The Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council (YRITWC), a non-profit native organization formed to protect and preserve the Yukon River Watershed, recently supported a project to develop Community Emergency Response Plans (CERP) for their partner villages using a ground-up, or grassroots, approach. The authors developed a model CERP for the Yukon River villages that would allow each community to direct their own response resources and organization in the event an oil spill or other disaster threatened their community. The YRITWC s goal was to provide watershed communities with a simple, user-friendly response manual that was still consistent with other regional, state, and national plans. Therefore, while the Yukon River CERPs were developed specifically to integrate with the Subarea Plan for oil and hazardous substance spills and with other existing regional, state, and national response networks, they are geared toward community responders. The YRITWC views community ownership of the CERP as critical to developing a level of trust and sustaining working relationships with the State and Federal agencies involved in oil spill and emergency response. This paper describes the process used to develop a model CERP that adequately addressed the need for technological and natural disaster response planning in Yukon River native villages and to promote a functional emergency response system in rural, isolated communities.

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