Disaster Management ( Or Emergency )

Disaster is anything that can occur causing damages, an ecological disruption and deterioration of health and the health services. Disaster can be manmade or natural disasters such as floods. When disasters like flooding or tornadoes that may be accompanied by floods occur, the public health personnel and public health nurses are normally the first people who respond to the emergency, given that they are the people who understand and know the available resources used in providing first aids to the affected victims.

evacuation, making emergency repairs to the levees, and providing food and law and order in an unprepared shelter). These measures, born of necessity, may be quite different from or exceed in scale anything responders have done before. They must be creative and extremely adaptable to execute improvised tactics. Equipping organizations to recognize the novelty in a crisis and improvise skillfully is thus a far different (and far more difficult) matter from preparing mainly to implement preset emergency plans. Scalability and Surge Capacity In many disasters, as Katrina well illustrated, responders must cope with far greater numbers of endangered people or more extensive damage than usual. To scale up operations to handle this surge of demand, emergency agencies require access to resources in larger quantities than normal and frequently to specialized equipment or

Tragic events that cause damage to property and life may destroy the social, cultural and economic life of a community. Communities must be engaged in the various phases from prevention to recovery to build disaster resilient communities. In order to do this, there must be a disaster preparedness plan in place that involves multiple people in various roles.

Every year, there are approximately 150,000 deaths and 200 million people affected by natural disasters and humanitarian crises (Thomas, 2003). Natural disasters alone, which include various occurrences, cause substantial disruptions such as the temporary displacement of more than five million people. According to the Fritz institute, statistics show that uprooted people from humanitarian crises such as civil conflict and war is greater, with an average of 13 million refugees and 20 million internally displaced people each year. As the biggest worldwide participants in the relief effort in the global community, disaster relief organizations are the forerunners of the help supplied to people affected by catastrophic events.

Effective disaster management is highly important when it comes to assisting in rescue and relief to affected. This does not only include post disaster rescue efforts but these disaster management activities should be proactive. They start right from taking preventive measures before the disaster actually occurs and goes on till the effected people are resettled back in their lives. This disaster management pertaining to human life is not only associated with physical well being but also focuses on psychological, emotional, and spiritual rehabilitation.

This chapter provides an overview that describes the basic types of hazards threatening the United States and provides definitions for some basic terms such as hazards, emergencies, and disasters. The chapter also provides a brief history of emergency management in the federal government and a general description of the current emergency management system—including the basic functions performed by local emergency managers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the all-hazards approach and its implications for local emergency management.

According to Jack Herrmann is Asst. Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine “Disaster management is the preparation for, response to, and recovery from disaster. While there are different understandings of Disaster Management, it is generally viewed as a cycle with the following five key phases:

An emergency is a severe, sudden and sometimes risky circumstances requiring urgent action (Salman Sawalha, 2014). Escalation of an emergency situation can lead to disaster; which is an unusual event that can cause lost of life and property (Salman Sawalha, 2014). International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRRCS) define disaster as “unexpected devastating events that disrupts the operations of a population or public which leads to huge losses and overwhelmed the affected community 's ability to respond to the situation with the resources they have at hand”. There are two main types of disaster that can lead to emergency situations; these include natural and man-made disasters.

The burden of emergency management has grown great deal in the last few decades. We have seen an increase in natural disasters, a new threat of terrorism on our front door and an increase in manmade disasters. All of these have tested emergency management in a number of cities and towns across the nation. It is not always disasters that present problems for emergency managers. We have to look beyond our traditional view of emergency management of helping us during times of disasters and view what issues they consider may affect their emergency response. Issues that emergency management see that are moving into the critical area are issues of urbanization and hazard exposure, the rising costs of disaster recovery, and low priority of emergency management.

Disasters, whether natural or manmade, can happen anytime and anywhere, without warning. An earthquake, hurricane, tornado, fire, or hazardous material spill or even an act of terrorism can happen

Risk for disasters is a part of life; emergency situations occur more frequently than many people believe. A wise person plans for the worse, and hopes for the best. After a disaster, how well a community can recover will depend largely on how well they prepared in advance. Risk management includes identifying any potential risks to a community and proactively planning to minimize the threat. Proactive organization of resources and people to respond to emergencies can mean the difference between a community’s ability to regroup and recover, and the loss of life. To better

In his book, “What is a disaster?” Quarantelli asked five researchers with different social science background (Gilbert, Dombrowsky, Kreps, Porfiriev and Horlick-Jones) to define the term disaster. Unsurprisingly, all the scholars defined disasters differently (Rosenthal, 1998). For instance, Kreps defined disasters as: “non-routine events in societies or their larger subsystems (e.g. regions, communities) that involve social disruption or physical harm” (Kreps, 1998:34).

It's basically defined as an event of nature, which overwhelms local resources and threatens the function of process and security of the community. Generally, disasters are the ultimate test of a community’s emergency response capacity .

The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED, 2009) defines a disaster as an unforeseen event that causes destruction and resulted in a high number of civilian casualties, that overwhelms local capacity and request international assistance. Alexander (2014) agrees “An emergency is defined as an exceptional event that exceeds the capacity of normal resources and organization to cope with it”.

The development of disaster recovery plans,( for minimizing the risk of disasters and for handling them when they do occur,) and the implementation of such plans. Disaster management usually refers to the management of natural catastrophes such as fire, flooding, or earthquakes. Related techniques include crisis management, contingency management, and risk management.