Rescue | Disaster Rally

Emergency Management and How It Works

To understand emergency management, you need to be aware that a disaster can take place at any given moment, no matter where you live on the globe. Just think about it; a misplaced match can lead to a terrible house fire or an earthquake can leave your community devastated. Even though we can’t avoid them at all times, emergencies can and should be prepared for. This is where emergency management kicks in. You’ll find an emergency management department, county authority or some sort of division in most states, all for a very good reason. Without proper planning, an emergency can result in irreparable damage, with no possible forms of recovery. What you can do to avoid this is learn about emergency management and how it works.

Our guide will walk you through everything you need to know about being prepared for any emergency. You’ll understand why your emergency management plan is crucial, what institute you need to contact for help and even how you can undergo training, programs and online courses to become an emergency manager or get a masters degree in this field. Without further ado, learn what the deal with emergency management is and start rethinking your safety priorities.

Emergency Preparedness

When speaking of emergency management, we have to include emergency preparedness in the equation. It focuses specifically on getting ready for disaster and, frankly, being prepared for the worst. The Homeland Security Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Incident Management System (NIMS) define the idea of preparedness as a permanent cycle to ensure a fast and safe response in cases of emergencies, with the following key points:

Plan
Organize
Train
Equip
Exercise
Evaluate
Action

To put it simply, you have to be ready at all times, from all points of view, for a tragic emergency that might take place. When planning for an emergency, you must consider the fact that disasters can be manmade or natural. In the former situation, prevention measures tend to guarantee safety more than the latter, where man is not in control. For example, you can avoid the disastrous results of an accidental fire by having an extinguisher and an evacuation plan all set up beforehand.

Emergency Management Cycle

The description of emergency management also goes hand in hand with a specific cycle. Known as the ‘phases’ of emergency management, these four stages can narrow down damages to a minimum. Even more importantly, they can effectively save lives.

Phase 1 – Mitigation

The first step in emergency management is mitigation. To put it in a nutshell, mitigation involves the identification of risks and doing what you can to minimize them from the beginning. This could mean building dams to avoid floods, rebuilding certain structures that are made of weak materials or identifying all the weak points in a building.

Phase 2 – Preparedness

The second phase focuses upon getting prepared for a disaster. What makes it different from mitigation is that it stresses on getting ready for the third phase, response. This phase involves outlining a plan, getting supplies together and running through drills to see if preparedness is adequate.

Phase 3 – Response

Response, the third phase of emergency management, refers to the instant actions that need to be performed when an emergency takes place. The response should unfold according to the preparedness plan, with evacuation and essential operations.

Phase 4 – Recovery

The final phase of emergency management is recovering from the disaster or emergency that took place. It usually involves reconstruction and caring for those affected by the incident. This is the phase where state authorities, international organizations and other certified sources can play a vital role in speeding up recovery.

Emergency Management Director

In addition to learning the basics about emergency management, you can also look into job opportunities or forms of certification in the field. There are various degrees or new certificate programs that can help you reach this goal and become an emergency management director or specialist. The salary for a professional in this area can range anywhere from $33,370 to $116,900, as the BLS informs us.

If you decide to pursue a career in emergency management, you’ll most likely be working for local or state governments, hospitals, universities / schools or in the electric power generation, transmission and distribution industry. The states with the highest employment level are Texas, California, New York (NYC), Virginia and New Jersey (NJ). Even though states like Colorado, Florina, North Carolina, Washington or Indiana don’t have such a high level, you can still find emergency management jobs in these areas.

Emergency Management Organization, Office and Association Examples

Thankfully, there are an abundance of organizations that can help out with emergency management in times of need. These organizations can be national or international and are willing to provide disaster victims with supplies, support and shelter.

One of the most significant organizations for emergency management is FEMA, but also NIMS. All Red Cross branches can be consulted in times of emergency, as well the United Nations for large scales. A few other organizations are the International Association for Disaster Preparedness and Response (DERA), the Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance (COE) or the Citizen Corps.

It is best to search for emergency management organizations in the city or state that you live in for immediate help.

How to Prepare for Emergencies at Home or Work

Now that we know the fundamental aspects of emergency management, it’s time to conclude with a few ways in which you can prepare from emergencies at home or at the office.

