Your EAP Binder Is a Lie

Somewhere in your comm center there is a binder. Or a shared drive folder. Or a filing cabinet that nobody opens.

Inside it are Emergency Action Plans for dams, pipelines, chemical facilities, or other critical infrastructure in your jurisdiction. These plans were sent to you by the facility operators because federal or state law requires it. Someone at your center signed for them. They were filed. And that was the last time anyone looked at them.

This isn't a guess. I've asked training coordinators at dozens of agencies whether their dispatchers have ever trained on their EAPs. The answer, almost universally, is no.

The EAP plans exist. The dispatch training doesn't.

An EAP for a high-hazard dam in your jurisdiction contains a notification flowchart, inundation maps, population-at-risk estimates, and a classification system that tells you the difference between a "developing situation" and an "imminent failure." That classification drives every downstream decision - evacuations, shelter-in-place, mutual aid activation, public notification.

If your dispatchers have never seen that classification system, they're going to get the first call from the dam operator and have no framework for what it means. They'll treat it like any other caller reporting a problem. The dam failure notification chain won't activate in time. The evacuation zone won't be right. The downstream agencies won't get the heads-up they need.

This isn't hypothetical. This is exactly what happened at Oroville in 2017. It's what happened at Taum Sauk in 2005. The plans existed. The training didn't.

Why the EAP training gap persists

Three reasons, and they're all institutional.

First, EAPs are written by engineers and lawyers for regulators. They are not written for the dispatcher who picks up the phone at 2am. The language is technical, the flowcharts assume domain knowledge the comm center doesn't have, and the notification procedures reference positions and roles that may not map cleanly to your center's staffing model.

Second, nobody owns this training. The facility operator's obligation ends at delivering the plan. Your emergency management office assumes the comm center knows what to do with it. The comm center assumes someone will train them on it eventually. Nobody does.

Third, it feels low-probability. Your dam hasn't failed yet. Your pipeline hasn't ruptured. So the binder sits. Until it doesn't.

What you can do this week

Find the binder. Open it. Read the notification flowchart for the highest-hazard facility in your jurisdiction. Then ask yourself: could my night-shift crew execute this infrastructure emergency notification chain right now, without help, at 3am?

If the answer is no, you've found your next training priority. Not your next training idea. Your next training priority.