Editor’s Note – Special Units and Underutilized Resources

Think about any disaster. Regardless of the type of large-scale incident, the response units deployed are likely to include emergency medical services, law enforcement, fire services, emergency management, and volunteer organizations. Beyond these standard response units, specialized responder units may not receive the same level of public attention yet are often available to provide critical skills. For example, for the well-being of both responders and survivors, one special operations unit that should not be overlooked is mental health.

Emergency planners should consider the many standard and specialized response resources within the community when creating a disaster response plan. Multidisciplinary collaboration can help planners identify these resources, share information, and inject a broad range of expertise into the decision-making process. Multidisciplinary teams bring together a combination of knowledge, skills, and experiences to achieve a common goal more effectively than any single discipline can on its own. This is true during any phase of a disaster.

As federal financial support decreases and expenses increase, states should identify and leverage currently available resources that may have been underutilized in the past. Citizen responders are one example—Scouts, Community Emergency Response Teams, and other volunteer organizations that prepare citizens for disaster response. In some cases, untrained survivors become impromptu responders. Trained and untrained community members can become force multipliers when emergency responders understand how to safely and efficiently incorporate them into the operations.

This June edition of the Domestic Preparedness Journal provides a glimpse into the many possibilities that exist within a community to better respond by leveraging special units and underutilized resources.