Hazard Management and Emergency Planning

CHAPTER 12

Enabling effective hazard management by the public

COLIN GREEN

 

Introduction

With no sense of irony, we frequently congratulate ourselves upon the heroic behaviour of the emergency services in a disaster. If the emergency services have to be heroic, then hazard management has failed since the objective is to reduce a potential disaster to the easily manageable. Equally, the emergency services frequently have to compensate with heroism for the failures of command, communication and control during the disaster, and mismanagement and negligence prior to the disaster.

Moreover, focusing attention on the emergency service response concentrates both upon a particular form of response – that by the emergency services – and intervention at ...