Emergency Mangers

As Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma successively lashed the gulf coast starting in late August 2005, nature’s fury exposed serious weaknesses in the United States’ emergency response capabilities. Not all emergencies pose this magnitude of challenge. In the United States, the initial—and usually major—responsibility for disaster response rests with local authorities. This “bottom-up” system of emergency management has a long history and continues to make sense in most circumstances. Core Challenges for Large-Scale Disaster

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would become the central point-of-contact within the national government in responding to incidents. Since formation in 1979, FEMA’s core missions were to enhance the government’s ability to survive a foreign attack, and to assist state and local authorities in disaster response (Carafano, 2005). And while the two core missions seem heterogenous in scope at times from an outside perspective, the biggest difference between the two tasks is duration. A man-made disaster may be over in a matter of minutes as compared to a hurricane lasting several days, but in both instances the road to recovery is long. In order to streamline response and recovery in either scenario, FEMA was reorganized with new directives to support comprehensive emergency management practices (CRS, 2006). Today, FEMA provides the standard approach and guidance that many local communities may not have due to funding, training, and

and Dentistry and Director of the Program in Disaster Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry and the UR Center for Disaster Medicine and Emergency Preparedness. For over a decade, he has responded to numerous national disasters as a volunteer with the American Red Cross. He has also developed comprehensive disaster mental health training programs for the New York State Office of Mental Health and the New York State Department of Health currently being disseminated throughout every county, state psychiatric center and acute healthcare facility throughout New York State.

Ensuring Resilience to Disasters has more tasking’s than another mission and involves many different agencies to accomplish those tasks. The four tasks are to mitigate hazards, enhance preparedness, ensure effective emergency response, and rapidly recover. The main agency that is responsible for these tasking’s is FEMA. FEMA’s mission is to “reduce the loss of life and property and protect communities nationwide from all hazards, including natural disasters, acts of terrorism, and other man-made disasters” (FEMA, 2017, p.2). FEMA works with federal and State services to assist them in accomplishing their goals. They also assist local services by assisting in setting up emergency management agencies (LEMA) and set guidance for Emergency Operations Planning (EOP). EOP’s are “plans that provide an overview of the jurisdiction’s preparedness and response strategies. It describes expected hazards, outlines agency roles and responsibilities, and explains how the jurisdiction keeps the plan current.” (FEMA, 2010,

According to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), there are many factors that will affect the direction of emergency management in the coming years. These can be classified as global challenges, global opportunities, national challenges, national opportunities, professional challenges, and professional opportunities. Global Challenges include some issues like global climate change, increasing population and population density, increasing resource scarcities, rising income inequality, and increasing risk aversion. Global Opportunities has to do with increased scientific understanding of the hazards and societal responses, as well as revolutionary technologies. National Challenges involves increasing urbanization and hazard exposure, interdependencies in infrastructure, continued emphasis on growth, rising costs of disaster recovery, increasing population diversity, terrorist threats, low priority of emergency management, legal liability, and intergovernmental tensions. Due to these factors that will affect the direction of emergency management in the coming years, there is need for us at emergency management division to adjust operational plans to meet these challenges and especially changes emanating from constant changes expected in technology and other threats we face.

The disaster which hit the Maricopa County in the State of Arizona in September 2014 was a major disaster that necessitated the community preparedness for leading successful response and a prompt recovery. Besides emergency managers, many officials and the private are involved in the processes. Some of these stakeholders are public health, public safety, and municipal officials. Collaboration is needed for getting all those involved in the processes to interact accordingly. This paper addresses the major collaboration strengths between emergency responders, public health, public safety, and municipal officials to deliver accurate response and recovery during the event, the main weaknesses of the collaboration among all those that were involved in the efforts, and recommendations for improving the collaboration between the stakeholders.

As the Disaster Coordinator for the city I am responsible for ensuring the public safety and welfare of the citizens within the city's jurisdiction. This requires me to have a full understanding on my role and responsibilities for managing disaster response and employing resources in order to save lives, protect property, the environment. Additionally I’m tasked to preserve the less tangible but equally important social, economic and political structures. My first reaction was to alert the regional Joint Terrorism Task Force to prepare them for possible activation. Next it is vital to gain situational awareness and develop a Common Operating Picture (COP). This COP is the who, what, where, when and how as it relates to the incident. Situational awareness starts at the incident site and includes continuous monitoring of reporting channels to gain

Situational awareness is a crucial cog in the wheel of an efficient disaster response. Information on casualties, extent of damage, infrastructure and the present response efforts give emergency planners the way forward in the allocation of resources available. It helps in promoting preparedness, which requires the emergency response team to have detailed information about the risk that they are getting into (Haddow & Haddow, 2013).

While we do not have historical record of all of the natural hazards that have impacted the United States, we do know that for multitudes of years, the United States has been hit by many natural hazards – hurricane, tornado, drought, wildfire, flood and earthquake, to name a few. As each of these natural hazards occur, multiple issues arise – relative to the core components of emergency management: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. Yet, even with prior knowledge from years past and the destructive events that have occurred, we as a nation continue to struggle with natural hazards that more often than not become natural disasters. For too long it seems as if we have settled in to a rhythm of responding, attempting to recover, rebuilding and then repeating the cycle as another natural hazard strikes.

Data obtained by assessing social vulnerability must be implemented within each phase of the emergency management process; mitigation, response, and recovery. First, to effectively respond and recover from incidents emergency management agencies must concentrate on the mitigation phase to prevent incidents from happening in the first place. This is achieved through a thorough hazard/vulnerability analysis (HVA). This type of analysis assesses the risk of physical, economic, and social vulnerability within all communities of a given jurisdiction (Lindell et al., 2006, p. 165). Additionally, the basis of the HVA allows emergency managers to effectively plan for disaster by creating pre-planned responses to disasters (rather than improvised response) and staging resources to locations with the highest probability of risk; ultimately contributing to the mitigation and response phases.

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.

This subject aims to teach students the main elements of emergency management for natural disasters and to a lesser degree terrorist attack. Students will understand the principles involved in emergency

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.

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

This emergence of social media has also changed emergency management and disaster response. Emergency management as a whole is fairly new, only creating widely recognized, integrated emergency management systems beginning in the 1970s. Furthermore, at this same time people realized that the effects disasters have on the communities they strike can be mitigated by the creation of disaster plans ahead of time, proper disaster response training, and the efforts of human actions in these situations. Because social media has enabled mass amounts of instant information sharing, it allows not only locals and disaster response teams to help with the management of crises, but also many remote citizens.