USA's Agencies -- FEMA

FEMA

"The Merits Of War And Peace."

I know it's been a long, long time since I talked about the last agency, NCIS, but I am back with one of the most known agencies. It is mentioned in when a disaster comes. I am going to explain briefly what is the goal and organization of this USA's Agency.

Any doubt or suggestion, comment or contact me through vanysampayoandyou@hotmail.com

FEMA, which stands for Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fig.1) is an agency within the United States Department of Homeland Security, which I'll talk next. It was formed on June 19th 1978, so is quite a recent agency if we consider the others. 

For them to intervene, the governor of the state where the crisis took place has to declare a state of emergency and call the FEMA director and the federal government.  

Their main purpose is to coordinate a response to a big disaster, which can't be handled by local authorities, and assist the victims by providing food, shelter and medical assistance. This help only is guaranteed in USA territory. The agency also provides local governments experts in numerous specialties in order to the city recover from the disaster. 

Their budget in 2012 was 10.9 billion. It is a lot a money! 

FEMA has as Administrator W. Craig Fugate (Fig.2) and Deputy Administrator Richard Serino.

It has, what you could call, several headquarters all over USA but the most important, so to speak, is the one located in Atlanta, Virginia. (Fig.3)

FEMA’s Five Strategic Priorities:

Priority 1: Be survivor-centric in mission and program delivery

Priority 2: Become an expeditionary organization

Priority 3: Posture and build capability for catastrophic disasters

Priority 4: Enable disaster risk reduction nationally

Priority 5: Strengthen FEMA’s organizational foundation

FEMA's Two Strategic Imperatives:

1. A whole community approach to emergency management

2. Foster innovation and learning

CRITICS:

By the way, you Americans know better than me what I'm going to say, but while I researched FEMA online I saw a lot of information about the lack of action by the agency. I saw pictures and read some comments and they weren't the best, so I decided I was going to dig in a little bit about the critics.

The most known case is Katrina Hurricane's in August of 2005. FEMA was intensely criticized...(Fig.4) Normally FEMA comes in when the local authorities can't handle the disaster. Well, in this case FEMA was the one who wasn't able to deal with it. It was way too much and they simply weren't prepared. The screams for help was overwhelming and they didn't have the resources to help everyone so the critics built up fast. Most of the victims's requests weren't fulfilled such as shelter. 

I could talk about it for hours but it is time to use the billions of their budget and put it where is needed so that when another crisis appear, FEMA doesn't fail right in front of all the Americans who pay it. 

PHOTOS:

    Fig.1       FEMA        

              

    Fig.2       W. Craig Fugate

 Fig.3       Headquarter



 Fig.4 Critics

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=pt-PT

http://www.fema.gov/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Emergency_Management_Agency

Vany Sampayo