Volume 1, Issue 2

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) path to Homeland Security was paved for 24 years by (1) the actions of five presidents and by new laws, (2) by the outcomes of the agency’s bureaucratic “turf wars” with other federal departments or agencies, (3) by staffing decisions inside the agency that relied on “generalist” managers more than “technocratic” managers, and (4) experience with human-caused disasters ranging from terror bombings to radiological and hazardous materials incidents, under all-hazards emergency management. These are the determinants that prepared FEMA for a major role in homeland security.

As the United States attempts to improve the security of the homeland, the thousands of vessels, millions of containers, and millions of passengers entering the country each year have been identified as major sources of vulnerability. Ports are the primary connection between the U.S. and the world economy. Any interventions that increase the security of ports must not only be effective, they must be economically sustainable. This paper is based on the premise that a port is best analyzed as a complex system consisting of a set of loosely coupled economic systems. The evolution of these systems has been driven by economic efficiency, and as ships and facilities became more unique in their design, they became functionally and physically segregated from each other. The paper demonstrates that by using a risk management approach sets of potentially effective security interventions that intervene at all points in the event chain can be identified. These interventions can then be evaluated for both effectiveness and economic impact. If security interventions cause serious harm to the systems they serve, the terrorists will have achieved one of their primary objectives.

There has been much discussion and controversy over the safety of transporting large amounts of highly radioactive waste to any centralized storage/disposal facility. Safety concerns have focused primarily on four areas: the potential for sabotage or a terrorist attack, the potential for an accident resulting in the release of radioactive material, the ability of the transportation casks to maintain their integrity in the event of an incident, and the distance and location of the rail and highway transportation routes. While, the government maintains that adequate safeguards will be taken to ensure the safety of future shipments, critics assert that the substantial increase in the number of shipments across great distances will significantly increase the probability for an incident resulting in the release of radioactive material.In spite of the generally positive government safety record for past radioactive waste shipments, there is no guarantee that an incident involving the release of a significant amount of radioactive material will not occur during transit in the future. Thus, federal authorities will need to take steps to reduce concerns over the vulnerability of the radioactive waste shipments by taking a two-track approach. First, the federal government will need to provide adequate training and equipment to state and local emergency first responders so they have the ability to respond quickly and effectively to any nuclear waste transportation incident. Second, it will be imperative to begin a public education campaign that addresses not only the steps that have been taken to prevent an accident, but also the measures that have been taken to mitigate the effect of any potential incident. Following this policy prescription will not only improve emergency response and strengthen homeland security, but also boost public confidence in the government’s ability to transport highly radioactive waste safely. Ultimately, this approach also will help to ameliorate the political conflict associated with the radioactive waste transportation issue and moderate opposition to the waste shipments.

Asia Under Siege of Viruses -- a report from Singapore

Davis, Mike. 1998 Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books. Reviewed by Roy E. Roper, Ph.D. Catherine J. Goodzey, M.S.