People, weather disasters, terrorist attacks, and other criminal activities are inherently unpredictable. Which does not mean that law-enforcement and healthcare agencies cannot prepare for them by using the "special events" calendar as a training curriculum.
Numerous mass-casualty incidents have demonstrated the value of building and staffing a number of medical centers dealing primarily with trauma and burn patients. But even those centers may not be able to care for all victims of a "mega-disaster" such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Thanks to EMAC, ESF-8, and other mutual-assistance policies and programs, individual states no longer have to go it alone when facing a hurricane, an earthquake, a terrorist attack, and/or other disasters, natural or manmade.
Most terrorist attacks against the United States have been large-scale incidents. But the demonstrated willingness of individual martyr-terrorists to serve as suicide bombers has changed the equation and requires much greater attention than it has been given so far.
The children and grandchildren of the Greatest Generation that won World War II are worthy successors, serving their nation as firefighters, policemen, EMS technicians, and hazmat specialists. Many of them also demonstrate, with their own lives, the last full measure of devotion.
First-person report: How Kentucky coped with "frozen Hell" earlier this year by making full use of not only its own responder capabilities but also those available through CDC's Career Epidemiology Field Officer program.
It sounds like a mission impossible, but U.S. public health officials are determined to find a way to provide pandemic medications, within 48 hours, to everyone within a major metropolitan area endangered by pandemic influenza or a potentially lethal bioterrorism attack.
At one time it took 80 days to go around the world. It now takes only one day. The speed of person-to-person communications has dropped from several weeks to instantaneous. Unfortunately, medical capabilities have not moved forward at quite the same pace.
Whether building a house or an entire community, the emphasis on lowering the carbon footprint and/or reducing energy costs could and should be complemented by "off the grid" considerations and a broad spectrum of disaster-resistant features more needed today than ever before.
Safeguarding the nation's food supply - from the farm to the fork, so to speak - is not only mandatory for health reasons but also, and increasingly, a national-defense/homeland-security requirement as well.
