Federal Relief Every Emergency Edmg 220 Apus Haza
In need of a 125 response/discussion to EACH of the following forum posts. There are (2) different Forum posts. Agreement/disagreement/and/or continuing the discussion. The two interactive posts should each be substantial, relevant, and engaging. Replies to classmates should include direct questions. In-text citations and references may be in APA format. Original forums discussion/topic post is as follows: (Use/Cite references to support your ideas)
Week 5: Hazards & Vulnerability
I have attached Chapters 5 & 6 of the Fundamentals of Emergency Management.
Responses to Discussion Posts of Other Participants
Student replied to two other students’ initial posts and included at least two of the following areas:
1. Validates post with additional evidence from the literature and attribution is given to the author or creator of the work.
2. Poses a thoughtful question.
3. Provides an alternative point-of-view.
4. Offers additional insight into how the concept might be understood.
Student advanced the weekly conversation by replying back to everyone that replied to their initial post.
Responses met the minimum word count and contained no spelling, grammar, or punctuation errors.
Responses were on time.
Forum 1
Hello Class,
I live in East Tennessee so as you might imagine one of our biggest threats comes from wildfires. After the 2016 wildfire caused such widespread destruction, there was quite a bit of discussion about how to prevent such a devastating tragedy from happening again. One step toward that was that in 2018, the city of Gatlinburg became one of only three cities in the state to become certified as Firewise City. This certification means there’s been allot of cooperation between local government officials, businesses, volunteer organizations, and many other partners to help prevent such destruction again. One of the biggest recommendations I could make is to continue public education and awareness so that citizens and visitors can know and employ simple actions that can make big strides in helping prevent another fire.
Another threat we face is that we have several Tier II facilities in our jurisdiction. Tier II facilities are those which uses over a certain quantity of hazardous chemicals. These facilities generally work well and cooperate with governmental regulations as well as working with community leaders and the LEPC to make sure their facilities are as safe as possible. A recommendation here could be that these facilities continue to make accurate and timely Tier II reports; also that local hazmat response teams continue their education and response exercises so that if an emergency arose, they would be ready.
Another hazard my locality faces is severe weather including flooding. Because we’re right along the Tennessee River and at the base of the Great Smokey Mountains, flooding can be an issue. Just last year, we had what’s called a “100 year flood”, which basically means it was a flood that has a 1% chance of happening in any given year in a one-hundred year period. Thankfully, our water rescue teams are highly trained and were able to help get quite a few people out of harms way. Hazard adjustments, especially after this happened, included many homeowners taking their own mitigation efforts such as installing more advanced drainage systems and an even greater push to get out weather messages as early as possible employing a variety of platforms such as social media.
Below are the links to Firewise USA and the EPA’s website on Tier II reporting if anyone was interested in reading more:
https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/Fire-causes-and-risks/Wildfire/Firewise-USA
https://www.epa.gov/epcra/tier-ii-forms-and-instructions
Have a great week everyone!
Forum 2
Aloha Class and Professor,
Appreciate you taking the time to read my forum. It is a pleasure to be with you and hope you are well and safe. This week form Hawaii as we think about hazards from an island standpoint, the most common are tsunamis, floods and hurricanes. I believe many hazards are missed as we have seen through the pandemic, volcanoes eruptions recently, missed resource allocations for food and health. We haven’t even started talking about lender housing abuse and economic recessions. I believe these should be part of the emergency management plan in order to hold the city and county responsible for negligence of responsibility.
First duty is to start with most catastrophic and severe group, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, and hurricanes. I believe that these are well maintained already with using emergency communication management systems through the telecommunications organizations. This allows for warnings to let the community act as needed. The issue is how to respond. I believe we need to develop a proper information system that allows for the community to do what is needed immediately on the confirmation of a potential hazard. Volcanoes that errupt should give more options to go. We are on a island and there is no method for emergency evacuation from one island to another. I would develop a boating system to provide ferrying operations to the different islands.
The next group of response emergencies are resource emergencies. Right now we are solely dependent on the USA and other countries to save us in the middle of the Pacific. We didn’t plan appropriately. We need to have a population cut off that allows for Hawaii to have emergency food, water, shelter, for the population that is residents. The fact that Hawaii does not know how to budget and depends on other states or federal relief every emergency shows that we are left to the wolves. If we get hit by a hurricane the residual after effects are destroyed boats and planes. We need to force planes and boats to emergency evacuate the area to protect our transportation of goods (using mitigation).
The last portion is economic emergencies. We have a state governor and executive team that does not know how to do emergency planning. The issue that we run out of money each time a recession occurs is not the right answer. The fact that here in the middle of a pandemic, places us with emergency funding pulled from year 2025 is not painting a bright future. We are still recovering form the housing market crash of 2009. We need to have reserves that allows us to prepare for these occasions and not to depend on the government. FEMA and many other programs for relief is great mergency resource. The issue is Hawaii depending and counting on this as a primary source. I would have like any business or person, an emergency fund that allows for 3 years of continued resources.