The success of emergency response relies on proper emergency preparedness activities to define areas of responsibility, roles, and effective interventions. In this perspective, software tools can be of paramount importance in supporting the decision making
process, since the involved authorities are forced to consider the multifaceted factors characterizing the emergency preparedness and response. Specifically, the manuscript focuses on two complementary risk typologies: mounting risk (i.e. floods) and sudden
risk (i.e. flash floods or tunnel accidents). The Authors developed a program, which assesses the vulnerability of an inter-organizational civil protection structure by analyzing a number of parameters that pertain to physical, organizational, and
contextual features. The Analytical Hierarchy Process methodology, AHP, was applied to the emergency preparedness problem so to structure the available alternatives into a weighted multi-criteria framework while evaluating the performance indexes, and
expressing the performance of the emergency system within a specific context.