Mid-1900s Disasters and the Impact on Emergency Management

Mid-1900s Disasters and the Impact on Emergency Management
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Mid-1900s Disasters and the Impact on Emergency Management
Emergency management is a primary role carried out by the government. The United States of America’s (USA) Constitution requires the state to ensure public safety and health. In that case, the federal government has a secondary role in disaster management. Some of the activities undertaken to manage emergency events include responding and avoiding human-caused and natural hazards. However, the federal government has the ultimate obligation to assist when local, state, institutional, county, and individual entities become overwhelmed. The USA emergency management is highly decentralized. In that light, actors and the number of entities involved in a specific incident vary depending on the severity and context of an event. Congress offers funds for emergency management annually. For instance, from 2005 to 2011, it gave an average of $12 billion per year to the lead federal agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is responsible for disaster management (Lindsay, 2012). The four primary phases of emergency management are mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. The paper analyzes and discusses the interagency responses to the 1927 Mississippi flood and its contribution to the theories of response, the Dust Bowl and its contributions to the theories of disaster mitigation, and the 1947 Texas City explosions and their effects on preparedness and the law.
The most catastrophic flood in the USA occurred in 1927 along the Mississippi River. In particular, it affected various parts, namely Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Approximately 70,000 square kilometers of land were underwater. The flood destroyed about 137,000 buildings and displaced around 700,000 individuals from their homes (Risk Management Solutions, 2007). About 250 people in the affected states died. Mississippi River flooded due to heavy rainfall that started in August 1926 and continued until the spring of 1927. According to the USA Weather Bureau and the Red Cross, the economic losses that resulted from the flood were between $250 and $350 million. The flood was a significant disaster that led to the implementation of the Flood Control Act of 1928 (Risk Management Solutions, 2007). The interagency emergency management facilitates quick response, mitigation, preparedness, and recovery from disasters since the federal, local, state, volunteer organizations, non-governmental organizations, and county agencies coordinate and collaborate to help survivors. Since 1927 was not the first time that the Mississippi River flooded, the USA Army Corps of Engineers was commissioned by Congress in 1879 to build levees across six states. During this time, volunteers and localities upgraded and repaired levees and handled the cleanup activities (Kosar, 2005). Nevertheless, heavy rains made the river spill over riverbanks, hence bursting levees. In 1927, no federal disaster management agency was in place. Instead, the federal government partnered with the American Red Cross, which acted as the congressionally-chartered quasi-governmental entity. The Red Cross was established to keep peace and mitigate disasters caused by famine, floods, pestilence, fire, and other natural calamities. By August 1927, water had receded the affected states, and the Army Corp of Engineers repaired levees.
The 1927 Mississippi flood significantly contributed to the theories of disaster response. Specifically, first responders are usually local police officers, emergency agencies, and medical personnel when a disaster occurs. If the incident is not severe and is of a low magnitude, the local government responds by helping the affected individuals. However, if the local, institutional agencies and individual entities are overwhelmed, they request assistance from the state government. If the state government has limited resources, it asks for aid from the federal government. FEMA was not created during the 1927 Mississippi flood, and the federal government asked for assistance from the Red Cross (Kosar, 2005). The theory of response in disaster management emphasizes interagency collaboration to respond to catastrophic incidents when they occur. For example, during the Mississippi flood, the Red Cross helped save individuals who were stuck in different places as they fled from waters and evacuated all survivors to safe areas. In addition, Mississippi River activists introduced annual conventions and media campaigns to pressure Congress to set funds aside for river navigation and flood control. These yearly conventions united many delegates, such as bankers, cabinet members, members of Congress, plantation owners, shippers, governors, mayors, congress members, and chambers of commerce who enhance Congress to contribute money for levee construction and property protection (Randolph, 2018). As a result, the collaboration of the federal, state, local, institutional, county, volunteer, and non-governmental organizations foster quick response in disaster control and management.
The Dust Bowl entails a series of drought episodes that affected the Southern Great Plains of North America in the 1930s. The drought lasted for about a decade. In particular, crops were damaged due to the lack of adequate rainfall, wind erosion, high wind speeds, high temperatures, dust storms, and insect infestations. As a result, agriculture was depressed, and the Dust Bowl significantly increased unemployment, business losses, bank closures, and other social and economic hardships. The primary drought events took place from 1930 to 1931, 1934, 1936, and between 1939 and 1940. Baveye et al. (2011) depict that the Dust Bowl was known as the “dirty thirties” since dust was ubiquitous in the living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms and the air that people breathed, which caused deaths resulting from “dust pneu...