Emergency Service Sector (ESS): Social Sciences Term Paper

Emergency Service Sector (ESS)
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Introduction
The Emergency Service Sector (ESS) is an amalgamation of millions of highly-trained, skilled persons, along with the cyber and physical resources, which offers a wide range of responses, preparedness, prevention as well as recovery services during incident responses and day to day operations (Berger et al., 2012). The ESS entails geographically scattered facilities and equipment in both volunteers and paid capacities organized at the territorial, tribal, local, state, and federal levels of government like fire stations, city police departments, Fire Departments and, Department of Defense Police, county sheriffs, and town department of public works. The ESS also includes private sector resources, like private security firms, private fire departments, and private emergency health and medical providers.
Primary Risk Areas
The ESS has several primary risk areas that may affect its functioning and credibility. First, one of the risk areas is communication and cybersecurity. Natural disasters may cause a loss of cyberinfrastructure and 911 capabilities. When this happens, many people may lose their lives and property because the traditional 911 channels like telephone lines have been cut off. Any natural disasters and catastrophes capable of cutting off cyber lines and 911 capabilities make people unable to make calls when in distress. Though natural disasters and catastrophes are not within our control, emergency departments should move swiftly to save lives as soon as the situation is manageable (Mitsova et al., 2020).
Another risk area is the fire department. Fires can burn down a whole town or locality if not adequately controlled. Wildfires, domestic fires, or industrial fires can travel through wooded areas, households, and industries into public spaces and cause massive loss of life and property. Therefore, there is a need to alert fire departments and fire stations to respond to such fire accidents. To sort out this problem, urban and residential roads should be passable to aid the work of firefighters, fire stations and departments should always be alert and respond timely to fire emergencies, and the stations and departments should always be equipped to avoid the unavailability of firefighting trucks, personnel, and extinguishers (Mitsova et al., 2020).
Next, the medical service sector is another area of risk. This is one of the areas that can either break or make humanity. Suppose it breaks, humanity breaks. Take, for instance, the situation that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought in the world. Health and medical services are over-stretched, unavailable, and expensive. Indeed, the Covid-19 pandemic is an example of how the medical and health sector is at risk because one year down since the first case was realized in Wuhan China, millions of people have died, millions infected, jobs lost, socialization broken, and relationships broken. To curb this problem, the WHO set guidelines to manage the virus. The guidelines include social distance, hand washing, territorial lockdowns, wearing masks, and quarantining (Mitsova et al., 2020).
National security is another risk a...