Meeting the Challenge of Facility Protection for Homeland Security
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Ernest Sternberg
Terrorism casualties in the U.S. have been caused primarily by attacks on facilities. In earthquake, hurricane, infectious disease outbreaks, hazmat releases, and other disasters, peoples’ safety often depends on the facilities they occupy. Yet strategic homeland security documents issued by the White House and the US Department of Homeland Security focus on the protection of "infrastructures," understood to consist mainly of utility systems, and rarely on facilities per se. For other than federal office buildings and infrastructure nodes, federal plans barely acknowledge the urgent task of protecting civilian facilities. This article gives evidence for the importance of facilities to homeland security. Are facilities so varied and numerous that it would be cost-prohibitive to implement a national protection strategy? The article argues that it would not be. Economies of scope in multi-hazard protection, existing legal and accreditation frameworks, new possibilities for integrating information systems, and the nation’s many facility-safety professionals are all valuable resources on which to build. The U.S. should identify facility protection as a distinctive field of homeland security policy and proceed by supporting decentralized initiatives.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Research Article
- The Core Competencies Required of Executive Level Business Crisis and Continuity Managers -- The Results
- An Exploratory Study of Local Emergency Managers' Views of Military Assistance/Defense Support to Civil Authorities (MACA/DSCA)
- Terror, Adaptation and Preparedness: A Trilogy for Survival
- An Integrating Framework for Modeling and Simulation for Incident Management
- Meeting the Challenge of Facility Protection for Homeland Security
- Communication/News
- Free Online Courses Available from PERI
- Assessing the Foreign Language Needs of the Department of Homeland Security
- The Swedish Port Security Network - An Illusion or a Fact?
- Book Review
- The McGraw-Hill Homeland Security Handbook
- Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions
- Related Research Article
- Related Research in Other Publications
