Comprehensive Emergency Management

Comprehensive emergency management, as defined in various laws throughout the United States, is the preparation for and the carrying out of all emergency functions, other than functions for which the military forces are primarily responsible, to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergencies and disasters, and to aid victims suffering from injury or damage, resulting from disasters caused by all hazards, whether natural, technological, or human caused, and to provide support for search and rescue operations for persons and property in distress.

Comprehensive emergency management is the philosophy that gave birth to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the eventual decline of the term civil defense in the United States. Under Comprehensive Emergency Management, attention is given to the full range of emergencies from small weather incidents to the "ultimate emergency" of war. Its "all-hazards" philosophy stands in contrast to previous state and federal emergency management that focused solely on a massive nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

For any local or state jurisdiction, Comprehensive Emergency Management involves the creation of an emergency management plan, typically an Emergency Operations Plan that provides for the activation of an Incident Command System as a flexible central command structure for in-coming and committed resources that required to deal with all aspects of the incident as an emergency situation. Other command-level constructs include multiagency coordination and public information systems; overall, the federal command construct for Comprehensive Emergency Management is the National Incident Management System (NIMS).

Another aspect of emergency management efforts has been tasked to the CDC, which formed the Emergency Operations Center (EOC). This branch is staffed by CDC public health respondents to better enhance communication and organize responses to disasters requiring their assistance. To go along with that, the CDC also created the Incident Management System (IMS), a group structured by protocols, support, and services to incidents the CDC responds to. All of these groups combined form the CDC's Emergency Management Program (EMP). This group responds to a wide variety of events such as outbreaks of diseases and respiratory illness, natural disasters, man-made disasters, and events where national security is in jeopardy. Not only does this group operate in the United States, but it has also been implemented in Japan, Haiti, the Middle East, Etc.

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