Combine a shortage of trained staff with a surplus of crises, and what emerges is an accurate but not yet finished portrait of the LA Emergency Preparedness Department, which has become one of the city's most valuable organizational assets.
FEMT may be hard to pronounce, but it is becoming a key legal and organizational concept in the war against international terrorism, thanks to the forward-looking instructional approach developed and used by the State of Washington's Department of Health.
Responding to a federal mandate, the Commonwealth of Virginia created an Initiative Action Team to ensure that its local, county, and state agencies could & would use a common language in their radio communications with one another & other jurisdictions.
Interagency operations centers that provide a unified, all-purpose "home base" for Navy, Coast Guard, and other federal, state, and local port and maritime stakeholders are already operational, with more on the way.
The City of Alexandria, Virginia, took the money and ran with it when a DOJ grant was made available. The result was Community Support Group C, which specializes in a broad spectrum of homeland-security missions - and serves as a helpful example.
The University of Virginia, the City of Charlottesville, and Albemarle County join forces to develop and deploy one of the most versatile and most capable multi-jurisdiction communication systems in the country.
Rather than waiting until the unthinkable becomes the inevitable, Washington State's Health Department moved out - and moved fast - to create an outreach training program that prepares responders to cope with nuclear/radiological incidents.
One of the nation's foremost experts in the still emerging field of emergency management provides her insider's point of view of the guiding principles - including both a vision and a mission statement - on which this important new field was founded.
Just in Time! A well-crafted piece of legislation passed two years ago provides the blueprint needed to ensure the full and uninterrupted use of the U.S. port system that is the key to the nation's continued economic prosperity.
In times of crisis, the communications between neighboring U.S. jurisdictions is still, all too often, a virtual "tower of babble." Advanced technology can solve some of the problems and confusion - but create some costly new problems at the same time.
