With the number of events requiring their attention seemingly growing each year, emergency managers are finding themselves under increasing burdens, and working to plan for a less and less clear future. While events requiring their attention used to be both rare and distinct, they’re now finding them to be almost constant, as disasters bleed into each other or overlap, according to an article in the Hill.
Says Trevor Riggen, head of disaster response for the American Red Cross, to The Hill, “We’ve seen this enormous shift from disasters being an episodic number of acute events on a regular cycle, with a mega event every three to four years,” to major events now “happening every year, multiple times per year.”
When these disasters further merge with public health threats like the COVID-19 pandemic or the ongoing opioid crisis, emergency managers are increasingly finding their local resources strained or overwhelmed. Says Deanne Criswell, Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator to The Hill, public services “work really well when they’re managing the problems that don’t need to go outside of their lane. But they need to start to cross-collaborate, especially when we’re talking about large-scale problems.”
This cross-collaboration is driving increased emphasis for emergency managers on interoperability, in that all involved parties should be able to engage to deploy their expertise together, to help address increasingly complex problems, gathering knowledge from a combination of local resources, volunteer organizations and charities, and state and federal organizations, based on previously established relationships.
Source:
https://thehill.com/homenews/news/577872-emergency-managers-face-a-chaotic-and-uncertain-future
