The Importance Of Hazards In Emergency Management

Emergency management deals with many areas and subjects that most people might take for granted. Some might see those who work in emergency management as the people that deal with aftermath of a disaster and don’t consider the other factors involved with this subject matter. In many cases it is a little bit more complicate than that and in some cases the thought process that goes with emergency management can become a little more intriguing. People that work in emergency management need to have knowledge of the many hazards that can happen to a community and the many risks associated with each hazard. One needs to understand how each hazard is associated with risk and the risk that they have on the human and animal population.

In many areas

These types of hazards all can occur when either we don’t do proper inspections to make sure everything is running properly or we don’t pay attention to warning signs that are right in front of our face. For instance in the dam failure situation, if we see a small leak coming from it, that could lead to a bigger disaster and major flooding in town in the future if we don’t fix it right away. Dam failures most often occur from maintenance neglect, overtopping, poor design, or structural damage caused by earthquakes, collision, or blast (Haddow et al., 2014). All of these situations where a dam fails except for the ones caused by earthquakes can be avoided if they were built properly and up to code and were inspected annually. There could be an untold number of dams across the country that are in poor maintenance and are probably on their last legs and people in the danger zone could be unaware of the danger in their area. This is further proven by the fact that in 2009, the American Society of Engineers, which rates U.S infrastructure, gave U.S dams a grade of “D”, and that many dams were “high-hazard” and that the number of deficient dams exceeded 4000 (Haddow et al., 2014). This type of information should be alarming to many people that we have so many deficient dams across the country that are being neglected. Each one of these dams brings their own sets of risks to the people of the affected areas. The risks that can be involved if the hazards of these deficient dams can include major flooding, loss of crops, homes being destroyed, and loss of