Kits & Supplies – make sure you have plenty of nonperishable food and water stored, as well as basic supplies like batteries and flashlights.
Plan – create a plan that is clear and easy to follow. Make sure that you take all aspects of any emergency into consideration. As an alternative, you can create several plans with specific instructions for different emergencies.
Training – go through the plan several times to see if any aspects need to be upgraded.

Stay safe and always prepare.

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All You Need to Know about Disaster Response Services

When disasters and, generally speaking, disruptive events occur, people respond to the threat and contain it the best they can. The official terms surrounding disaster management (like disaster relief and disaster response) often vary and people confuse them or use them interchangeably, but there is actually a pretty strict delimitation when it comes to all sides of this support process.

Here is a brief overview of how the various sides of disaster management work and intertwine:

Disaster Management – this is the widest aspect, referring to the entire cycle of emergency management;
1. Emergency Planning – this phase refers to identifying risks before the disastrous event even occurs
2. Disaster Response – the second phase of the cycle, comprising immediate assistance services, such as search and rescue, distributing supplies, providing emergency medical care and so on. Also called disaster relief by some.
3. Disaster Recovery – the last phase of disaster management, taking place after the immediate emergencies of the second phase have been dealt with. This phase focuses on making sure the affected lives return to normal as fast as possible.
Business Continuity – this part focuses on disaster recovery for businesses, ensuring that companies affected by disasters can pick up their normal activity as fast as possible and that the temporary disruption doesn’t prove to be the end of the company as well.
1. Disaster Recovery Services – a sub-set of business continuity, this part of a BCP (Business Continuity Plan) focuses mostly on IT system and the protection of virtual protocols and data.
2. Business Contingency Management – a post-disaster set of plans and activities, destined to make businesses more resilient and able to cope with future disruptive events (preparedness training).

Disaster response, therefore, is an emergency stage of activities destined to bring some relief to those affected by a disaster, and is one of the main focuses of humanitarian actions and organizations everywhere.

Disaster Response Jobs and How to Get Involved

If you’re tempted of getting involved more into disaster response activities, first of all we need to congratulate you for your noble intentions, and second of all, to provide you with an overview of how to start. Before looking for opportunities on how to get involved, you need to decide how much time you can dedicate to this: do you want to be involved on and off, as a volunteer, or do you want to make an actual profession out of it?

If you want to get involved as a volunteer, you can do this on a low-key mode, with your local emergency response team (every area has one, so do a quick search and you should be able to get in touch with your local emergency management force in no time). There are also the major international organizations who are always looking for more volunteers to join their operational forces. We will give you more details about what the best humanitarian action organizations are and how to get in touch with them and see what you can contribute with, in the section below.

As for disaster response jobs and careers, this side of the intervention field is also full of opportunities. Since people working in disaster response are basically super-heroes, trained to not only do their job flawlessly, but also do it under considerable time pressure and without all the usual tools and props, serious certification is required. Usually, the certification one needs in order to be a licensed emergency management team member comes from FEMA. This government agency also provides the training required for the major specializations needed. Here are just a few examples:

Medical emergency response staff (nurses and field doctors);
Bomb alert engineers;
Data backup scientists;
Communications officers;
Search and rescue team members (including firefighters);

You can find out more about the training offered by FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute (EMI) here.

A Few Disaster Response Organizations

Humanitarian and disaster relief organizations are active all over the world, and the international ones usually focus more on the countries where the government lacks the resources to provide proper disaster response on its own. Since most acts of disaster response are aimed first and foremost at meeting people’s most basic needs, and therefore a central government that isn’t able to help the people affected by disaster really needs all the help it can get. The most important thing about disaster response, though, is that it’s always an organized and systematic activity, no matter who is the central authority behind the organization (either a national government or an NGO). There can be spontaneous interventions for disaster response, but they are usually on a local neighborhood scale and will either fizz out or become part of a larger scheme.

