Disaster Mitigation

Mitigating Factors Prevent Effective Disaster Management and Present Roadblocks To Mitigation and Prevention.

Sara Slovniski

UMASS – Boston

College of Advancing and Professional Studies

Abstract

An analysis of weather related disasters in the US from 1980 - 2013 reveals support for an age old adage; an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. With the staggering amount of money spent on cleanup and reconstruction from these events, why isn’t more time and money spent on prevention and mitigation with governmental policy put in place to back it up? Exploration into the number of ‘disasters’ that have been declared since the time the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was officially formed in 1979 will be undertaken. A brief look at FEMA’s history and the amount of money that has been spent on its budget throughout the years up to its most current status will be reviewed. A comparison will be made to the massive amount of money spent on the recovery and reconstruction efforts to address the damages incurred from these events. The evidence will bear out that spending money up front to sure up vulnerable infrastructure and resources in the most disaster prone regions of the country will more than adequately save time, money, and most importantly lives when a disaster does occur. It will be shown, however, that politics, together with ‘smoke and mirrors’, plays a large part of drawing attention away from the need to invest in pre-disaster planning and fortification.

I. Introduction

No country, no community, and no person is immune to the impact of disasters. Disasters, however, can be and have been prepared for, responded to, recovered from, and had their consequences mitigated to a certain degree (Haddow, Bullock, and Coppola, 2003). Each of these previous actions have taken precedence over the others at various times throughout the history of emergency management / disaster preparedness. This has been dependent upon the presence (and...