If you were responsible for protecting a city from future emergencies, what steps would you need to take and what plans would you need to create? If you were suddenly pulled onto an incident management team for a catastrophic flood, what would you need to know? If your boss told you to figure out why so many people were injured in a disaster and how to prevent it next time – would you know what to do? These aren’t silly class assignments made up to give you a grade… these are life-and-death decisions that you might be responsible for making after you graduate from the BDEM program.

As you know, emergency management is a complicated, high-stakes, and challenging field to work in. In this class, we’re here to learn about the current forms of emergency management that are practiced in Canada and around the world; to understand why the “comprehensive” part of the title is so important; and, ultimately, to be prepared to serve in real-life emergency management roles going forward.

This course in Comprehensive Emergency Management is part of the backbone of the BDEM program. You started with DEMS 1701 (“Case Studies in Disaster Management”), which provides an introduction to emergencies and disasters with real world examples. Then, you moved on to DEMS 2700 (“Fundamentals of Emergency Management”), which introduced you to keys like mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. This class builds on everything you learned in those prior two – our job is to help you be actually ready to be involved in an emergency management team or organization. Finally, there’s DEMS 4705 (“Comprehensive Emergency Management 2: The Canadian Context”), which is an elective course that builds on what we learn here with even more real-world experiences, focused studies, and emphasis on critical thinking.

Over the twelve-week course we’ll be covering a large number of topics, including emergency planning and operations, prediction/forecasting, after action reviews, legal and statutory dimensions of emergency management, effective public engagement, and jurisdictional and institutional structures. You’ll learn what all of that jargon (technical language) means throughout the course, but the bottom line is that the course is all about the ideas, tools, and methods of emergency management.

Official Course Calendar Description

Provides an in-depth theoretical examination and practical analysis of a number of themes within the four pillars of emergency management: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery, within a comprehensive emergency management framework. Prerequisite: AP/ADMS/DEMS 2700 3.00. Corequisite: AP/DEMS 3701 3.00 or permission of the course director. Cross-Listing:AP/ADMS 3702 3.00 PRIOR TO FALL 2009: Prerequisite: AK/ADMS 3700 3.00. Corequisite: AK/ADMS 3701 3.00 or permission of the course director. Course credit exclusion: AK/ADMS 3702 3.00.