Without further ado, here are the major disaster response organizations you should know about:

The Red Cross – The Red Cross is an international organization with a strong presence in its U.S. branch, so basically whenever natural disasters have struck us in the past few years (tornados, hurricanes and floods), the Red Cross has provided a huge relief for those affected. Find out more about how you can get involved here.
The United Nations (UN) – Another great international organization that handles very varied types of disaster response and humanitarian work, besides various other responsibilities in diplomacy and so on. The UN also has some pretty high-end emergency management jobs for those of you who already have experience with humanitarian work and emergency relief coordination.
The Catholic Relief Services – One of the most important Christian organizations present in the U.S., the CRS welcomes all kinds of volunteers for their wide array of humanitarian actions, beyond disaster response (donations, doing some hunger relief actions from the charity fund and so on).
The Lutheran Disaster Response (LDS) – The other major Christian organization that provides disaster response nationally and internationally, the LDS welcomes plenty of volunteers and professionals altogether.
World Renew (WD) – One of the most active organizations in the field of disaster response and humanitarian work, WD has a very complex layering of projects and activities in which you can get involved with.

Last, but not least, if you’re willing to try going abroad for a disaster relief work experience, the first step you should make is to read this guide on what skills you need and where to start. Good luck!

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What Is Disaster Recovery and What Can You Do Yourself?

In case of a natural or human-induced disaster striking an area, the fast recovery from the unfortunate event is a priority for everyone. The recovery must optimally be realized with as little human and financial costs possible so that the area can resume its previous state and even be better prepared and less vulnerable to similar future events. So, what is disaster recovery as officially defined and provided by various services and organizations? There are two main sides to this recovery: the humanitarian part, referring to people and communities and which is usually known as disaster relief, and the part focusing on ensuring the survival and continuity of a business, usually known as disaster recovery.

Sometimes, the two terms are used interchangeably, since they aren’t that different in meaning, but for the sake of differentiating between the two types of disaster management services, a great part of the world has started respecting this distinction between disaster relief and disaster recovery. Our present article will focus on clarifying the disaster recovery aspect for businesses, and also, address some FAQs about disaster recovery along the way.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery can be defined as a set of procedures and policies set in place in order to ensure the continuance of infrastructure (and/ or of business activity) in the aftermath of disruptive events. The more the world came to rely on technological infrastructure, the more we started to realize how vulnerable we would be left in case this infrastructure failed, and since the 70s, disaster recovery systems have been specifically created to assist with this issue.

Since disaster recovery focuses first and foremost on ensuring the restoration of IT and technological infrastructure and data, it represents only a subset of the more general business continuity systems. These comprise of a vaster array of policies which ensure other aspects required for an activity to be resumed (finding alternate office space, financial recovery from damages and so on).

As businesses started realizing their huge dependence on IT technologies (and especially since internet speed and real-time response became an integrative part of almost any business), services which offer disaster management and recovery have become more and more popular and needed. So, what is disaster recovery from this point of view, of commercial services marketed and offered to IT-reliant businesses? Usually, all service providers specializing in disaster recovery for businesses offer this:

Full cloud storage and online backup for your business information, data, sensitive data like login details and company track records etc.;
An initial evaluation of the risk your business faces in case of disaster and tips on how to minimize that risk;
A disaster recovery plan to be activated in the wake of a disruptive event, prescribing the client (the business trying to protect itself from disaster) the steps to follow for continued functionality and on to a full recovery;
The availability of limited office space and computer systems to allow the affected business to resume its activity at least partially until their workspace is restored;
A cyber security diagnostic in case the disaster was not caused by a natural event (like an earthquake or a tornado and so on), but by a specific cyber-attack which led to a potentially dangerous breach;
Various service packs offering increasing levels of assistance with the aftermath of the disruptive event.

Disaster Recovery FAQs

1. What Is Disaster Recovery for Businesses Beyond the Backup Service?

Initially, disaster recovery service providers focused mostly on cloud storage backup, but today’s service packs offer much more than that. First, they diagnose the specifics of the business that is trying to protect itself from disaster, then they formulate some options and service packs adapted to suit the needs of that business. This can include everything IT-related, like ensuring a preservation of layers of access according to the company’s hierarchy and so on, but also non-IT services. Such non-IT services can include the provision of office space and minimal infrastructure required for the business to get back into work, even if for the time being the company is still dealing with the aftermath of disaster and its actual office space and work environment and compromised.

2. What Other Aspects of Disaster Recovery Should I Consider as a Business Leader?

You should consider disaster recovery beyond the simple aspects of cloud storage, as well as depending on the specifics of the business you are running. After all, what is disaster recovery if not a tailored approach meant to get your company back in business as soon as possible? A few general ideas useful to all businesses would be these: increasing the security and diminishing the risk of data loss, protecting both your physical and virtual assets with the help of comprehensive insurance, and creating reliable procedures for getting back on track as fast as possible.

