Oct. 16, 2001
Emergency Management in the 21st Century
By Invitation
By Jack
Harrald
The events of Sept. 11 forever changed the way
emergency management will be done in this country in the future.
The United States has the best emergency response system in the world
as has been proven again in our incredible response to the tragic events
in New York City and Washington, DC.
However, the staggering loss of life caused by these terrorist acts
demands that the principal focus of our nation’s emergency management
system must be on reducing the terrible impacts of these events. Our
vulnerability is now obvious to all. What is less obvious is that we
have the knowledge, tools, and technologies to reduce that vulnerability.
We can reduce the impact of future events by assessing our vulnerabilities
and risks, conducting pre-event planning, taking mitigation actions
to equip, protect, and prepare our first responders, and ensuring that
our nation’s medical system is fully integrated into our emergency
management system and has the capacity necessary to respond to mass
casualty events.
Our nation’s emergency managers at the federal, state, and local
levels are in place now to help communities, businesses, and individuals
to protect themselves from the current terrorist threat and the historically
more frequent threats of natural hazards such as floods, hurricanes,
earthquakes, tornadoes, and fires.
The cause and the scope of terrorist events may be different but the
consequences in terms of loss of lives and property, infrastructure
damage, and social and economic disruption are similar. A significant
earthquake in certain parts of the United States could cause similar
loss of life and economic loss. The increased number of natural disasters
experienced in the 1990s led the emergency management community to begin
to focus on how we could reduce, mitigate, and prevent the consequences
of disasters.
It is time for us to build on this foundation and to incorporate terrorism
into a true all-hazards emergency management, preparedness, and prevention
program that will ensure the safety of our citizens and our society
for the future.
In order to do this we must take the following actions:
•At the federal government level, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) must expand its funding for community-based and risk-based
prevention planning and actions. The Congress should establish a national
prevention and preparedness trust fund. FEMA should lead an effort to
establish a federal disaster prevention and preparedness plan, integrated
with the very successful Federal Response Plan, which would ensure that
the full resources of funding programs within the federal government
are made available to support state and local disaster prevention and
preparedness efforts.
•At the state level, our nation’s governors should establish
similar funding and technical assistance programs to support both state
and local planning and prevention actions to protect critical infrastructure
systems whether they are publicly or privately owned.
It is at the community level where disaster preparedness and prevention
actions will be most effective. With support from the federal and state
governments, and in partnership with the private sector and non-profit
organizations, communities across the country must move forward in creating
community partnerships, identify their vulnerability and risk from terrorist
attacks and natural hazards, determine what disaster prevention actions
can be taken to reduce the impacts of these risks, and finally, to take
action.
The business community must also reexamine its business contingency
and continuity planning models. Prevention efforts to ensure safer facilities,
safer homes for employees, and improved community infrastructure must
be supported by the private sector.
Our nation’s colleges and universities must also review how they
will reduce the impacts of these types of events on their campuses and
their
students, staff, and faculty. This nation’s investment in research
at
universities needs to be protected. Curriculum in the post-graduate
professional schools should include
disaster prevention and crisis and emergency management issues.
Essential to the success of our preparedness and prevention efforts
is a reexamination of our communications strategies. We must take the
skills and technologies that have been employed to communicate so well
with disaster victims and, through an extensive campaign of public education
and awareness, we must convince the American people that they can do
something to reduce their sense of vulnerability to terrorism and other
disasters. We must give them the tools to make their homes, workplaces,
and communities safer and the resources to improve their local emergency
management capability.
On Sept. 11 the nation witnessed the critical importance of our first
response capability and realized the need to ensure that our emergency
response and emergency medical capacity and capability are adequate
to meet the threat everywhere in America. The coordinated and effective
actions in New York and northern Virginia demonstrated that our nation’s
emergency management system is the best response system in the world.
Now it is time to build on this solid foundation and create the best
preparedness and prevention system in the world. In doing so, we will
honor the heroic responders to the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. We will create a lasting tribute to those innocent
people who died on Sept. 11 and the families and friends they left behind,
and help ensure that no other American family suffer their fate.
~ Harrald is director of
GW’s Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management and president
of The International Emergency Management Society
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu
