Mid-1900s Disasters and the Impact on Emergency Management

Mid-1900s Disasters and the Impact on Emergency Management
Author’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course Code and Name
Professor’s Name
Date

Mid-1900s Disasters and the Impact on Emergency Management
Emergency management is a primary role carried out by the government. The United States of America’s (USA) Constitution requires the state to ensure public safety and health. In that case, the federal government has a secondary role in disaster management. Some of the activities undertaken to manage emergency events include responding and avoiding human-caused and natural hazards. However, the federal government has the ultimate obligation to assist when local, state, institutional, county, and individual entities become overwhelmed. The USA emergency management is highly decentralized. In that light, actors and the number of entities involved in a specific incident vary depending on the severity and context of an event. Congress offers funds for emergency management annually. For instance, from 2005 to 2011, it gave an average of $12 billion per year to the lead federal agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is responsible for disaster management (Lindsay, 2012). The four primary phases of emergency management are mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. The paper analyzes and discusses the interagency responses to the 1927 Mississippi flood and its contribution to the theories of response, the Dust Bowl and its contributions to the theories of disaster mitigation, and the 1947 Texas City explosions and their effects on preparedness and the law.
The most catastrophic flood in the USA occurred in 1927 along the Mississippi River. In particular, it affected various parts, namely Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Approximately 70,000 square kilometers of land were underwater. The flood destroyed about 137,000 buildings and displaced around 700,000 individuals from their homes (Risk Management Solutions, 2007). About 250 people in the affected states died. Mississippi River flooded due to heavy rainfall that started in August 1926 and continued until the spring of 1927. According to the USA Weather Bureau and the Red Cross, the economic losses that resulted from the flood were between $250 and $350 million. The flood was a significant disaster that led to the implementation of the Flood Control Act of 1928 (Risk Management Solutions, 2007). The interagency emergency management facilitates quick response, mitigation, preparedness, and recovery from disasters since the federal, local, state, volunteer organizations, non-governmental organizations, and county agencies coordinate and collaborate to help survivors. Since 1927 was not the first time that the Mississippi River flooded, the USA Army Corps of Engineers was commissioned by Congress in 1879 to build levees across six states. During this time, volunteers and localities upgraded and repaired levees and handled the cleanup activities (Kosar, 2005). Nevertheless, heavy rains made the river spill over riverbanks, hence bursting levees. In 1927, no federal disaster management agency was in place. Instead, the federal government partnered with the American Red Cross, wh...