Emergency preparedness in integrated management systems: Case study of the Port of Tallinn

Abstract

The paper discusses the problem of the integration of emergency preparedness and safety management into the ISO-based integrated management system (IMS). The international and national legal requirements for ports embrace different aspects of safety, but unfortunately do not give an entire conception of safety management. The standard ISO 14001 requires procedures for emergency preparedness from the organisations which have implemented it, but at the same time, emergency is not strictly defined in the standard and the formulation of the requirements' permit various interpretations. Thereof, our goal was to analyse the existing situation in the port of Tallinn and develop an updated conceptual approach during the improvement process of the integrated management system, suitable for the specific port and maybe partly applicable in other similar organisations. The problem was observed in the context of a case study of the Port of Tallinn, which has implemented the integrated quality and environmental management system. The work, presented in this paper, was carried out in the frames of the Interreg IIIB programme DaGoB "Safe and Reliable Transport Chains of Dangerous Goods in the Baltic Sea Region". The first step was the analysis of the management system, bringing out the gaps and ambiguities, concerning emergency preparedness and safety management. The second step was working out solutions and proposal; the third step, the compilation of a relevant thematic handbook, in addition to a general handbook of the IMS. © 2009 WIT Press.