CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION TO EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
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.
Introduction There are many ways to describe emergency management and the importance of the tasks emergency managers perform. Indeed, in
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The natural environment is, of course, not “getting its revenge”. Geophysical, meteorological, and hydrologic processes are unfolding as they have for millennia, beginning long before humans occupied the earth and continuing to the present. Given the eons-long perspective of the natural environment, it would be very difficult to identify meaningful changes in event frequency for the short time period in which scientific records are available on geological, meteorological, and hydrological phenomena. Event frequency, from an emergency management perspective, is not really the issue. It is certainly true that, over the years, more people have been affected by natural disasters and losses are becoming progressively greater. The significant feature driving these observations, however, is the extent of human encroachment into hazard prone areas. With increasing population density and changing land use patterns, more people are exposed to natural hazards and consequently our accumulated human and economic losses are increasing. Much of this exposure is a matter of choice. Sometimes people choose hazardous places, building houses on picturesque cliffs, on mountain slopes, in floodplains, near beautiful volcanoes, or along seismic faults. Sometimes people choose hazardous building materials that fail under extreme environmental stresses—for example, unreinforced masonry construction in seismically active areas. Some exposure results from constrained choices; the cheap land or
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.
An emergency operations plan for the community in which we live is a document of great importance to each of us whether we know it or not. This paper examines the emergency action plan for Knoxville, Tennessee. In the course of the examination, it will compare and analyze the plan for Knoxville with the standards set forth in the textbook for this course along with other recognized sources in the field of emergency management.
EMS organizations also have their contract options for funding. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (2013), they developed a fee schedule for ambulance services, in order to contain costs. This schedule is written into a contract. Many patients that are transported by ambulance are Medicare beneficiaries. The government will only reimburse the companies for services rendered during transport, unless contraindicated by the patient’s medical condition. There are codes associated with treatment that either replace or supplement ICD-9 codes. The fee schedule also corresponds with BLS and ALS levels of care, rating treatment from routine to complex (Brennan, 2012). Private insurance companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield include ambulance services for their patients when other transportation would otherwise harm the patient. Cities and hospitals create contract agreements with private ambulance companies for services.
The history of emergency management dates back in 1803 when a great fire struck Portsmouth city in New Hampshire. In response to this firebreak out, the Congress passed into law the Congress Act, 1803 to compensate the Portsmouth merchants. The Portsmouth city fire breakout and the congress response to the disaster set a precedent, which was applied in United States in management of emergencies like the 1835 terrific fire of New york city, fire break out at Chicago in 1871, the Galveston hurricane of 1900, and the 1906 San Francisco horrible earthquake up to mid-20th century (Rubin, 2012).
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is a body under the United States Department of Homeland Security that was created in 1978 to improve the safety of the American residents, especially during disasters. FEMA has a primary mandate of coordinating the response to any disaster that may occur in the U.S. and that overwhelms both local and state authorities’ resources. FEMA comes in to aid only after the governor of the involved state has declared a state of emergency and has made a formal request. However, there is an exception to the gubernatorial declaration requirement, when an emergency occurs on a federal property such as the Space Shuttle Columbia experienced in the 2003 return-flight disaster ("About the FEMA Agency", 2016).
Natural disasters are the catastrophes cause by “Mother Nature”, which is often difficult to forecast or manage (Morrison, et al 2014). Examples of
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.
The purpose of the Emergency Preparedness Plan is to save lives and prevent injuries in case of emergencies such as nuclear attack, fire, natural disaster, civil disorder or other, and provide the necessary best practices to ensure all possible and relevant forms of communicating with our faculty, staff, students, and parents. Mrs. Patricia Harris of the International Studies Elementary Charter School was interviewed about the International Studies Elementary Charter School’s Emergency Management Plan and the role of the school counselor during emergencies. Surprisingly, the school counselor does not play as important of a role than one would have thought. Although, the counselor does serve as one of the Designated School Emergency Team Members, some the tasks that would seem likely the counselor would perform, are performed by other administrators. Tasks such as talking to parents or being there for the students are performed by the principal while the school counselor is delegated to direct traffic. Based on the Emergency Management Plan, it would seem that the school counselor’s role is still not clearly understood. With all the expertise that counselors can bring to a crisis situation, it’s disappointing that counselors are assigned such a miniscule task as delegating traffic. Counselor Harris did discuss the Dougherty County School System’s Crisis Team. That team is
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
Making an emergency action plan is really important to reduce the risk for and prevent injuries. When developing an emergency plan, one need to know and identify the types of emergencies when they occur, write safety guidelines and instructions that need to be followed in the event of an emergency. The steps to follow include signals to use in order to activate the safety plan when there is an emergency, the procedures for responding to the emergency, for calling 911 and giving direction to the EMS responder to the scene, and any follow-up actions that need to be taken. Identify safety equipment that is available and needed to respond to each type of emergency. After developing the emergency plan, one need to practice it in order to be familiar
Protecting the public’s health historically has been a state and local responsibility. However, the growing threat of bioterrorism has highlighted the importance of a strong public health infrastructure to the nation’s homeland security and has focused increased attention on the preparedness of the public health system (Frist, 2011). Since the 2001 anthrax attacks Congress has passed new legislation to increase the strength of the nation’s public health system thus the funding has also rapidly increased to meet the potential demand. There is an ongoing debate however, as to what level of contribution local, state, and federal agency’s feel is an appropriate level of ongoing public health investments.
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).
In a new form of protection and communication, social media is the main thing that everything is using in today’s times. Marketing employees have positions as titled as social media directors. Companies have people watching and monitoring everything that happens with their social media reputation all hours of the day everyday. Young people are seeing the power of social media everyday with teachers demonstrating how fast a picture can be shared across the world. Social media is relatively new and could possibly open many gates for communication. This depends heavily on who is publishing information and news on social media. If news spreads fast on social media, then the use of it can be used for emergencies. If many people are
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