AVERTING FUTURE DISASTERS By Ramsey Judah

A team of United Kingdom’s firefighters were in Charlotte, NC during the week of October 5, 2009 training in flood rescue and flood management operations. The training event was headed and organized by Paul Hayden, one of 40 of England’s fire chiefs, whose job entails much more than just heading the local fire house back home. He also serves as the national advisor to the United Kingdom’s emergency service known as UK Resilience that deals with emergency and environmental disasters in the nation of 62 million people.

Teams from the UK have been coming to train in places like the Fire and Rescue Compound in Charlotte because the location offers optimum training opportunities since North Carolina has fast moving streams and rivers. The team that just came in comprises of a crew from England, Scotland, and Ireland in cooperation with some members from the Netherlands and Australia. It is an international effort that seems to becoming a norm in the fire and rescue industry.
“The training session that took place is for flood response and emergency management for large scale events,” said Hayden. “It is done to prepare for major environmental disasters.”
According to Hayden, training in countries like the United States is necessary because it’s a homogenous country as far as infrastructure and equipment are concerned. “Plus it doesn’t hurt that we speak the same language,” he said.
The UK became much more concerned with emergency services after World War II when the firehouses in the nation were independent of government control. “After WWII, British fire departments became nationalized and the government instated a national selection process for fire chiefs,” Hayden said. “The number was limited to 40 as they would control and react to their sector of the country and the positions were politically restricted to make sure that politics do not affect our work and process.”
Unlike the US, England has an unwritten constitution, which does not necessarily have people work together efficiently. But after WWII, England began to change the way it did things in order to usher in a more efficient system of emergency services. The last decade alone has brought in a swift change both in the UK and the US.
“In the last decade the UK passed the ‘Civil Contingencies Act’ which is part of UK Resilience, Hayden said. “It breaks hazards into different categories and the response units into local and national levels.”
Hayden states that the Act allows the all emergency services to come together with integrated plans with a hierarchy of different command groups. For instance, he is part of the Gold Command Group which can react independently to an emergency without the need for a higher authority. This is a luxury the US’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) doesn’t have and is the main reason why it failed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
“The disaster in New Orleans was not failed by FEMA,” Hayden said. “It was failed by the US’s legislative system on the local, state, and national levels that prevented FEMA from going in right away.”
According to Hayden, FEMA does not have the authority to dive right into a major disaster because there is so much red legislative tape to go through before being allowed to go in. The US constitutions in local, state, and national levels allow the respective governments to have dominion over their respective parts. Therefore, New Orleans would have to contact the state and declare an emergency. The state would then assess the level and contact the national government if the emergency cannot be handled by the state. Then the national government then would give the green light to FEMA to go in and do its job. He points to the disaster from Katrina in Mississippi and how FEMA was able to react very well there.
“The reason they were able to help Mississippi was because the local government and the state government did what they needed to do make sure FEMA could get in as soon as possible,” Hayden said. “There was much more damage in real estate in Mississippi than there was in New Orleans, yet they did what they needed to do in order to get the situation under control quickly.”
The heat from the FEMA failure in New Orleans was square on Michael Brown because of the organization’s late reaction, but according to Hayden, who is very familiar with the inner workings of our system, the blame should have been laid on the local New Orleans government and the Louisiana State Government for their incompetence in the situation.
Hayden states that if the US does not reassess the power given to FEMA, a major blunder like that of New Orleans is bound to happen again. “In the UK, the national emergency service doesn’t have jurisdictional boundaries,” he said. “This way if a major disaster takes place, the national advisors go to work and are in charge of the situation right away.”
The system for emergency service in the US and the UK is soon looking to be evolving on an international level as Hayden is promoting a mutual cooperation system in which the two countries can help each other in times of major disasters.
“If a major disaster like that of Katrina ever happened in the UK, I may not have enough resources to handle the situation,” Hayden said. “But if I could get the US to cooperate, I would definitely have the manpower and the equipment needed to really work effectively in such a situation.”
Hayden stated that there was recently major flooding in Holland that required an international cooperation of nations from the UK, Poland, and Germany to help the people and the country. The European Union has an effective civil protection mechanism that allows the nations to provide aid to each other and cooperate in emergencies through the command center in Brussels. But for the US and UK to cooperate, Hayden feels that both countries would need to put their egos aside.
“It isn’t easy for a country as powerful as the UK or the US to allow foreign help because they would feel like they’re letting their people down,” Hayden said. “But both countries need to look past that as the climate is bringing about more serious disasters on a more constant basis.”
Hayden, who has a degree in law from the UK, finds that an agreement between both countries to work mutually would not be so painstaking. Instead of having to go through treaties and wait for government approval, the two countries could just create bi-lateral agreements that would outline the terms of aid and would skip the entire legislative process.
“The US already has bilateral and tri-lateral agreements with New Zealand, Australia, and Canada for emergency disasters like that of wildfires,” said Hayden. “We could definitely build one to serve our mutual needs as well between the US and the UK.”
The mechanisms for mutual agreements are there, Hayden says that it is only a matter of putting them to work in order to ensure a safer future for both countries.