Federal Emergency Management Agency(FEMA)

FEMA’s Mission Statement: FEMA’s mission is to support our citizens and first responders to ensure that as a nation we work together to build, sustain, and improve our capability to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate all hazards.

Members:FEMA is part of a team. The team includes federal partners, state officials, tribal officials, local officials, the private sector, non-profits, faith-based groups, and the general public.

On March 1, 2003, FEMA became part of the United States Department of Homeland Security.

History of FEMA:FEMA can be trace it’s beginnings to the Congregational Act of 1803. This act is the generally considered to be the first piece of disaster legislation when assistance was provided to a New Hampshire home following an extensive fire. In the century following, legislature was passed more than 100 times in the aid to hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters.President Carter’s 1979 executive order merged many of the separate disaster-related responsibilities into FEMA. These included the Federal Insurance Administration, the National Fire Prevention and Control Administration, the National Weather Service Community Preparedness Program, the Federal Preparedness Agency of the General Services Administration, and the Federal Disaster Assistance Administrations activities from HUD.

On October 4, 206 President George Bush signed into law the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act. The act reorganized FEMA and provided substantial new authority to remedy gaps that became apart in the response to hurricane Katrina.

FEMA’s information about Hurricane Katrina:Hurricane Katrina made landfall three times along the United States coast and reached a Category 5 at its peak intensity. The hurricane originated in Southeast Bahamas on August 23, 2005. Two days later, the hurricane strengthened to a category 1 and first made landfall between Hallandale Beach and North Miami Beach Florida. Hurricane Katrina made its second landfall as a category 4 hurricane in Plaquemines Parish Louisiana on August 29, 2005. Wind speeds reached over 140 miles per hour in southeastern Louisiana. Hurricane Katrina made it’s final landfall four hours later along the Mississippi/Louisiana border. The hurricane-force winds extended up to 190 miles from the center of the storm and tropical storm-force winds extended for approximately 440 miles.

FEMA Disaster Survivor Assistance:FEMA offers several different resources on their website. Some of the different resources that are offered include: Ensuring your safety, coping with disaster, and helping pets. The resource ensuring your safety includes ensuring your own safety, aiding the injured, being aware of your own health, and safety issues. The resource coping with disaster includes understanding disaster events, recognizing signs of disaster related stress, easing disaster-related stress, helping kids cope with disaster, and a child’s reaction to disaster by age. The resource helping pets incudes ways of locating lost pets.

Disaster Recovery Centers: These are a readily accessible facility or mobile office where applicants can go for information about FEMA or other disaster assistance programs, or to get help with other questions related to the disaster. Some of the services may include: guidance regarding disaster recovery, help with understanding any written correspondences received, housing assistance information, answers to questions, status of applications being processes by FEMA.

Plan, Prepare & Mitigate: There are actions that should be taken before, during, and after an event that are unique to each hazard. The local Emergency management offices can help identify the hazards in your own local area and outline the local plans and recommendations for each.Some ways to plan, prepare & mitigate include: protecting homes, protecting our communities, protecting your business, and national preparedness.

Make a Plan: FEMA feels that it is important to make an emergency plan to be prepared before a natural disaster strikes. Your family may not be together when a disaster strikes, so knowing how to get to a safe place. How you will contact each other, how you will get back together, and what you will do n different situations is really important.

Ready.gov has made it very simple to make a family emergency plan:http://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/a260e5fb242216dc62ae380946806677/FEMA_plan_child_508_071513.pdf

Build a Disaster Supply Kit: Items can include water for at least three days, food for at least three days, a battery powered radio (with extra batteries), a flashlight with extra batteries, a first aid kit, a whistle, a dust mask, moist towelettes, garbage bags for personal sanitation, pliers to turn off utilities, manual can opener for food, local maps, cell phone with chargers.**Note that you may have to gather additional supplies like prescription medications, infant formula, pet food, cash, matches, feminine supplies, paper and pencil.

Get Involved:Ask “How can I help?”

Find opportunities to support community preparedness. This can be done by being part of the community planning process, joining a preparedness project, create a preparedness project, and donating cash or goods.

Reference:Federal Emergency Management Agency. Retrieved March 5, 2014 from: http://www.apastyle.org/learn/faqs/web-page-no-author.aspx.