Essays on Disaster Response

Every region around the globe has different exposure factors that relate to the occurrence of various kinds of disasters, and that needs intervention strategies when they happen. Managing of resources and individuals during emergency periods can present multiple challenges that require the relevant people to improvise and develop new strategies to deal with the arising problem. Decision-making is one of the key components of these operations as the decisions are essential in providing solutions to the outstanding problems (ANA, 2008). It is important to review some of the ethical practices that can enable different people to attain the best ...

Q1 Based on the best quote, “Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot Give me a caring idiot, give me a sensitive idiot, just don’t give me the same idiot” by the president of the Jefferson Parish, Aaron Broussard and the words from James Lee Wit that states “we promised to make an agency that could deliver on the political promises” (Cooper & Block, 2006). This suggests that FEMA was expected to provide the best services that were related to homeland security, for instance dealing with disaster, Hurricane Katrina ...

Development of long-term recovery plan following a disaster is an essential and complicated process. Communities affected by a disaster need to measure its impact before formulating a plan. The preparation can last for several months since it needs enormous resources. Hurricane Katrina remains the most destructive natural disaster in United States' history. It affected several areas in the country (Pratt, 2016). Communities in New Orleans city were the most affected. The city is located along Mississippi River. Hurricanes and flooding are major sources of disasters. New Orleans has been affected by other hazards such as drinking water pollution and ...

Abstract

Disaster analysis is essential in the management of disasters. It assists in the identification of gaps in the management cycle within a given region. Management of disasters occurs in four cycles including planning or preparedness, response, recovery, as well as mitigation. Planning is an essential tool in all the phases of the cycle. The primary aim of disaster response is to offer immediate aid to improve health, sustain life, as well as assist in the improvement of the morale of the affected population. Recovery phase aims at restoring the infrastructure as well as the operations of the community services ...

Abstract

This project serves to focus on the country of Saudi Arabia and how the nation, handles school preparedness when it comes to disasters. Saudi Arabia is a developing country. The researcher argues that more need to be done in making sure children are protected in a developing society when a disaster happens. Some of the disasters explored in the discussion include fires, earthquakes, hurricanes and terrorist attacks. The researcher believes that while there is potential to rectify this issue, more future research needs to be done. In the exploration of the topic, the author found that there were vulnerabilities ...

The existing framework for homeland security (HS) never offered the required system to handle issues posed by Hurricane Katrina. Even though homeland security designed a response framework, which ably manages the requirements of a catastrophic threats, wildfires, as well as artificial calamities, the framework had structural drawbacks for managing Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina had significant effect on homeland security (HS) environment because of some flaws within national preparedness. These flaws were apparent in the processes for sound or unified control of the national disaster response, knowledge of the plan for preparedness, control or command structures in the Federal administration, ...

Briefly, define and describe community resilience as it related to critical incident management. Include in your answer what is meant by “continuity of government.” Community resilience implies the measure of the sustaining capability to make proper use of the entire available resources so as to deal with the diversity of the adverse situations. Kean & Hamilton (2004) asserts that the communities may possess limited resilience if there is no intensity of readiness for catastrophes. Properly prepared communities are described as resilient due to their capability to offer assistance in the prevention of losses incurred as a result of a disaster. ...

The American population’s vulnerability to the disaster has been heightened in the recent past as a result of the occurrence of events such as the devastating 9/11 attacks as well as Hurricane Katrina. Despite numerous efforts and programs being implemented by the Department of Human Services with respect to emergency response, a crucial aspect of health care remains unresolved. The vulnerable populations comprised of newborn children as well as aging individuals remain at risk especially when their respective conditions involve their dependence on electricity (Jorgensen, Mendoza, and Henderson, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ...