3. What Is Disaster Recovery as Business Continuation and What Services Should I Look Into?

As mentioned above, disaster recovery confined to IT and cloud backup is but a small aspect of protecting your company and ensuring your business continuation. This second concept is a more loosely defined set of services and measures, impossible to pin down because the nature of each business can be drastically different and, therefore, the business continuation plan must be adapted to each individual case. There are usually three levels of a sound business continuation plan:

Resilience: the purpose of these measures is to minimize the damage and ensure that the business activity can continue up to a certain point in spite of the disruptive event;
Recovery: the purpose of these procedures is to ensure a fast recovery of the degree of functionality lost in the disaster and bring the activity back to full capacity;
Contingency: Ensuring that the people and the infrastructure of the business become more flexible and able to cope with unforeseen aspects of whatever disruptions and disasters may come. This third layer of measures and procedures is meant first and foremost to deal with the potential inadequacy of the first two (the resilience and recovery plans and measures). To increase the effectiveness of contingency, this part of the business continuation strategy must also include the thorough testing of the other parts of the plan.

What Can You Do Yourself For a Better Disaster Recovery?

First of all, as a business owner or leader you should try to familiarize yourself as much as possible with the actual risks you are facing in case of the various types of disasters which can strike your business. Identify your potential losses and this way you will know exactly what your protection priorities should be. If you’re not sure how to identify security risks yourself, don’t worry: it’s quite common to enlist the services of a disaster recovery consultant in this stage of planning.

The bottom line is to start asking yourself not simply ‘what is disaster recovery?’, but increasingly ‘what should my business recovery plan contain?’ Consultants from the recovery service provider you will hire can only help you with the technical details you may not be aware of, but only you can intimately know the priorities and vital functions of your business, so you are in the end the most qualified planner for your business continuity.

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Top 7 Disaster Recovery Services Needed

When a disaster, natural or otherwise, strikes a place, community, or business, it may very well feel like all is ended and there can be no recovery. But it is crucial that the aftermath of the disaster to be one of careful consideration and wise choices so that there can be a restoration of the highest possible degree. Recovering from a disaster or a disastrous situation is hard, but not impossible, and with the help of disaster recovery services it can now be more manageable than ever.

Our overview of the top disaster recovery services will let you know exactly what type of help you should look into before the unfortunate event, for people, communities and businesses alike. We will put a special emphasis on disaster recovery services for businesses and small businesses in particular since this type of services and less well-known and the smaller companies can usually go down forever in the aftermath of a disaster.

A. What Disaster Recovery Services Are Most Needed?

In the aftermath of a natural (or artificial) disaster, emergency intervention teams are always on the move and striving to help as much as possible, but even these specialists have their limits. The cooperation, help and even the preparedness of those needing help is crucial to the success of the disaster management teams. Whether the disaster is a natural one like a tornado, big storm, flash-flood or earthquake, or an artificial one like a terrorist attack, the involvement of bystanders is vital. In most cases, the general public must truly get involved in the recovery missions if anything along those lines is to succeed.

Still, knowing when to stand aside and let the professionals do their job is also of the upmost importance. Disaster relief teams are not only well-trained on the type of challenges which come with unfortunate events, but they are also equipped with the required infrastructure and intervention kits. To get a better overview of how disaster recovery services work, here is a brief list of the top most important such services, in the areas of humanitarian help and in the area of business recovery as well.

Disaster Recovery Services for People and Communities

1. Firefighter Services

Almost all types of natural disasters also cause the occurrence of fires, but that’s not all the reason for which firefighting teams are of vital importance in disaster relief. Their main quality is that they are also trained and qualified to find people who remain trapped under rubble, which is one of the leading causes of death in the aftermath of disasters.

2. Danger Removal Intervention Teams

These experts are usually sent in to neutralize all traces of danger still looming in the aftermath of a disaster, whether the issue at hand is electric wires gone wild, a potential explosive material or a building about to collapse.

