Emergency Management
| Author | Jeffrey Wilson |
| Pages | 933-936 |
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The attacks on September 11, 2001 that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington were disasters of an almost unimaginable scale. Still, even in the panic and devastation that ensued, orderly emergency procedures needed to be maintained to prevent further damage and to spare as many additional lives as possible. Emergencies on a smaller scale may not require as much sustained effort as the September 11 attacks did, but they, too, require effective emergency management procedures.
Emergencies that can warrant either a local, state, or federal effort can include a variety of situations:
Natural disasters include earthquakes, floods, tornados, hurricanes, blizzards, mud-slides, and volcanoes.
Fires can be set accidentally (by lightning storms or by careless campers) or they can be set deliberately by arsonists.
Transportation disasters include airline crashes, train crashes and derailments, boat accidents, highway pileups and accidents, and anything that disrupts the ability of people to move from one place to another.
Hazardous materials emergencies include oil spills, hazardous waste spills, and nuclear accidents.
Invasions and attacks could come from military or terrorist sources.
Depending on the size and location of the emergency, local municipalities may take the primary charge, with state and federal agencies providing backup. Emergency management can also come from the private or corporate sector; mining accidents, for example, are usually handled primarily by the mining company (whose on-site miners are most familiar with the safest and most efficient rescue procedures).
Until the twentieth century, there was no formal government response system for emergency situations. The fear of an attack on U.S. soil, for example was almost nonexistent; the last foreign troops in the United States had been the British during the War of 1812. By the twentieth century, attitudes had changed, but it was not until the 1940s that the federal government felt compelled to take action. President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the first Office of Civilian Defense in 1941, in anticipation of possible attacks on U.S. soil by the Axis forces in Germany and Japan. By 1950,when President Harry S. Truman created the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the
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main focus of emergency management was guarding against a possible invasion from Communist forces.
During the Cold War years following World War II, civil defense administrators worked with citizens to help them prepare against possible enemy attacks. A major fear was nuclear attack. The devastation of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan were still fresh in people's minds. During the 1950s, many families installed bomb shelters underground or in their basements to guard not only against bombs but also against nuclear fallout. Municipal buildings, schools, and large private office buildings and apartment houses often displayed placards with the Civil Defense logo and the words "Fallout Shelter" (many older buildings still sport these placards). Up until the 1960s, students were led through air-raid drills in which they were instructed to "duck and cover" by ducking under their desks and covering their heads with...
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