Executive Summary

Emergency management (often referred to as disaster management) is a sphere of public policy programs, which aims at creating plans, which the communities, which make them less vulnerable to various natural and man-made natural risks and hazards. The practice also shows that inability to draft and implement these plans may result in a high number of victims, damage to physical assets and other negative outcomes (Haddow, Bullock & Coppola, 2008). Statistically, two-thirds of all American companies do not have comprehensive disaster plans, and thus, in the event a disaster happens, it is the task of local public authorities to save ...

The Fukushima Daichi is a technological disaster triggered by natural calamities on March 11th, 2011, when a massive earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale hit Japan. The earthquake originated from Honshu Island, and it created a tsunami. Following the tremor, reactors one, two and three automatically shut down. Reactors 4, 5 and 6 had been previously shut down for maintenance and repairs. Due to felled power supply lines, the Fukushima Daichi reactor complex was cut off from the electricity grid. As the operating reactors had shut down, they could not generate power for them to cool down, and ...

Introduction

The disruptions from natural and unnatural disasters exposes salient and pertinent long standing social structures into people’s consciousness, and forces individuals and institutions to confront problems—some of which had already existed but have become more evident and alarming after disasters, while some are produced or are resurfaced by disaster events. Weak social structures, for example, such as unpreparedness, power struggles, corruption and evident biases towards the affluent tend to become more evident especially in post-disaster evaluation and rehabilitation. This paper explores on two articles that discusses the current normative state of disaster response and rehabilitation politics in ...

1. On an average, 90 percent of the disaster-related deaths and injuries are sustained in nations where per capital income is under $760 per year (Coppola 26). 2. In poor countries, the government focuses its resources on interest that have a greater social demand such as basic infrastructure, education, or military. Rather than spending on mitigation or preparation of disaster management, government prioritizes other social necessities. 3. International involvement is needed when the nation is overwhelmed by the sheer disaster caused by an event. Three types of emergencies require international involvement; these are humanitarian emergencies (India invaded Bangladesh in ...

Overview of Disaster Relief: Organizational Structure of Relief Organization / SLP

Purpose

The primary purpose of Disaster Response Plan is to coordinate community proper care operations during typhoon or earthquake. Community proper care includes sheltering, feeding, first aid at mass proper care facilities and family well-being inquiry. Disaster response plan's designated as the guide for coordinating community proper care. Disaster Response Plan is responsible for coordinating all community proper care administrative, control, organizing, education, readiness, and response and recovery exercises. Disaster response plan is supported and harmonizes with the American Red Cross, local community authorities and volunteer relief agencies to meet essential human needs like shelter, food, clothing, query ...

Security requirements are crucial to the effectiveness and efficiency of a program or system. There are so many ways of obtaining standard security requirements that can be adopted and used. Such requirements can be drawn from the readily available security frameworks that have set standards that are internationally acceptable. They can also be company requirements set by the members.

Why are protection profiles reusable?

A protection profile gives an outline of standards, objectives and prerequisites for products that concern security requirements as regards various users. However, the requirements for protection profiles are entirely independent of the implementation process they are available for the public to ...

1. Contingency planning requires an understanding of the crises that are most likely to occur, the potential impacts of those events, the resources that are needed to address those situations, and the most efficient means of accessing those resources. How has the center addressed each of these concerns?

YNH-CEPDR provides a complete solution to create a proper contingency planning system which includes risk mitigation planning and based on the anticipated impact the actual steps are planned and there are proper guidelines that are created and shared with the operations team so that the business continuity efforts can be in place, as ...

Abstract

Disasters and emergencies happen a lot of times every year. At some point, it can be argued that their occurrence is inevitable as disasters and emergencies, or even crises, are bound to happen; and that it is not a question of if but when they are going to happen . Keeping that in mind, it would be important to know how the basic and different operational definitions of disasters and emergencies; how society has coped up with them and the different specific strategies and standards set in place to appropriately address them such as but not limited to mitigation steps and strategies, ...

