Principles of Emergency Management - Essay Example

The unpredictable nature of disasters makes them difficult to control. The loss and damage caused by disasters are great and during recent years the social and economic costs of disasters have plunged. Climate change, global warming, and the rise in sea levels along with human actions have increased the cost of dealing with disasters. Mitigation is an essential discipline that deals with reducing or eliminating the impact of disasters. It focuses on long-term solutions to reduce the risk and harmful effects of disasters. Also, it involves the participation and partnership of players beyond the usual emergency management including land use planners, building officials, insurance companies, and so on.

The mitigation tools being used by officials are building codes, warning and identification systems, land use planning, public education, insurance, and controls. To enhance the construction of structures near hazard locations, technical guidance has been prepared. These have together caused a decrease in the number of casualties due to disasters (Haddow, Bullock, & Coppola 2010). Preparedness refers to the readiness to respond to an emergency and has been described as being the first step to emergency management.

This phase includes undertaking activities before the disaster occurs to develop operational and procedural efforts to aid an effective response to an emergency management event. Since all organizations are susceptible to disaster therefore it is recognized that they must ensure their preparedness efforts (Haddow, Bullock, & Coppola 2010). Proper planning, allocation of resources, prioritizing training of emergency responders, and disaster simulation exercises are required as part of an efficient preparedness effort.

The steps identified by ICMA (2003) for emergency management preparedness efforts include the adoption of emergency management-related ordinances, risk assessment, Emergency Operations Plan (EOP), warning systems, resource identification, grant acquisition, mutual aid agreements, training, and public awareness (Bumgarner 2008). The emergency response addresses the needs of the population and involves several emergency response programs and capabilities to provide support at times of crisis. The National Response Framework (NSF) was formed in January 2008 by FEMA that provided a series of mechanisms, structures, and policies for incident management.

The National Incident Management System (NIMS), which provides a framework for incident management also works closely with NRF (Haddow, Bullock, & Coppola 2010). Response to an emergency involves partnership with several government and non-government agencies and after a poor response to Hurricane Katrina, the report resulted in the formation of NSF and the adoption of NIMS to act as a base for coordinating and integrating responses.