Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
national and local level becomes an additional duty of a WCM instead of the primary duty of a
scientist trained in emergency management or community resilience. The situation has been
exacerbated with the addition of Atlantic and Caribbean communities without an increase in
overall program budgets.
Public education
. The committee found that the current education criteria of inventorying the
number of annual tsunami awareness programs is vague and lacks speciic guidance on the
target audience (e.g., residents, employees, tourists) and on how to accomplish goals. Proposed
standards for outreach include a commendable list of potential activities, such as incorporating
materials into public utility bills or providing tsunami safety training to local hotel staff. However,
jurisdictions can meet the mandatory criteria for outreach by implementing just “one or more” of
the several potential activities. Therefore, a jurisdiction could technically meet the outreach crite-
ria simply by passively posting tsunami information on an agency website and ignoring more ac-
tive efforts, such as training local hotel staff and working with faith-based and civic organizations.
Incorporation of Social Science
. The TsunamiReady Program currently lacks involvement from
researchers trained in the social sciences, land-use planning, and emergency management. The
NOAA Tsunami Program needs to be more proactive in incorporating social science indings in
program deliberations, evaluation, and criteria development.
During deliberations about the TsunamiReady Program, the committee compared
TsunamiReady to other approaches to improving community preparedness to natural hazards.
The Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP)
2
is one such program that
also aims to mitigate the risk from natural hazards, but unlike TsunamiReady, EMAP is more
broadly geared toward all-hazards mitigation. EMAP is the nationally recognized standard for
emergency management and establishes “a common set of criteria for disaster management,
emergency management, and business continuity programs … (and) provides criteria to assess
current programs or to develop, implement and maintain a program to mitigate, prepare for,
respond to and recovery from disasters and emergencies.”
3
Standards are established by the
EMAP Standards Committee in a process complying with procedures and processes as pre-
scribed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Compliance with the standard is
voluntary, and assessments and accreditation are applied through a review process conducted
by peers from the emergency management profession.
Although the most current TsunamiReady draft (November 6, 2008) includes many
elements of the above EMAP standards (http://www.emaponline.org/), it is currently a mix
of requirements that are not well structured. At the time this report was written, the draft
2
Supported by FEMA, National Emergency Management Association (NEMA), International Association of Emer-
gency Managers (IAEM), Council of State Governments (CSG), National Association of Governors (NCG), National League
of Cities (NLC), National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), U.S. Department of Justice Ofice of Justice Programs
(OJP), and U.S. Department of Transportation. EMAP is managed by the CSG and is overseen by an appointed commission.
http://www.emaponline.org/.
3
EMAP Standard, April 2006,