Program

Mobile devices and microblogging are emerging as significant means of spreading information during disasters not only to affected communities but also to professional responders for time-critical situational awareness (Imran et al., 2013). As the usefulness of information varies significantly, it is common for human annotators to examine the content of incoming messages and control their dissemination in a content moderation process (Link et al., 2013). The large volume, high velocity, and variety of user-generated contents from both mobile devices and social media platforms such as Twitter create a processing bottleneck in finding relevant and valuable information. With on-topic tweets being ...

Introduction

The SNS is an acronym utilized in place of The Strategic National Stockpile. This is a medical supplies buffer created to help in cases of emergencies such as biohazards, natural disasters and chemical and bio-terrorism. The supplies are kept ready for distribution to all the major cities at once and are available free to the population in times of disaster. Nursing professionals play a crucial role in administration and distribution of these resources to individuals in their need during disasters. This paper evaluates mechanisms affecting at play in the administration of these resources by answering to the following questions. - ...

September 11 attacks

September 11 attacks, also referred to as 9/11, is a series of commercial airplanes hijacking and suicide attack committed by 19 terrorists associated with the Islamic extremist group, Al-Qaeda against the United States (Pandya, 2013). The planes were carrying 11, 4000 gallons of jet fuel, which experts claim that the objective of the militants was to take control of the planes once they were airborne and turn them into weapons of mass destruction (Pandya, 2013). The attack targeting the U.S. was one of the deadliest terrorist attacks on the American soil in the history of the world. The attacks against ...

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was created in 1863 in Switzerland as a private agency to provide relief to war detainees (Forsythe, 2005). Originally its role was to be a humanitarian agency in times of trouble but then it took over a lot of subsidiary roles like taking care of combatants, civilians in distress, political prisoners and people separated from their families because of conflict(Forsythe, 2005). The International Red Cross functions under the basic principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, universality, unity, and voluntary service(ICRC, 1986).

Mission of the Red Cross

The core mission of the Red Cross in recent times has ...

1. Johnson County Emergency Management Agency Johnson County Emergency management Agency was founded as a department that coordinates disaster management issues for both the visitors and citizens of Johnson County. It was established following concerns by the citizens over a lack of properly coordinated disaster response, planning, mitigation and even recovery arrangements in the county. This led to losses of lives, uncontrolled destruction of property and also resulted in much destruction caused to the environment. In response to these concerns, the agency was formed with a disaster management department which coordinates the plans of the county to sense possible causes of ...

Improving disaster management for emergency medical services

Abstract The emergency medical services (EMS) professionals have been serving as front line disaster management and rescue team for the past thirty years. The EMS professionals are one of the first branches of rescue teams that are dispatched during an emergency irrespective of their level of training. In case of a disaster, the EMS professionals have to work alongside various other departments such as police, fire and hospitals to create a coherent disaster management regime. To achieve this, it is crucial to lay down protocols and hierarchy that would enable smooth flow of information and communication. Since the 9/11 attacks, ...

Book Review

Brunsma, D. L., Overfelt, D., & Picou, J. S. (2010). The sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a modern catastrophe. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Introduction

The book captures the history and story of Katrina. The Hurricane was considered as the most damaging disasters of recent time because of the magnitude of displacement and the level of destruction. The book “The Sociology of Katrina Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe” is a collection of the views of the social scientists expounding on various perspectives of Katrina.

Summary

The book recognizes the Hurricane as a horrifying and destabilizing act of nature that created an enlightenment function that broke all ...

Communication challenge

Disaster management is one of the critical issues in society. It is worth noting that disasters are inevitable regardless of how much we try to avoid. Disasters management is one of the disciplines that deal with avoiding manmade and natural disasters. It entails the aspect of preparedness, recovery as well as response, which is meant to come to terms with disasters. In most cases, disasters put to test the emergency response ability and the recovery process. The ability to recover and deal effectively with disaster after it has occurred tends to improve due to the increase in the risk ...

