While the consumerism around July 4th is hard to avoid, planning barbecues, having friends over and watching fireworks give me pause to reflect on things that I appreciate about our country.
I spent the last week in senior-level emergency preparedness training for the Incident Management System, which is part of the federal National Incident Management System structure and sponsored by the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency (FEMA). It’s the system that is used by public safety organizations across the country to manage recovery efforts in a wide variety of disruptions in our cities and communities, whether caused by natural or man-made disasters.
While the system can be used in even small instances, it’s more readily observed in action during larger scale events, such as the Station fire in 2009 or the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast. More recently it was being used to manage the situation with the fires in Colorado and the severe windstorms that hit the mid-Atlantic states, knocking out power to millions for an extended period of time.