What is Readiness and What Factors Can Affect It?

On 15 April 2012, following a heavy rainfall in northern Tehran, water of Mianrood’s channel placed in north Ekbatan enter the subway line 4. Flooding during a short time arrived near Towhid station in intersection of Azadi street and Chamran Highway such as some of stations like Ostad Moein and Habibolahi’s station is completely filled with flood. In this incident getting caught the train’s wagons by power outage could cause a major tragedy but speed act of relevant authorities in control center of Tehran’s subway in addition to warning equipments in line 4 prevented this major catastrophe. This experience demonstrated the importance of preparation of acting organizations inresponse to events especially earthquake risk in a big city like Tehran. Regardless of the causes of the incident and how responsible organizations respond in faced with this incident; the question is how has been achieved preparation in managing of abnormal situations and in this achieving process managers faced to what barriers. In this article we try to attend to factors affecting readiness with a different look of the past and using the experience of events occurring in the country and point of view of experts and managers and qualitative research method with an emphasis on Tehran. Among the various factors affecting readiness, seven factors had the most effect: proper and common understanding of the situation, the creation of false beliefs in managers and despair overcome on readiness, different interpretations of incidents because the lack of common scenario, part view and organizational conflicts, correct selection and job stability of disaster managers, absence of emergency laws, exceeding public rescue efforts from government actions and redirection of management. Necessity of attention to the realities of disaster scenes such as unexpectedness of part of them and not rely on preestablished plans for dealing with the disaster scenes are the fact that all disaster managers must notice to them for getting preparedness.