In Recent Years, Public Sector Organizations Increasingly

After examining a wide variety of input from FEMA and the private sector, there continues to be very little research on the effectiveness and uses of web based NBEOCs. When a disaster strikes the whole community, it pitches in to help. However, according to FEMA (Homeland Security, 2013), there had not been enough coordination between various levels of government and the private sector until Sandy. Currently, “only a portion of all U.S. cities engage the private sector for emergency management issues, and those efforts range widely in format, focus, level of effort, and sustainability” (Homeland Security, 2013). By conducting research on the NBEOC, it will secure greater understanding of the capabilities and opportunities created by coordination between the federal government’s EOC and private

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.

Throughout its history, FEMA has had two main missions. First, FEMA’s mission is to enhance the federal government 's capacity to deal with and survive foreign attacks. The main types of foreign attacks that FEMA is tasked to respond to relate to terrorist attacks and nuclear war. The second mission of FEMA is to assist state and local authori¬ties to respond to man-made and natural disasters that are to enormous for the local and state resources to respond to efficiently. While national security focuses more on civil defense, state and local authorities are more focused on natural disasters such as hurricanes, storms, floods and potential nuclear power accidents. These divergent focuses really presents FEMA with huge challenges since federal security authorities’ main objective is quite different from state or local authorities’ focus. Considering that FEMA designed the Federal Response Plan, the agency has the challenge of balancing these interests while working on its two key missions.

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

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.

Organizations over the past few decades have come to realize two things, there are a limited number of people in the government that are able to respond to natural disasters or large scale disaster effectively and that the government only has so many available resources to offer during a time of crisis. Another fact is, that private sector companies and non-profit entities, such as the Red Cross, have the ability to be more prepared due to their vast network of stores and distribution centers and their leisure, they indeed do have a unique responsibility

Disaster relief operations are complex systems having more to them than just a response mechanism. They require a significant amount of pre-planning.

Mutual aid agreements are essential for allocating resources, equipment, and personnel between jurisdictions through intrastate, interstate, private organizations, and nongovernmental organizations agencies in the event of an emergency situation that exceeds the capabilities of the local agencies. Intrastate agencies mobilized by a mutual aid agreement consist of resources within the state that can provide support to the requesting department. During catastrophic events, interstate sources activated through a mutual aid agreement are comprised of resources from other states that are able to support the operations required when state resources are incapable of providing adequate aid. Private-sector organizations, nonprofit organizations, and nongovernmental organizations provide additional support in times of crisis when the organization has necessary resources to sustain operations. Emergency situations that may arise and benefit from the resources established in an existing mutual aid agreement include mass casualty incidents, fire and law enforcement situations, natural disasters such as hurricanes and tornadoes, and terrorist attacks.

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.

Collaboration involves various groups or groups of people working together to accomplish a desired outcome. It is a bit like teamwork. By strengthening connections during an emergency crisis, you have the ability to be more effective, faster, produce more, and have more personnel available. Collaboration offers more innovation and experience to a situation. This paper will discuss the roles of those that were involved in the collaborative efforts of FEMA. The basic reasoning for this paper is to provide knowledge and understanding the experience of emergency management and collaboration that took place during Hurricane Sandy.

There are however, several restrictions that prevent the military from being able to directly respond to foreign or natural disasters inside the U.S borders. A formal request for aid must be generated through the Department of State for foreign aid (JP3-29, 2014). Likewise, a request for federal assistance must be made from the state to the President prior to military forces are authorized to respond to a domestic natural disaster. Unlike the Armed National Guard that is run by the state and falls under US Title 32 laws, the Department of Defense operates under Title 10 laws that prevent the military from operating in inside the United States borders for defensive support of civil authorities without the explicit permission from the Secretary of Defense (JP3-28, 2013).

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.

Hurricane Katrina exposed huge issues in the United States disaster preparedness and response programs. In 2005, the structure for homeland security was unable to manage catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina. Unified management of national response

The primary aim of all agencies involved in disaster relief is to help people and reduce human suffering. But due to the participation of multiple agencies from wide backgrounds, with different interests, visions and financial capability, proper coordination and collaboration between the parties involved, remains a point of concern. Little or zero pre disaster collaboration is found between nodal agencies. The sudden onset of a disastrous event and unpredictability of immediate responders, often result in requirement of large scale post disaster partnership between agencies. The paper intends to focus on the degree to which inter-agency coordination and collaborations impact the success of a humanitarian relief operation and thereby asserting the need of association and teamwork both pre and post disaster.

In order to respond to these devastating events and provide aid to those left in the aftermath, humanitarian relief organizations have to quickly prepare and implement large-scale relief activities, with only a short period of time to do so (Lassiter et al., 2015).