Significant concern was raised when Iran reported an increased number of centrifuges at its uranium enrichment facilities. In addition, nuclear power vulnerabilities were exposed during and after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan. As nuclear programs and nuclear power usage increase, effective countermeasures must be in place to prepare for any deliberate or accidental radioactive threat.
President Barrack Obama issued an important and far-reaching directive last year to help "guide activities that will enable the nation to achieve the [national preparedness] goal." As agencies across the nation strive to meet that goal, new ways of building community resilience continue to emerge. By gathering and analyzing the wealth of information that individual citizens already possess, U.S. law-enforcement agencies are finding new ways to upgrade community resilience.
Smoke thickened, black ash fell from the sky, and fire sirens wailed as residents fled for their lives - or tried to get back to their homes. They were all in a life-or-death race against Australia's "Black Saturday" bushfires, which devastated huge areas of Victoria. Numerous lives were lost, thousands of citizens were displaced, and the entire nation realized that previous recovery and rebuilding plans were inadequate.
Representatives of a Business Operations Center (BOC) ensure that the public sector obtains the resources needed during a disaster. In addition, the BOC offers private-sector volunteers an opportunity to play a critical role in disaster response while at the same time helping to reduce lost business revenue and building resiliency for their own companies and organizations.
Although there is no universally accepted definition of the term "Resilience," there is no doubt that planners and responders throughout the world are working to achieve it. The residents of Greenburg, Kansas, are a typical example. After the city was hit in 2007 with an EF5 tornado broader in scope than the city itself, its response was to come back stronger, and more resilient, than ever before.
In 1990, a cruise ship travelling from Norway to Denmark - the Scandinavian Star - turned into a "floating fireball" within 45 minutes after a small hallway fire erupted, resulting in 158 deaths. Better ship construction and new maritime training standards target such disasters and help prevent future tragedies with adequate training of personnel and equipment and better crew communication both onboard as well as with shore-side responders.
Harris Corporation has successfully conducted the first live, multi-state demonstration that showcased the powerful capabilities of 700 MHz Band LTE (Long Term Evolution) for first responders. Users at multiple sites across the United States tapped into the LTE network to share streaming video, voice, mapping and presence to support various simulated mission-critical surveillance operations.
In sailing-ship days, it took three months or more to send a message from the United States to New Zealand. Today, those countries are only a mouse click away, as the citizens of Chicago and Christchurch gratefully found out when both major cities were hit hard, and almost simultaneously, by weather disasters of colossal magnitude.
It seems somewhat complicated on paper, but The Netherlands' crisis-management system works well in practice. The nation's compact geography, the close working relationships between the various ministries involved, and the experience gained from previous disasters all augur well for eventual success in dealing with future emergencies.
"Management" is in many ways an abstract and somewhat generic term, but most citizens have a general understanding of what the word means. Whether the relatively new U.S. National Incident Management System (NIMS) is of American origin or not is perhaps debatable, but the concept itself is nonetheless useful in many countries around the world.
