The Legal Considerations of the Emergency Manager This extract will elaborate on some of the legal considerations that the emergency manager must consider when conducting searches, seizures, and evacuation operations during an emergency management activity. Unfortunately with the unforeseen nature of the emergency and/or disaster one must consider whether this event involves imminent threat of widespread or severe damage, harm, lost of life or property resulting from any natural or man-made cause, the choices that must be made by local officials frequently are not easy to make in a split of a second (Nicholson, n.d.). Most of their decisions may not be the most popular choice but must be the course of action that will benefit the cause. Sometimes, critics will criticized the emergency manager for their course of action taken based on several different motives that they foresee. But we must ask ourselves are their point of view is fact based or just opinionated. For example, a flood threatens several cities and there are limited resources to aid them all; an emergency manager must decide which residential area must be preserved through sandbagging and diking. One area is considered low-income resident and low to minmiunm property values. While the other cities are considered wealthy with extremely high property values. Considering all the factors every residents can safely evacuated themselves, but still the world weighs on the emergency manager’s shoulders to make
Natural Disasters are very difficult to control and they most often create divided opinion among citizens of states. Authorities are always at crossroads with the citizens when trying to implement policies that are likely to force homeowners to evacuate when natural disaster is looming. Implementing forceful arrest and evacuation of people who are unwilling to leave during natural disasters is a good policy which will simply protect lives and valuable properties of victims. Since the aftermath of natural disasters cannot be predicted, it becomes necessary to evacuate, albeit, forcefully, as smaller potential natural disasters can turn
“(2) The emergency is of such a nature as to induce a well-grounded apprehension of death or serious bodily harm if the act is not done;” and
Katrina was a crisis primarily because of its scale and the mixture of challenges that it posed, not least the failure of the levees in New Orleans. Because of the novelty of a crisis, predetermined emergency plans and response behavior that may function quite well in dealing with routine emergencies are frequently grossly inadequate or even counterproductive. That proved true in New Orleans, for example, in terms of evacuation planning, law enforcement, rescue activities, sheltering, and provisions for the elderly and infirm.
Emergency management law derives from federal, state and local laws which legal responsibility may result in liability (Nicholson, p 393). When addressing the state law, the tort concept arise known as negligence (Nicholson, p 393). Also, Immunities protect emergency managers under certain conditions (Nicholson, p 393). The National Fire Protection Association and post-9/11 federal law generated new benchmarks for emergency managers to follow that resulted in federal funds for the state and local emergency management performance (Nicholson, p 393).
Balancing the parameters of the Fourth Amendment1 can be a delicate matter. Search and seizure is an integral part of law enforcement; however, it must be handled to the letter of the law protecting the rights of all parties involved. According to the Emergency Doctrine2, probable cause3 in addition to exigent circumstances4 under Article 14.05 of the Code of Criminal Procedure may afford the police the authority to conduct a search without a warrant. The proper protocol for a Constitutional search and seizure will be dissected and interpreted regarding proper police management and intervention through the following example:
Many concerns and objections have been filed in opposition to the Department of Health (which includes Social Services, Fire and Emergency Management, and Human Services) administrator by departments, citizens, and so on. The City Manager has contracted me regarding: unethical practices, unprofessional leadership, poor fire and emergency response time, unethical practices, insufficient customer and patient care, and much more concerning various governmental departments and external stakeholders. In regards to the latest questions of the City Manager a thorough search into the accusations will be put into play. Supplementary to the issues already being presented, the school board have made concerns to the capability to conduct daily transactions.The school board has a collaborative association with an assortment of government departments and they have levied department directors with non fulfillment to work together on a number of efforts that will be revealed later within this report. This report will provide an underlying support for the City Manager to discourse and perform leadership techniques that outline the actions that should be carried out in order to prevail over the previously mentioned complaints.
