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By Dawn Williams


The nightmare every community is being faced with a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, largely because dealing with them requires so much work. People who have to deal with these problems have to devise a system that can best use available resources to handle a variety of possible problems. Having functional emergency communication equipment is critical to success.

Even in the wild, creatures have figured out that when things do not go as expected, they have a greater chance of survival by following a leader. Primates like the great apes follow the ranking silver-back to find food and avoid danger. Elephants follow the senior female as she seeks out water during severe droughts, and human beings also naturally look to those in a position of authority to get them through crises.

Leaders of every community have a responsibility, legal and moral, to prepare for the unknown, to help each group be as ready as possible to survive and recover. Whether a crisis is a natural phenomenon like an earthquake or wildfire, or of human sourcing as in war, preparation is an inherent responsibility of leadership. As human settlements became more complex, it meant that there is much more to prepare for and protect.

Throughout the nation, each community has developed a way to deal with disasters. While information and experience sharing have always been a part of the process of developing contingency response systems, there was no standard way of getting things done. Some organizations, both public and private, also have set methods for dealing with contingencies.

For the most part, the responsibilities and tasks are assigned to people who do something entirely different as a job. When an emergency occurs, the ease of response and recovery depends in large part to the skills of those individuals assigned to act. How well these individuals can actually respond is a matter of training, exercises and experience.

A number of private companies and some governmental agencies have developed their own courses of instruction. Each military organization, for example, holds a required number of exercises each year designed to test the leadership and resources of the organization in the aftermath of a number of different contingencies. The process was different for each service, just as it was for each city or private organization.

A large scale response in any community will likely be more than any single organization or population center can handle alone. Working together with neighboring communities is the natural conclusion, but because it happens rarely, this can be a difficult endeavor. It is in these times that the problems with each group developing their own methods makes it painfully difficult to work together.

After recent enormous disasters like the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, a national effort to resolve the problems of coordination began. The resulting national incident management system has made it easier for communities to work together. At the center of this system is the ability to make each group able to talk together, a benefit of standardized emergency communication equipment.




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