotiations stage. Iron out the details of each MOU. Participants in negotiations should include the specific business owners or facility administrators, civic leadership, attorneys, and your preparedness organization.
Step 19. Sign agreements.
Step 20. Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for each participating facility. Participants in this developmental stage should include the specific business owners and your preparedness organization.
Step 21. Review and update agreements and SOPs over time as needed.
Step 22. Identify needed gear and supplies for the team.
Step 23. Fundraise or seek grants to be able to purchase supplies or ask for donations of materials.
Step 24. Support the Ready Your Street program with WASH education for community residents.
Step 25. Develop Standard Operating Procedures for the WASH Team.
Step 26. Create an annual plan for the team and carry out the objectives.
Step 27. Provide annual exercises and training for volunteers.