Emergency Management 2

Introduction
Emergency management is also known as disaster management is amongst the disciplines that deal with avoidance of risk and hazards. Emergency management engages the preparation, mitigation support, and recovery of the community or society during an occurrence of manmade catastrophes such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters such as floods, drought, and hurricanes among many others. Emergency management is the method by which government and private agencies practice to avoid disaster or to manage a disaster to minimize the effects of the disaster on the sociological, emotional, and physical aspects of the people’s lives. Most often emergency occurs when least expected, as a result, successful disaster management is often dependent on the comprehensive and systematic planning of both private levels that is, businesses to ensure business continuity. And government level to ensure the protection of properties and lives. The process of having efficient and effective emergency management is dependent on the policymakers and leaders who are tasked to organize the process related to the management of a particular society in case of a disaster. Emergency management mostly relies on the sociological as well as the economic aspect of the society. There are different phases of emergency planning such include mitigation.

Phases of disaster management
Disaster mitigation includes all the activities that aim at preventing the perils that can cause an emergency and at sometimes lessen the impact of a disaster in case it occurs.

Mitigate actions can either be structural or non-structural (Pearce, 2003). Structural approaches are measure effected by use of structures to attain the goal of the activity such may include the construction of walls to prevent natural disasters such as a flood. Non-structural methods, on the other hand, include; investigation, planning as well as legislation to complete a mitigation activity. However, emergency mitigation is not applicable to all disasters. Preparedness is the second phase this stage outlines actions and plans that should be considered in case of a disaster. Such include communication, coordination, appropriate training, as well as information dissemination. The third phase is a response that occurs during disaster occurrence. This stage involves actual mobilization and deployment of the necessary services and measures that should be executed on the peripheries areas. Recovery is the last phase of disaster management the main objective of this phase is to restore normal operations on an area affected by a disaster.

Emergencies has been occurring and they will still continue to occur but, the fact is no place or a person who can be immune to emergency-related losses, social unrest, terrorist acts and natural disasters. All these can lead to unforeseen consequences for communities. This implies that nations and its communities face difficult social, fiscal, environmental and cultural choices in regards to the best way to ensure a basic quality of life and security against deliberate attacks, natural disasters as well as hazards. Other than the unquantifiable cost of loss of lives and injuries caused by disasters. Emergency also affects a region economy negatively in terms of properties destruction and recovery cost. Amongst ways of reducing disaster impact on a nation and its communities are investing in resilience enhancement. Disaster resilience can be defined as the ability to plan and prepare for adoption, recovery from adverse events. With enhanced resilience, there is better planning and anticipation of a disaster to reduce the impact of a disaster.
Disaster resilience
Disaster resilience is a national imperative this because disaster resilience has its foundation at the individual level, however, the utmost impact is at the level of the community. To have a resilient nation we must have a resilient individual that translate to resilient communities (Cutter, Burton, & Emrich, 2010). From a vulnerability perspective, several factors feed into resiliency such include specific site information on threats to communities and individuals. Such information needs to be accessible, transparent and readily accessible to all people. Based on such information it is possible from the national level to zone ordinances that protect critical functions as well as citizens and at the sometimes help societies in the exploitation of natural defenses to disasters.
Retrofit and building codes standards should be adopted widely and enforced strictly by the national agency. If such features among many others are implemented a nation and its community could realize an accelerated post-disaster recovery due to the presence of hardened infrastructure against emergencies such as floods. The drive that makes resilience an important aspect in disaster management is the fact that no nation is immune to disasters and any action that move nations to higher resilience will reduce some of the many broad economic and societal challenges that come along with disaster. Some of the challenges to decision-making that enhance resiliency is on how to establish resilience core value in communities. Progress would be measured by developing and deploying metrics and tools of measuring progress this will provide numerical means of measuring resilience (Chang, & Shinozuka, 2004). Effective risk management framework enhances emergency management in that it helps in the analysis of risk. This majorly focusses on the interaction between element at risk and source of risks. Risk analysis highlight opportunities and critical areas to enable development of effective intervention approaches.
Conclusion
Disaster management is paramount at both government and private levels. All federal, state and local agencies responsible for emergency management should coordinate and promote national resilience in their policies. Increasing disaster resilience is important and requires collective will of community and nation.
References
Chang, S. E., & Shinozuka, M. (2004). Measuring improvements in the disaster resilience of communities. Earthquake Spectra, 20(3), 739-755.
Coppola, D. P. (2006). Introduction to international disaster management. Butterworth-Heinemann.
Cutter, S. L., Burton, C. G., & Emrich, C. T. (2010). Disaster resilience indicators for benchmarking baseline conditions. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 7(1).
Pearce, L. (2003). Disaster management and community planning, and public participation: how to achieve sustainable hazard mitigation. Natural hazards, 28(2), 211-228.