As I recall, there was an earlier report out from a workshop on the topic of the resilience of the workforce at DHS. Here is the latest report, titled A Ready and Resilient Workforce for the Department of Homeland Security: Protecting America’s Front Line (2013)
If you just want to see the Executive Summary (19 pp) and the six major recommendations,you can download, at no cost, all or parts of this book-length report (266 pp.).
Article from local newspaper in NJ re the Pluses and Minuses of Home Rule.
Proponents of home rule say the practice puts decisions in the hands of those most intimately familiar with a town’s needs — the town itself. But critics contend the practice leads to higher costs and results in some towns making decisions to the detriment of their neighbor.
“Home rule was nice when we could afford it,” said former Gov. Thomas Kean, who battled legislators and local officials on the issue when he was in office in the 1980s, even launching the first effort for a coastal commission that would have broad power over shore development. “Now it raises property taxes, increases the cost of everything we do and makes it very hard to make decisions affecting more than one town at a time.”
“On a simple planning level, the kind of impacts we’re talking about with sea level rise and climate change, they’re bigger system impacts and they don’t respect political boundaries,” said Peter Kasabach, executive director of New Jersey Future, a planning-advocacy group,
National Preparedness: Actions Taken by FEMA to Implement Select Provisions of the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006. . GAO-14-99R, November 26.
In light of this report, it appears to me that FEMA has a lot of homework to do!
In the current issue (Nov./Dec. 2013) of Emergency Management Magazine, the Diva has an article assessing the Sandy Rebuilding Task Force Report. See: Hurricane Sandy Task Force Issues Recommendations for Long-Term Recovery.
Victims want to know when they can expect money and taxpayers want to know where there money is going. Both are sensible expectations, but not usually easy to answer post disaster.
Local officials in NY are working on legislation to make the expenditures of the billions of federal dollars allocated for H. Sandy reconstruction and recovery more transparent for those affected. See this article from local paper.
Note that the federal government has a post-Sandy expenditure system in place. It is on the Dept. of HUD website page with the H. Sandy Rebuild Task Force Report. Direct URL is here, though I am not sure how current the data is.
From the HuffPost/Canada: Climate Change Refugees: Coming Soon to a Country Near You. An excerpt:
The world will face a significant humanitarian challenge in coming years. The United Nations Refugee Agency says there are currently 45 million people forcibly displaced by conflict, persecution or natural disaster. According to the International Organization for Migration, the number of people who need new homes, food supplies and livelihoods will increase by at least half, due to climate change. And the international organization, which has studied the implications of environmental migration, says large increases in forced migration will lead to increased conflict, and greater environmental destruction, as migrants burden host communities and their resources.
This is the first time I have seen the term “forced migration.”
In recent years, a greater no. of universities have created emergency management units and acquired dedicated staff to manage them. This example of Rutgers’ experience after Hurricane Sandy is instructive: Hurricane Sandy exposes flaws in Rutgers’ emergency response, report says.
In the teeth of the fiercest hurricane to hit New Jersey in generations, Rutgers University secured its campuses, safely evacuated thousands of students, managed large shelters without incident and maintained crucial data on its vast computer networks.
But Hurricane Sandy also exposed critical weaknesses in the university’s emergency response, including a failure to communicate well with students and staff, a shortage of personnel at the emergency nerve center and, perhaps most importantly, a lack of backup power, resulting in the loss of decades-old scientific research samples.
From the blog called Living On the Real World: Climate resilience comes to the Pentagon. An excerpt:
The “challenge of global climate change, while not new to history, is new to the modern world,” Hagel told the Halifax International Security Forum. “Climate change does not directly cause conflict, but it can significantly add to the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. Food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, more severe natural disasters – all place additional burdens on economies, societies, and institutions around the world.”
As report by Homeland Security Wire, this new report from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST): Joplin tornado highlights need for building design, construction standards. The lead paragraph:
Nationally accepted standards for building design and construction, public shelters, and emergency communications can significantly reduce deaths and the steep economic costs of property damage caused by tornadoes. That is the key conclusion of a two-year technical NIST investigation into the impacts of the 22 May 2011 tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri. Report and recommendations released for public comment.
UPDATE: The full report and additional details about the content of this 482 page study are on this NIST website.
From the Wall St. Journal, Typhoon Haiyan: How a Catastrophe Unfolded. Some of the key points are:
But many of their efforts, it turned out, were woefully inadequate. Some officials miscalculated the biggest threat that Typhoon Haiyan posed to the city and its surroundings. They used a term for the storm that wasn’t widely understood. They grossly underestimated the havoc the storm would wreak, stocking far too few supplies for a city to survive on in an emergency. And they failed, despite vigorous efforts, to move many of the most vulnerable people out of harm’s way. For almost 24 hours, local and national officials in Tacloban had no way even to call for help. They had simply failed to imagine a storm so large.
Recovery Diva 