Those Americans who have grown up in the shadow of natural disasters - earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes - have always known that it is essential to be prepared at all times for the worst to strike at a moment's notice. The rest of the country, in the months since 9/11, has also learned to think this way - although arguably many communities remain ill-prepared for even relatively small-scale disasters. This paper presents us with the opportunity of creating the kind of crisis management agency - that we have here called First Response and Beyond - that every significantly sized city should have but can rarely afford.
When people consider what they want from a crisis team they are likely to think first of those people who are called first-responders - firefighters, paramedics, emergency medical personnel, police. Most communities have people who are already during much of the work that needs to be done immediately after a crisis such as a terrorist attack or a natural disaster. When establishing a crisis response center, it is not necessary to duplicate all of these same services and personnel; rather, it is imperative that a crisis response agency coordinate with existing agencies (including police and sheriff departments and fire houses) and have communications set up with a designated person during each shift at those hospitals that have trauma centers. The role of a crisis services agency must be to provide a coordinating mechanism among all those other agencies and organizations that provide first-response services during a crisis. The head of First Response and Beyond must work with the heads of each of the other organizations to ensure that there are mechanisms in place to pull in people who are not working a regular shift to ensure that as many first-response workers as are needed are available (or failing this that all of the first-response workers who exist in an area are available).
While emergency medical personnel, m...