Building Capacity for Catastrophes

Expanding EMAC — Mission Ready Packages

The Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) is a national interstate mutual aid agreement among all 50 states and several of the United States’ territories to provide assistance and resources in the event of a disaster declared by a governor. “Once the conditions for providing assistance to a requesting state have been set, the terms constitute a legally binding contractual agreement that makes affected states responsible for reimbursement. The EMAC legislation solves the problems of liability and responsibilities of cost and allows for credentials, licenses, and certifications to be honored across state lines.” (EMAC website). It is administered by the National Emergency Managers’ Association (NEMA), a group started among state emergency officials in 1974 to exchange information and coordinate operations. EMAC works in conjunction with FEMA’s federal disaster response system to provide state-to-state assistance when needed.

States usually request personnel, resources, and equipment in the wake of disasters through their emergency management agencies. This process can be quite a bureaucratic process where the impacted state makes an EMAC request for specific resources which is then pushed out to other state emergency management agencies to see if they can fill the order for the needed resource. If a state can fill an order for a resource or personnel, they calculate the financial costs associated with deploying them and forward it to the requesting state to evaluate against other incoming proposals and to accept the one(s) that best meet their needs. Besides financial costs, states consider FEMA typing (level of capability) and response time to name of few. However, EMAC has developed a process that expedites the process.

Mission Ready Packages (MRP) identify resources that are pre-determined and entered into the EMAC system for deployment. The essential information needed for a state to accept a resource to respond to a disaster including FEMA type, related costs, deployment time, and location are already calculated and are loaded in the EMAC system for immediate consideration by agencies readily willing to provide their services. EMAC still needs to insure the listed resource is available from the participating jurisdiction and the requesting agency still needs to formally accept. While this does speed up the resource ordering process, additional procedures can be added to further reduce response times and add national capacity.

EMAC should institute a fourth operations level, Level 4, which does not need to be activated at the onset of an emergency but provides a daily operational watch desk that is up and running at all times. During this Level 4 phase, EMAC should electronically check on the status of Mission Ready Packages from across the country to check on their availability, deployment status, and any changes in their EMAC criteria at least once in a 24 hour period. A steady state operational status report would be made available of all the emergency response assets that states and other jurisdictions are ready and willing to deploy. This is similar to what fire departments across the country do each and every day and on a national level what the Department of Defense does for its readiness status.

Accounting for resources on a daily basis not only creates a common operating picture of what is immediately available in times of crisis, it also establishes a larger picture as to the overall capability and capacity for national emergency response. Utilizing this system, resource gaps could then be better identified and national or regional capability and/or capacity could be enhanced. Congress and DHS would then modify their grant structure and terms to meet the identified gaps.

Throughout the national preparedness literature and doctrine there in no distinction between capability and capacity. However, an organization can be very capable in a certain skill, such as collapsed structure rescue but that may not give them the capacity to conduct mass urban search and rescue operations in a catastrophic enviornment. One potential solution is to base deployable essential first responder capabilities as Mission Ready Packages in each county in the United States. This should provide the needed national depth in capacity without overburdening local municpal governments to provide a significant percentage of their resources.

There are 3007 counties in the United States. If each of these counties provided one of each of the following: one ambulance task force, (15,035 ambulances and crews) one fire task force (6014 engines, 3007 trucks, 3007 rescue squads, and 3007 chief officers), and a law enforcement strike team (78,182 officer and/or deputies) or Mobile Field Force and added them as Mission Ready Packages, this would greatly enhance the nations overall capacity and readiness to quickly respond to America’s next catastrophe.