against the government included starting a petition, planning a strike, issuing newspapers about what they were doing, addressing the citizens about how fascist the government is during town hall, planning a court case and planning a revolution. Every time we were in the process of an action, our party was always countered by the government when they used their emergency law. This emergency law gives the government the power to create ANY law since they did not specifically outline what an emergency situation was. From the moment it was not clearly defined and created, this law presented itself to be a fascist move. For example, my party started a petition so when the government found out with their “emergency” law they created a law stating
This is a review of Emergency Management: The American Experience 1900-2010 by Claire B. Rubin and Butler (2012), chapters 1 and 2. Emergency management at the federal level was nonexistent before 1950 when the Federal Disaster relief Act was passed. Disaster relief was the responsibility of state and volunteer agencies like the Red Cross. Several disasters paved the way for emergency management. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the San Frisco Earthquake of 1906, and the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 were the disasters that laid the foundation for the 1950 Federal Disaster relief Act (Butler, 2012, pg. 17).
The Emergency Services organizations in the United States are complex and challenging group’s that are a required necessity of all communities, based on law. The fire service part of the emergency services have been around over two hundred years and has been the backbone of many emergency service agencies on how the culture is built and how everyday actions are completed within the emergency services, there has been cultural ambivalence within the Emergency Service on how to deal with employees, with the current laws and regulations. Many of the employment issues within the emergency services have been due to the increase in members of the emergency services pushing back on the old cultural practices of the agencies or governments who govern the emergency service agencies. It is evident that in some incidents that the politics and old traditional cultures have made issues of diversity, leadership issues and equal rights issues. There is growing professional literary evidence that acknowledges the legal issues surrounding emergency service agencies (Rielage, 2008).
The purpose of this paper is to describe the legal considerations that an emergency manager must consider when conducting searches, seizures, and evacuation operations. The paper will address the following:
In “Wither the Emergency Manager,” Niel R. Britton comments on Drabek's “Human Responses to disaster: An Inventory of Sociological Findings.” Britton describes six positive and negative issues in emergency management as it is today. In this paper, we will discuss the implications on emergency management as a field and on the individual manager.
There are many challenges that law enforcement agencies faces when it comes to enforcing public safety at the same time protect the rights of individuals. This paper will focus on several key topics involving the relationship between public safety and individual rights. The first topic is the statutory authority and responsibilities of government officials, security personnel, and private citizens. The next topic involves the practices or laws relating to search, seizures, and surveillance by police, corrections, private citizens, and security personnel. This paper will also compare the laws relating to the use of
Local protective measure planning equips first responders with the knowledge needed to organize efficient response results in the event of an emergency. Structured open dialogue between local emergency jurisdictions enables responders to delegate the appropriate individuals and equipment resources to the impacted local areas requiring the most aid following a terror event. By establishing a streamlined communication framework, local emergency responders can collaborate their efforts and resources to promote collective well-being. When a local emergency plan specifies what responders and resources belong where and at what time, response overlap and shortages can be avoided. Unionized response action established prior to a terrorist incident, serves to mitigate the risks, hazards and threat of injury or harm the people and property of the US face when a terrorism event occurs. Furthermore, a structured local emergency operations plan for a hazardous materials incident involving a terrorist is imperative to public health and safety, as the blueprint outlines protective measures the public can follow to minimize their exposure to dangerous substances. The people of a community affected by a terror event can be warned and notified of the event’s associated dangerous materials, which threaten their well-being, through a variety of methods such as warning sirens or horns, emergency alert systems, automated
Ethics of Emergencies “The Ethics of Emergencies” explains Ayn Rand’s radical and unique view of altruism. She believes that there are 4 consequences of altruism, all of which are negative. These, simply put, are lack of self-esteem, lack of respect for others, a pessimistic view of life, and an indifference to ethics. She says that altruism hinders acts of true benevolence, and instead people act out of an obligation to others that has been internalized over time. Rand then argues that one should only volunteer to help strangers in emergency situations, and even then, only when the risk to one’s own life is less than the risk to the stranger’s. Rand advocates action in such emergencies because of the high value of human life. But Rand
There are many ways to describe emergency management and the importance of the tasks emergency managers perform. Indeed, in