Search Results

This chapter studies how, after his landslide reelection in 1972, Richard Nixon began his campaign to change the trajectory of American disaster policy and create a new era in which preparation and mitigation at the local level of government was a requirement to receive any assistance from the federal government. In signing the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 on May 22 of that year, Nixon remarked that this bill “truly brings the new federalism to our disaster preparedness and assistance activities.” The significance of the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 is debatable; some analysts see it as a continuation of practices set into motion by the Disaster Relief Act of 1950, whereas others see it as a significant departure from prior disaster legislation. The Disaster Relief Act of 1974 marked the beginning of the regulatory phase of disaster assistance, an era in which the federal government limited federal costs and forced individuals and communities to assume some of the responsibility of living in disaster-prone areas. The legislation contained the provisions requiring states and localities to take steps to mitigate future disasters. Moreover, it required communities to have plans and contingencies for disaster, which laid the foundation of the professionalization of emergency management. The chapter then considers the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

This chapter describes the evolution of the superpowers’ civil defense programs from the mid-1970s until the end of the Cold War. In the mid-1970s, the contrast between the USSR’s extensive civil defense effort and its moribund U.S. counterpart led to considerable anxiety that the Kremlin might see civil defense as a usable source of strategic advantage. Rebuffed in their efforts to convince the USSR to negotiate limits on its civil defense program, the Carter administration decided to revive U.S. civil defense on the basis of a strategic evacuation concept dubbed “Crisis Relocation Planning,” which the Reagan administration also pursued. Simultaneously, civil defense for nuclear war and peacetime emergency management were combined into a single agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Ironically, not only did Soviet leaders not perceive their civil defense program as a useable source of advantage, they grew increasingly sceptical of its utility throughout this period. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster accelerated this process and led to the reinvention of Soviet civil defense as a peacetime emergency management organization.

This chapter shows how after Kennedy's death, the new and greatly underfunded civil defense agency was moved to the Department of Defense, and the government no longer talked of bomb shelters. During the Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon terms, most states and cities either drastically reduced or ended civil defense programs. Then, Jimmy Carter came along and reactivated civil defense as a live issue in American politics. He set up a new program termed crisis relocation planning (CRP), which set out for the evacuation of people from cities to safer areas in the country during the presumed few days of advance notice the government would have before Soviet missiles arrived. Carter created CRP partially to mollify the NUTS proponents, who touted a “civil defense gap” between the superpowers. The job of providing secret shelters for the select few was assigned to the new civil defense organization, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which Carter created in 1979.

Chapter 3 focuses on the period immediately following 9/11 and Katrina: the phase of recovery led by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). It identifies the framing strategies used to typify the two disasters, define the victims, assign responsibility for the traumatic conditions (diagnostic framing), and identify remedies and solutions (prognostic framing). The chapter analyses the highly divergent framing of the disasters and their victims in New York and New Orleans—the former framed as heroes of a global tragedy and the latter as victims of a “natural” disaster—and explores the policy implications and consequences of these framing strategies. Major effects of this reorganization included the privatization and devolution of emergency management policy and the creation of new regulations that sharply restricted aid itself. Despite the “positive” versus “negative” valence of the framing of New York and New Orleans following these two tragedies, both localities suffered comparable difficulties in accessing federal aid.

Emergency preparedness to health risk and disaster response to health needs are essential health protection skills and competencies to protect community health and well-being in times of crisis. Emergencies and extreme events may disrupt the environmental context and destroy essential life- and health-sustaining infrastructure and environmental context. Crisis often renders a health system ineffective to protect a community from health risks and provide for the overwhelming health and medical needs associated with the disruption. In addition, in the twenty-first century, many of the emergencies and disasters transcend national boundaries and require transnational cooperation. Such a response requires global involvement and collaborations to respond effectively and efficiently. Natural disasters (e.g. hurricanes/typhoons), global disease outbreaks of old and emerging infectious diseases, and population displacements as a result of war, famine, or natural disaster often require just the response capacity of more than a single nation.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Hurricane Agnes, which swept through New York and Pennsylvania in late June of 1972. National trends influenced the federal and local response to the disaster. Hurricane Agnes struck the United States less than five months before the 1972 presidential election, and Richard Nixon's response to Hurricane Agnes was one variable in that election, which charted the course of American politics for the next three decades. In order to win reelection in 1972, President Nixon enacted the most substantial disaster aid package in history to that time, termed the Agnes Recovery Act, which he was convinced was the key to winning New York and Pennsylvania. The chapter then explains that local leaders played a crucial role in responding to the crisis in their communities and in flood recovery operations and rebuilding. Often neglected in studies of natural disaster policy is the way in which local leadership from government and the private sector interacted with representatives of the federal government to restore order and implement change. The chapter also introduces the Federal Office of Emergency Management (FEMA).

Interpreting security as the effacement of mortality enables us to dramatically broaden the scope of research to include non-anticipatory temporalities of security. In this chapter, present-tense emergency management is exposed as a technique of mortality effacement. States efface the trauma of mortality and re-establish security by performing the rituals of emergency management: erecting cordons, organising the triage of bodies, and reconciling bodies with their previous living identities (‘disaster victim identification’). Disaster response is a reconstitutive performance of security and sovereignty against the incursion of death and trauma.

Federal flood insurance partially pays for destroyed buildings but may be a factor in over-development of beachfront areas. One problem with federal insurance is that nearly a quarter of all payments for flooding are for properties that have been flooded before, which doesn't make sense. The Coastal Barrier Resource Act provides that no federal help will be given to some coastal areas in case of a storm disaster. The intention was to prevent development, but it has not worked. Mitigation such as raising buildings on stilts will reduce flood damage for a while. Some argue that mitigation simply delays the essential need for retreat. It makes no sense to support in any way building in dangerous locations such as beachfronts.

Drought occurs somewhere in the United States almost every year and results in serious economic, social, and environmental costs and losses. Drought is more commonly associated with the western United States because much of this region is typically arid to semiarid. For example, this region experienced widespread drought conditions from the late 1980s through the early 1990s. The widespread and severe drought that affected large portions of the nation in 1988 resulted in an estimated $39 billion in impacts in sectors ranging from agriculture and forestry to transportation, energy production, water supply, tourism, recreation, and the environment (Riebsame et al., 1991). In the case of agriculture, production losses of more than $15 billion occurred and especially devastated corn and spring wheat belts in addition to reducing exports to other nations. In 1995, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimated annual losses attributable to drought at $6–8 billion (FEMA, 1995). Since 1995, drought has occurred in nearly all parts of the country, and many regions have been affected on several occasions and in consecutive years. Most of the eastern United States experienced an extremely severe drought in 1998– 99, and in parts of the southeast, drought occurred each year from 1999 through 2002, especially in Florida and Georgia. Figure 9.1 depicts nonirrigated corn yields for Nebraska for the period from 1950 to 2002. Nebraska is one of the principal agricultural states in the United States, and corn is one of its primary crops. The drought effects on yields are most apparent during the severe droughts of the mid-1950s, mid-1970s, 1980, 1983, 1988–89, and 2000. Extremely wet years, such as 1993 in the eastern part of the state, also depressed corn yields. Monitoring drought presents some unique challenges because of its distinctive characteristics (Wilhite, 2000). The purpose of this chapter is to document the current status of drought monitoring and assessment in the United States, particularly with regard to the agricultural sector.