All right, so enough about mitigation. Let's talk about response.

This is for those of us who are adrenaline junkies.

This kicks in immediately after the disastrous event has occurred.

The first people that respond are the victims themselves.

This is self rescue.

Those who rescue themselves and their neighbors.

People helping people in the disaster itself.

And then there's the local volunteer and government agency.

So, fire, emergency medical services and law enforcement, are then next to respond.

This is an ever expanding circle of response.

We have the individual whose actually a victim of the

disaster being the first to respond and taking care of themselves.

Doing self rescue, and helping to rescue the people around them.

And then we have the county level response.

Fire departments,

local law enforcement, local EMS.

If we get a biggeruh, or big enough disaster, then we

have a state level response, at least here in the United States.

We have the state police, National Guard, state workers, state infrastructure and

supplies and heavy machinery in such that the state can bring to bear.

Beyond that, we have the federal response. That kicks in the

National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management

Agency FEMA, Disaster Medical Assitance Teams.

Disaster mortuary teams, veterinary teams, that all

come in to respond to, to the disaster.

There are strategic stockpiles of food, water, pharmaceuticals,

and more that can be brought into an area.

And then we have a worldwide or global level response,

with non-governmental agencies and friendly government aid.

A good example of this is the earthquake in Haiti in 2010.

People helped each other initially, providing care and aid for each other.

And this continued through the response with people help digging out other people.

You know, the government of, of Haiti kicked in and helped as much as it could.

And there was the worldwide response

that governments and countries all over the world sent aid and and

teams to help out with the response and aid the people.

And then the non governmental

agencies also established clinics, shelters, provided

medical aid, food, water, Shelter and, and such for the people.

At this recording in 2013,

some of these non-governmental agencies are still there providing aid.

And I'm sure some friendly governments are still

providing aid for the victims of that disaster.

So, response slowly morphs into recovery.

The danger to life, limb and property slowly begins to pass.

We use to think that we needed to be prepared for at least

three days from the disaster event to this,

this slow return of services from outside. What we've

recently learned is that, this outside aid

now usually takes at least a week in the United States to return.

In other countries, it could be even longer.

So, this week is considered a reasonable amount of time frame, in the United

States, for return of power, return of

water, utilities normal medical care, and other services.

So, we need to prepare ourselves from this response through this recovery period

to take care of ourselves for somewhere between three days to at least a week

without any kind of outside aid.

We need to be able to take care of all of our

personal needs, and all of the needs of our family during that time.

So again, response slowly morphs into that recovery phase.

which is returning to normal.

What is normal?

is it the life that we led prior to the disaster?

Or is it a new normal, change from how we

used to live? This process can take years.

Katrina, hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans years ago, and sh, in

some parts of the city, they are still going through recovery.

The earthquake in Haiti was in 2010, and my guess would be that

there are still some aspects of the country and the city of Port-au-Prince

that are still going to be recovering when the next disaster occurs.

There are so many concerns that we have to deal with.

Long term housing and such.

FEMA will provide finances for a hotel room for a week or so after a disaster.

But it may take significantly longer for

your house to get back to livable condition.

And then what do you do for the homeless folks that are in the shelters?

As we began to close down the shelters, where do the homeless folks go?

Services such as utilities, medical services.

when do the stores open? When do the restaurants reopen?

These are things that will take a long

time and the question is do they even reopen?.

Simple things, like garbage pickup, are going to

be disrupted and only slowly come back to normalcy.

There is financial aid and other help from the Government, and aid from

agencies like the Red Cross and its sister agencies in other countries.

But this slowly begins to close down and people will still need to be recovering.

People will still need to get their shelter, their food, their water

back to a level where it used to be. Businesses, when will they reopen?

For businesses to reopen, they need to have people to go in and buy things.

It is essential to have businesses open so that

people can go in and buy those life essentials.

So which comes first,

the people or the businesses?

Recovery then, is a very, very slow process, meeting these physical needs.

And we have other needs that have to go beyond these.

We have the psychological needs, the process of cleaning up and rebuilding.

and the disaster itself carries a heavy, heavy toll on people.

So, we need psychological help to decompress after all of

this that we've gone through, and

recovery, recover from the disaster itself.

So, recovery is a long difficult process that may take years and years, and years.

So in the recovery process, we begin to ask some questions.

What is the new normal?

Can we or should we rebuild the houses that have been destroyed by the disaster?

Million dollar homes along the Golf coast in the

United States destroyed during disasters, should they be rebuilt?

they're going to be at risk for the next disaster.

Areas that are at risk for high water,

poor neighborhoods, rich neighborhoods, it really doesn't matter.

Should they be rebuilt? And who pays for that rebuilding?

Can we actually rebuild them?

What protect, protections can be offered to the people from a security standpoint?

Who's going to pay for the rebuilding when you

know disasters occur over and over and over again?

Should we rebuild these houses, these houses and these businesses?

The next time a disaster occurs or a disaster

after that, all of this creates a tremendous financial toll.

And then how can we re, improve our plans to mitigate the effects of the next event.

What can we do?

What can we learn from this, that's going to improve our response the next time.

And prepare us better for that next disaster, so that the disaster has less

of a destructive effect.

So answering these questions brings us full circle to mitigation again.

We began this process all over again, maybe a little wiser, maybe not.

You know, during hurricane Katrina and in it's immediate after math.

during the response, we talked about better

plans for evacuating folks from dangerous areas.

This was a real problem with Katrina.

We learned quickly, and when hurricane Rita struck soon afterwards, we were

able to evacuate people quickly and get them out of harm's way.

But the questions still remain.

Do we force people to evacuate? So we've changed our plans.

We've changed our protocols, but what limitations do we have financially

in regards to personal freedom.

T hat still limit what we can require, what we can do,

what we're going to do, and what plans and protocols are going to be.

So, these are hard questions that need to be dealt

with, and brings us to the end of the disaster cycle.

This brings us to the end of

this particular presentation, dealing with the disaster cycle.

Which again, is mitigation, response, recovery, and mitigation.

This provides the basis for looking at and examining disasters and how we

prepare for them, and how we're going to respond and deal with them.

What we're going to do in subsequent presentations is talk in

a little bit more detail about preparedness on an individual basis.

We're going to talk a little bit about institutional preparedness.

The state and federal level preparedness.

Then we're going to move away from

preparedness and talk about some other disaster basics.

Disaster Cycle - Response and Recovery

Disaster Preparedness

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