FEMA
September 12, 2005 6 Comments
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the subject of today’s Family First Site. A lot of those discussions have focused about how slow it was in responding to the recent hurricane natural disaster in the gulf coast of our country. Some of the criticism was deserved, and some of it wasn’t. What did become clear was that there a lot of misunderstanding about what the mission of this department really is, and how it is supposed to function. So I thought a visit to the official website would be in order.
The name of the site is FEMA, which stands for Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Federal Emergency Management Agency – a former independent agency that became part of the new Department of Homeland Security in March 2003 – is tasked with responding to, planning for, recovering from and mitigating against disasters. Many do not realize that it can trace it’s roots to the Congressional Act of 1803. This act, generally considered the first piece of disaster legislation, provided assistance to a New Hampshire town following an extensive fire. In the century that followed, ad hoc legislation was passed more than 100 times in response to hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters.
Over the years, the agency (under different names) has grown to be the major source of federal government intervention in disasters that have occurred in our nation, both natural and man-caused. It tells how in past disasters, there was no unified response to disasters. Earthquakes would be the responsibility of one department, while hurricanes would fall under another. It was President Carter’s executive order in 1979 that unified these different response agencies into what is today known as FEMA.
This site explains what the agency is, how it functions (like any government agency, you can be sure there is some red tape and bureaucracy), and, most important, what it can do to help Americans who have suffered. There is a lot of information on what we can all do to be prepared for disasters, as well as what we can do to minimize the after affects. The site is available in both English and Spanish. The information can be read on the Internet, and most documents can be downloaded and printed as well.
Hurricane Katrina was a terrible disaster, one that rivals the hurricane that wiped out Galveston Texas in 1906 (6000 died in that one). But as a nation, we can and will learn from the mistakes that occurred with this hurricane. No one could have imagined the damage that would occur, and it is hard to be prepared for the unimaginable. What we need to do now is help our fellow Americans get their lives back together, and to get ready for the next event that will occur. We have come a long way since the events of September 11th, 2001, and Katrina shows that we have a long ways to go. But the system is in place to get us there. What we need to do is understand it, and work within it.
http://www.fema.gov/index2.shtm
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