3. Humanitarian Relief Work

After the first two priority services presented above, teams handling all other aspects of disaster relief come in. This includes providing people with food and water, medical help, shelter and clothing, as well as helping family members find each other through the chaos.

4. Resilience Training Teams

When the immediate life-threatening danger has passed, another type of experts are ideally brought in, with the mission of helping the community rise back to its feet. Their areas of training include restoring a livelihood to the community and reducing further risk.

Disaster Recovery Services for Businesses

How about disaster recovery service (usually abbreviated to DRS) for business owners (LTD ventures)? For preventing an unfortunate event from proving to be fatal to your enterprise, these are the most important services (we will continue the numbering of the top from where we left off above):

5. Disaster Recovery Cloud Services

Nowadays, online data are a vital part of any business activity, and the loss of that data can have handicapping consequences on all future activity of that company. That is why backup and disaster recovery services are an extremely important and increasingly popular pack for businesses worldwide.

6. Insurance for Environment Recovery

Not just your business data is important, but the work environment as well, from easily replaceable but necessary components like office space and furniture and computers and onto more specialized equipment which may take longer to replace. In order to make sure the recovery of your work environment doesn’t ruin you as a budding business, you need to be properly insured. A good disaster prevention insurance should cover as much of the expenses required for recovery as possible. Furthermore, if you opt for a comprehensive disaster recovery service pack (the kind which also provides cloud storage backup for your data), you should also have temporary access to a working space nearby, capable of hosting a limited number of people until your offices get reinstated.

7. Disaster Recovery Overseer (or Overseeing Team)

Depending on the size of your enterprise, you can assign only one person to this task or you can assign a whole team for it. The main idea is that someone should already know how to access all of the services above optimally, where to obtain the funding, what legal counselling to call, where to order replacement equipment from and so on. This person should have a very clear list of steps to be followed in case of disaster, which brings us to our main section.

B. Steps to Follow in the Disaster Aftermath (for Businesses)

In order to be prepared for an optimal and timely recovery in case a disaster strikes, it’s crucial to have a disaster preparedness checklist created in advance. In order to create the ideal checklist, especially if you are a business, you first need to identify your recovery priorities along the aforementioned two main lines: the recovery of your environment (physical activity space) and the recovery of your data. Identifying your priorities and formulating a disaster recovery plan are ideally completed with the help of a disaster recovery consultant team (for businesses).

Here is a simple example of how should this checklist look like, in order to get a better idea of how to create yours:

Call the required authorities in order to pronounce the disaster created, and initiate the insurance fund-accessing procedures.
Get in touch with the service ensuring your cloud data backup and let them know you will be needing all the info (and perhaps some office space as well) for resuming your business activity.
Select the employees who are qualified (and still capable) of resuming work in a low-maintenance stance so you can keep producing your services and keep in touch with your customers. Get them in the office space still available (or that provided by your disaster recovery service team) so they can start right away.
Have your PR specialist create a press release alerting both the general public and your clientele of the unfortunate event, your sympathies for those whose lives were affected by the disaster and your commitment to help them out (and to resume your business activity).
Have a legal counsellor (or your insurance agent) advise you about potential compensations that you may be needed to offer your employees if they were harmed in any way by the disaster. Your future productivity through this critical time depends on them, so it is in your best interest to keep them happy.

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Top Christian Disaster Relief Organizations Active in Emergency Response

Christian disaster relief organizations are actively involved in emergency relief efforts around the world. Some focus on fighting hunger and poverty while others provide emergency aid in the case of a natural disaster. Many organizations become active in emergency situations tackling different aspects of a crisis and helping with humanitarian aid. Whether it’s medical assistance, food products and water, clothing, toiletries, or bedding, Christian disaster relief organizations help supply victims of a disaster with essentials in the aftermath of the event.

Some of these organizations are active in emergency response and will typically become involved in relief efforts immediately after a disaster takes place. The vital efforts that these organizations make help survivors navigate the difficult time following a disaster. Christian disaster relief organizations rely mostly on Christian charity donations to fund their relief efforts and to carry out their activities. Beyond donating money for these organizations, people can volunteer for different actions and help support the relief efforts that they provide.

