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Uncharted Waters: Volunteers & Active Shooters
Universities often use volunteers to provide assistance in helping keep campuses safe and prepared. Most facilities on campus rely on volunteer crisis managers, crisis coordinators, fire wardens, or similarly named individuals to help with various emergency preparedness and response efforts – especially with evacuations. Some larger, or specialized facilities, have full-time building managers or engineers, who have emergency preparedness and limited response responsibilities. Additional volunteers can also fill such gaps with expanding roles and responsibilities.
Core Principles of Threat Management Units
Homeland security is a complex and ever-evolving challenge whose mitigation necessitates the actions and collaboration of personnel across all branches of government and the private sector. This enhanced complexity presents law enforcement, homeland safety, and security professionals with a myriad of challenges due to an environment overflowing with existential and hybrid threats, technological innovation, interconnectivity, and limited resources.transition done in the perceived safety of a child’s home under the supervision of his/her parent was and remains fraught with inherent danger.
Best Practices – From Cookies to Countermeasures
The anthrax attacks in October 2001 were a wakeup call nationwide of America’s weakness to respond to a widespread biological terrorist incident. Since that time, local, state, and federal agencies have worked together to improve public health readiness to mass dispense medical countermeasures (MCM) at points-of-dispensing (PODs). Providing bulk dispensing to non-public (or “closed”) PODs is one methodology employed to expedite the distribution of MCM to the private sector. However, exercising bulk dispensing in a realistic environment can present numerous challenges. Finding non-traditional partners, such as the Girl Scouts of Central Maryland, provides a cost-effective and simple solution to reducing the artificialities of a functional exercise.
Vertical Collaboration for Widespread Health Threats
From infectious diseases to terrorist attacks, state and federal agencies must collaborate to
provide the most effective responses for large-scale public health events. New types of threats
continually emerge, terrorist tactics evolve, and environmental conditions change. Each of these factors
contributes to the complexities that emergency preparedness professionals must consider when preparing
for, mitigating, or responding to any threat.
Strengthening & Streamlining Federal Response Efforts
In a world of increasingly complex and dangerous threats facing the United States – threats such as emerging infectious diseases, terrorist organizations, state actors, and extreme weather events – the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) stands tall as a robust and reliable federal resource ready to respond. On 1 October 2018, in an effort to better align the stockpile with other federal medical countermeasure response efforts, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shifted oversight and operational control of the SNS from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to the HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR).
Trending
Bridging Communication Gaps: Lessons from Hurricane Helene Hurricanes in 2024 caused widespread damage to infrastructure, leading to a critical but often overlooked issue: isolation. Physical and technological…
Cost Analysis: Protecting the Grid and Electronics… Because modern societies are increasingly reliant on electronics, they are more vulnerable to the effects of an electromagnetic pulse event.…
Agroterrorism: A Persistent but Overlooked Threat Agroterrorism is not new. Considered a subset of bioterrorism, it has become an increasing concern to the U.S. With so…
A Systems Thinking Approach to Improving Emergency… “PACE” planning helps organizations fail gracefully, but systems thinking reduces the likelihood of failure altogether. Combining both approaches helps organizations…Trending
Agroterrorism: A Persistent but Overlooked Threat Agroterrorism is not new. Considered a subset of bioterrorism, it has become an increasing concern to the U.S. With so…A Systems Thinking Approach to Improving Emergency… “PACE” planning helps organizations fail gracefully, but systems thinking reduces the likelihood of failure altogether. Combining both approaches helps organizations…Bridging Communication Gaps: Lessons from Hurricane Helene Hurricanes in 2024 caused widespread damage to infrastructure, leading to a critical but often overlooked issue: isolation. Physical and technological…Cost Analysis: Protecting the Grid and Electronics… Because modern societies are increasingly reliant on electronics, they are more vulnerable to the effects of an electromagnetic pulse event.…Domestic Preparedness Journal
Featured in this issue: Editor’s Note: Hazards That Can Affect the Mind, Body, and Outcome, by Catherine L. Feinman; A Holistic Strategy for Responders’ Well-Being, by Camilo Olivieri; Disaster Stress Management in an Emergency Operations Center, by Mary Schoenfeldt; Physical and Mental Injuries in First Responders: Why Wait?, by Pascal Rodier; Not Lost in Translation: A Multilingual Corps Approach, by Diana Sanchez-Vega; Meeting the Psychosocial Needs of Child Survivors, by Emily Heard; Psychosocial Hazards: Preventing Human-Caused Disasters, by I. David Daniels; Caring for the Affected at Family Assistance Centers, by Jennifer Stansberry Miller; How I Became an Accidental Disaster Mental Health Specialist, by Adrienne J. Heinz; Podcast – Seasonal Forecasts & Their Limitations With Dr. Philip Klotzbach
Articles Out Loud
Article Out Loud – A Proven Path: Scouts and the Operational Value of Prepared Youth
June 4, 2025
This is an article by Ethan Beaty, an Article Out Loud from Domestic Preparedness, June 4, 2025. Scouts have been
Article Out Loud – Understanding Service Dogs: What First Responders Need to Know
June 4, 2025
This is an article by Susan Cohen, an Article Out Loud from Domestic Preparedness, June 4, 2025. Service dogs do
Preparing for & Responding to Disaster – A 2018 Review