TopA History Of Emergency Management
The emergency management approach to natural disasters of any kind in the United States has been a patchwork of reactionary approaches and strategies that, according to Flynn (2007) always seemed to be looking behind and never ahead. Recent reaction to natural disasters has improved although emergency management practices still seem to be lacking in their capacity to handle the elusive and uncontrollable surprises that are always a part of natural disasters.
The first recorded response to a disaster was in 1803 when Congress provided funds for a town in New Hampshire to recover from an all-consuming destructive fire. Had the occurrence of natural and man-made disasters remained at an 1803 level this type of response would be woefully inadequate today. For more than 130 years there was no obvious change in approach to managing emergencies and disasters including no additional official federal government actions until 1936 when President Franklin Roosevelt implemented the Flood Control Act (Mabe, 2016).
The Flood Control Act of 1936 authorized civil engineering projects such as dams, levees, dikes, and other flood control measures through the United States Army Corps of Engineers and other Federal agencies. The act also dictated that federal investigation and improvements of rivers and other waterways for flood control and allied purposes fall under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of War. According to Arnold (1988), the act concentrated on the subjects of economic development and military preparation rather than emergency management. Unfortunately, the act also unwittingly established the first emergency response doctrine that would dictate emergency management for generations to come.
The rise of the cold war forced congress to seriously consider the needs of the civilian population in the case of nuclear attack. These included the Civil Defense Act and the Federal Disaster Relief Act. These acts placed the burden of civil defense at the state level while at the same time providing a framework to carry out the work required to alleviate the suffering from “major disasters” including flooding. The law required no specific congressional legislation to allocate emergency resources. These acts made access to federal assistance more easily and readily available to the states and encouraged a shift in centralized doctrine from the military preparation to a more effective decentralized doctrine of self-help and local control in managing disasters.