Role of ESS

The emergency management structure, as it applies to ESS, can be broken down into two primary functions – planning and response. The ESS Director who is appointed by the local Emergency Program Coordinator (EPC), plays an important role in planning and managing ESS in each community. As a critical component of the local authority’s emergency management program, ESS plays an important role in:

  • Assisting people to remain independent and self-sufficient
  • Assisting people to meet their basic survival needs during a disaster
  • Reuniting families separated by disaster
  • Providing people with accurate and up-to-date information about the situation at hand
  • Assisting people to re-establish themselves as quickly as possible after a disaster


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Introduction to Reception Centres by Emergency Management BC (EMBC), in partnership with the Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://www.jibc.ca/ess/