Top Christian Disaster Relief Organizations

Members and volunteers of these disaster relief organizations work around the clock to gather funds, organize support actions, and gather and distribute emergency supplies. Some of the largest Christian disaster relief organizations working at the moment provide international aid and are prepared to become active in emergency situations world-wide. Here are the top Christian disaster relief organizations that are equipped to intervene and provide aid in the aftermath of a crisis, either in the U.S. or internationally.

1. The Salvation Army

The Salvation Army is perhaps most commonly known for its members’ efforts to help Americans seeking basic necessities such as food, warmth, and shelter. The organization also has disaster relief teams that are permanently prepared to intervene when a community is at risk in the wake of a disaster or a civil disorder. The Salvation Army provides food and water, bedding, shelter, and other essentials to those in need.

This Christian humanitarian aid organization was established by William Booth, and it was originally named The Christian Mission. It became known as The Salvation Army back in 1878, and it has been working to help those in need since its inception. The organization’s disaster relief services adapt to the needs of each situation, but they are primarily focused on providing warm meals and cold drinks to survivors from Salvation Army mobile kitchens.

The organization is also equipped to open disaster relief shelters and provide warmth and shelter for people who have lost their homes and have nowhere to go. It also provides direct financial aid to those in need via a network of casework specialists. During the early stages of a disaster, the Salvation Army will focus, however, on the most pressing needs that survivors have and it will strive to provide food, water, clothing, medical care, and shelter.

As the Salvation Army is a Christian disaster relief organization, it has trained staff members that also provide emotional and spiritual support to survivors via its pastors and ministry. After meeting the survivors’ most urgent needs, the organization also deploys volunteers and members to help in cleaning and rebuilding projects when these are necessary.

2. Samaritan’s Purse

A nondenominational evangelical Christian organization, Samaritan’s Purse provides worldwide physical and spiritual support to victims of natural disasters, war, disease, hunger, and poverty. The organization was founded by Franklin Graham back in 1970, and it has been working to provide aid for people that are suffering in the aftermath of natural disasters or war.

The organization’s name is derived from the biblical story of the Good Samaritan. The story describes how the Samaritan rescued a hurting man that had been ignored by other passers-by. The Samaritan’s Purse organization has international crisis response units as well as U.S. disaster relief teams that are constantly ready to intervene in the wake of a disaster.

Samaritan’s Purse has a network of warehouses strategically located around the world. The organization stores emergency supplies in these locations in order to be ready to act quickly and deploy Disaster Assistance Response Teams in case aid is needed. Samaritan’s Purse provides survivors with food kits that contain staple items such as cooking oil, beans, soy meal, rice, salt, and corn. The organization also sends water purification kits to areas where the local water supplies have been contaminated because of a disaster.

Other disaster relief efforts that the organization is focused on include the deployment of fully equipped mobile medical teams on site to help people that do not have access to medical care during a crisis. Samaritan’s Purse also provides survivors with blankets, tents, and heavy-duty plastic sheeting. In addition to these efforts, the organization sends supplies such as hygiene items, cooking utensils, and other essentials to affected areas.

3. Operation Blessing

Operation Blessing International Relief and Development Corporation (OBI) is a faith-based organization that provides relief to disaster survivors both in the United States and internationally. Its core programs are centered on disaster relief, hunger relief, medical aid, children and orphan care, as well as community development. The organization is currently providing strategic relief in 37 countries around the world and in the United States to alleviate the suffering caused by poverty, hunger, and natural disasters.

Businessman and philanthropist M. G. Robertson founded OBI back in 1978. The organization is currently governed by a national board of directors which includes its founder. The disaster relief efforts that the organization makes are centered on providing victims of natural disasters and refugees in life-threatening conflict with the essentials required in each case. OBI distributes food, safe water, medicine, and other supplies to victims world-wide. The organization also becomes involved in the long-term recovery efforts that survivors need, deploying teams to assist with debris clean-up and repairs.

4 .Catholic Charities USA

Catholic Charities USA is a social service network that expands nationwide. It provides aid and financial support to those in need regardless of their religious, economic, or social backgrounds. Catholic Charities was founded in 1910 under the name National Conference of Catholic Charities, and it has been hard at work ever since providing shelter, food, and relief.

CCUSA is one of the Christian disaster relief organizations in the U.S. that has member agencies who are prepared to provide both immediate and long-term relief when a disaster occurs. CCUSA can immediately deploy food, water, personal care supplies, and financial aid to survivors.

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