Communication Between Agencies Essay

In order to be successful having great communication is the key to that success. Our country has endowed many tragedies with many of them due to the poor communication. Many lives had been lost because of poor communication or the first responder’s not being trained properly for a situation as this. Communication problems became the focal point of our nation’s emergency management improvement ever since September 11. Every day in cities and towns across the Nation, emergency response personnel respond to incidents of varying scope and magnitude. Their ability to communicate in real time is critical to establishing command and control at the scene of an emergency, to maintaining event situational awareness, and to operating overall within a broad range of incidents (National emergency communications, 2008). Communicating messages to the general public is a critical yet underdeveloped aspect of effective emergency management. Such messages fall under three basic categories: risk, communication, and warning and crisis communications. Risk communication involves alerting and educating the public to the risks they face and how they can best prepare for and mitigate these risks in order to reduce the impacts of future disaster events. Warning involves delivering notice of an actual impending threat with sufficient time to allow recipient individuals and communities to take shelter, evacuate, or take other mitigated action in advance of a disaster event. Crisis communication involves the provision of timely, useful, and accurate information to the public during the response and recovery phases of a disaster event (Bullock, 2009). The emergency management community as a whole has vast experience in practicing risk and warning communications. Preparedness programs have been an active part of emergency management in this country for decades, and public education programs conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, local fire departments, and other public and private sector agencies have disseminated millions of brochures and checklists describing the risks of future disaster events and the steps that individuals and communities can take to reduce and prepare for them (Bullock, 2009). In our text Bullock States, â€Å"The National Commission on terrorist attacks on the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, found that inadequate communications contributed greatly to hindering the ability of responding agencies to respond to the events that unfolded, and led directly to the high number of police and fire department employees who were killed when the towers collapsed† (Bullock, 2009). From this you can conclude that information was not passed along fast enough so as a result many people lost their lives because of this. There were also language barriers many of the different agencies did not use the same â€Å"lingo† and because of this confusion information was not passed between them correctly.