Water and water management, which also includes wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), are considered essential elements critical infrastructure. A disruption of their operation can result in the discharge of wastewater into the environment without having been adequately treated. This can cause health problems, contamination of soil, groundwater and surface water, etc. In order to provide operational safety and sustainability of WWTP operation, it is necessary to establish protection against potential risk activation, together with risk minimization and enhanced preparedness to address the risks. The article deals with the application of risk management stages on the selected object of the municipal WWTP facility in the form of a case study. The risk identification phase consisted of the identification of assets and risks. The assets were grouped together due to the complexity of the WWTP operation. A combination of methods, a safety audit, a checklist and semi-structured interviews were used to identify the risks in three iterations. A risk register was created as a result of the risk identification phase. Subsequently, a risk analysis was carried out, in which the scenarios of the risk impact on the assets were examined, the index levels of probability and impacts were determined, and the risk estimate was performed. The Bowtie Analysis Method was used to illustrate the causes and consequences for one of the critical risks. The result of the study is the risk evaluation identified undesirable and unacceptable risks for which risk management methods were proposed
Experience gained from NATO operations shows that the basis for an effective solution to a crisis is a combination of a comprehensive political, civilian and military approach. The cooperation of all stakeholders is thus a basic prerequisite for the effective resolution of crisis situations. These aspects and stakeholders include emergency management. This paper deals with civil-military cooperation in times of emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic. It qualitatively evaluates the findings resulting from the questionnaire survey focused on the state of crisis preparedness of the Army of the Czech Republic and the functionality of emergency management in cooperation with rescue work with other teams of the rescue system. The questionnaire was carried out at military units in all regions of the Czech Republic; organizational units of the Ministry of Defence with nationwide competence, which were directly involved in securing measures related to the declaration of a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March—May, 2020; Operations Command, which currently manages operations in the Czech Republic designed to manage the consequences of a pandemic; and members of the Ministry of Defence participating in the activities of the Strategic Command and Control Group. A total of 21 stakeholders took part. The experience in managing the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have shown that armed forces around the world have an irreplaceable position in dealing with nonmilitary crises. The conclusions and recommendations obtained from the research survey are the content of this paper.
One of the negative components of international travel is the higher likelihood of emergencies that affect a large number of people (mass negative impact on health), for example the transmission of infectious diseases, as e.g. SARS CoV-2 pandemic. The frequency and sources of mass-casualty incidents are currently changing dynamically, especially with the onset of terrorist attacks and large-scale natural disasters. Health services and emergency medical service (EMS) take part in addressing these emergencies. For this reason, this paper deals with the EMS emergency preparedness in the Czech Republic for an emergency events with a large number of affected people. EMS in the Czech Republic are not provided by the state but by individual regions. EMS in the Czech Republic do not have central management, nor do they use uniform data documentation. The investigation of the current situation has shown that the attitudes of EMS in individual regions of the Czech Republic to the tasks of emergency preparedness for mass casualty incidents are not identical. The current method of evaluating improvements in the quality of EMS emergency preparedness lacks consistency and is not comprehensively supervised. To tackle this, the paper presents an internal audit methodology for assessing the level of emergency preparedness of the emergency medical services. The authors therefore defined the decisive criteria and indicators assessing the quality level of EMS emergency preparedness at major disaster with multiple victim incident. When developing the methodological procedure of the preparedness evaluation, an algorithm was chosen, based on the gradual verification of the evaluation criteria and indicators by an expert group. Some findings and recommendations based on a research carried out in EMS in individual regions of the Czech Republic are presented.