Hi Nicholas,
I'm not sure about the permissions that are needed, but I might have a solution depending on a couple of factors. If your company utilizes Sales Force and depending on your subscriptiion level, you can install the Sales Insight application which should enable your marketing team to develop a folder of email templates that can be specifically tailored to the emergeny situations you described and accessible to users that do not have accounts with Marketo.
We have done a similar process so our sales team can send out pre-drafted content at their convenience. Not sure whether this will work with your situation, but I thought I'd throw it out there.
Good luck!
-Josh