Midweek, a wildfire started about four miles from camp. Within roughly twenty minutes, the program director told the site host afterward, the team had school buses on order, the county fairgrounds and the airport ready to receive the camp, and a division commander from the State Fire Marshal’s office on site reporting directly to camp leadership. Crews put the fire out quickly. No one moved. “Everything worked like it should,” Taylor said.
The camp’s written plan said only to move students to a designated evacuation area if required. The response worked because qualified incident managers were on site, not because the plan told them what to do.
The template’s structure is sound. It asks, for each hazard, what staff do and who does it:
Communication: who notifies the director and staff; at what point to call emergency services; who contacts parents and how fast; who holds the roster and takes attendance; what the emergency signal is; who counts heads during transitions.
Medical emergency: call 911; stay with the patient; contact the guardian; send the medication authorization form with the patient; a staff member stays at the hospital until family arrives.
Hazards: wildfire smoke, heat, fire, flood, earthquake, power and utility failure, hazardous materials.
Evacuation and sheltering: routes, assembly points, the shelter-in-place location, and safe and unsafe areas.
Missing child and reunification: search steps, information for responders, and confirming the identity of any adult picking up a student against photo ID and the registration form.
Threats: suspicious packages, bomb threats, threatening calls and active threats.
Before your camp:
Name the evacuation destination and the transportation, in writing, with phone numbers.
Tell local fire, law enforcement and emergency management that the event is happening, where, and how many people will be on site.
Fill in every blank in the template. Replace the generic numbers with your county’s.
Walk the site with the host and mark hazards, restricted areas, utilities and emergency access.
Brief every adult on the plan before students arrive, and post the key steps where staff will see them.
The program director also suggested a next step for the host: formally registering the training center as a muster site for real emergencies. Knife River’s staff said they believed it already was.