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Emergency Management Lessons Essay

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Lessons Learned from Recent Evacuations

Training: Training of key personnel in emergency management agencies is well accepted as an integral part of ensuring readiness for catastrophic incidents. However, the skills and capabilities of personnel assigned to "surge teams" that deploy to assist with on-site support must also be maintained and updated through training and exercises. The after-action report for the ESF-1 program for the 2005 hurricane season found the volunteers from throughout the agency to be important resources to help meet the demands of a catastrophic incident, but that some needed more training in the established ESF-1 and NRP processes.

An integrated training program is needed, in part because of the steep learning curve for complex operations that cross jurisdictional boundaries and…show more content…
The DOD's U.S. Northern Command and its components have participated in a number of full-scale exercises where the exercise scenarios were designed to overwhelm local and State assets to evoke a response under the NRP, including the employment of DOD assets. In addition, DOD is preparing a review of its military assistance to civil authorities in response to Hurricane Katrina, which will be another important source of information. The lessons learned from the responses to recent hurricanes (e.g., Katrina, Rita, Charley, Ivan, and Opal) as well as earlier hurricanes (e.g., Camille, Hugo, and Andrew) continue to be valuable. Lessons learned from major exercises such as Hurricane Pam in New Orleans identified evacuation issues for the city. Federal, State, and local agencies should establish processes to ensure findings and lessons learned from after-action reports are addressed and incorporated into procedures and
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