Disasters are inevitable occurrences in day to day life in society. They occur in the form of cyber crimes and attacks such as watering hole attacks, SQL injection, spear phishing, brute force attacks and advanced persistent threats. Physical disasters such as fire breakouts, oil spillage, floods and other catastrophes are inevitable. It, therefore, calls for a disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery strategies. A recent disaster at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in East Africa’s country’s commercial hub Nairobi Kenya is a case in point. Kenya’s main airport arrival terminal was razed down following a dawn ...

American Public University System

Abstract This paper provides a clear understanding of two main disaster response initiatives: the Emergency Prescription Assistance Program and the State Media Social Sites. To a great extent, the paper discusses the benefits of both programs, and the inherent barriers that affect the delivery of the outcomes envisioned by the framers of the two initiatives. As it shall be seen in the paper, both programs were necessitated by Hurricane Katrina. Despite the minor flaws in the workings of the two programs, the initiatives are a major leap from the past and they have set the bar higher for future disaster response ...

Bordentown is a city in Burlington County, New Jersey, US. The city, located at the convergence of Blacks Creek, Crosswicks Creek and Delaware River had a population of 3,924 as of 2010 (city-data.com, 2012). New Jersey has a climate that is relatively comparable to most other states. Other than experiencing higher levels of precipitation; Bordentown’s all other significant statistical climate determiners are relatively similar to other states. The town has four main highways, water, rail and bus services. This transport system serves long distance trips between the southern and Northern areas of the state. Several aspects of Bordentown’s geographical ...

Federalism is defined as a type of government in which the tasks of governing are constitutionally divided between a central/national government and sub-national units. In the case of United States of America, these units are the fifty states in the country. Under Federalism, the powers to govern are shared between the national and the state government. The whole system of governance and the country involved is often referred to as a federation.

In the United States of America, Federalism has evolved constantly over the period through various amendments in the constitution. The current system of governance cannot be described as any singe ...

Galveston Hurricane of 1900

This hurricane hit the city of Galveston, Texan on September 8, 1900 (Simpson, 2003). It was a category 4 storm, and it is widely considered to be the deadliest hurricane in U.S history. The storm claimed about 8,000 casualties and leveled the city of Texas. The main cause of the hurricane is unknown due to limited observation ability during the 19th Century. The storm was first sighted on august 27 east of the Windward Islands. By august 30, the storm had passed through the Leeward Islands. Antigua reported a severe storm three days later. By September 7, heavy damage was ...

Role of the major public health personnel, including the public health nurse, involved in the disaster.

The key roles of the public health personnel including the community nurse include the assessment of the disaster, policy development, and provision of health care needs for the affected victims of Franklin County. The community nurse provides direct care to the patients, families, or a group of people that were affected by the disaster through the door to door visits. The community nurse is collaborating with experts from other disciplines such as the epidemiologist (Sharon Kong), Fire department (Jim Anderson), EMS department(Cory Sanborn), Police department(Jeff Stackhouse), public health officers 9(Lane Harris), Environmentalists (Seth Stattmiller), and many other ...

According to the chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) classification of hazards, each of the individual types of agents can result in various types of injuries at different periods depending on the time they have been released (CBRNE Task Force Statement, 2008). Both chemical and biological agents result in injuries that fundamentally affect human beings via internal cellular pathways (CBRNE Task Force Statement, 2008). Unlike biological agents, which are transmitted through infection, chemical agents do not have any infectious attributes (CBRNE Task Force Statement, 2008). However, usually, the consequences of noxious chemical agents, especially pulmonary toxins such as nerve ...

It is also referred to as the disaster management. It is a discipline that deals with and the avoidance of risks. It is a proactive discipline in that, it prepares for a disaster before happening and also the disaster response upon occurrence. Generally this is a continuous process in which communities and individuals manage risks or hazards so as to avoid or mitigate the effects of such disasters. The effective disaster management heavily relies on the inclusion of emergency plans at every government and private involvement levels. Oftenly, the responsibility of governmental disaster management is placed with the institutions of the civil defense. ...