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New Zealand Emergency Management Needs a Make-Over

Making Recommendations and executing them are two different things.

A study of New Zealand's emergency management organization and system was commissioned and the report is in. See NZ needs a new emergency agency: report.

As you read the above article, I think you will find that some of the findings also fit our United States emergency management system. We too are a patch-work quilt of agencies with differing capabilities at the state and local levels. 

It sounds like they would like to move beyond "coordination" to more of a "command and control" model with much more emphasis on federal control and "go teams" to shore up substandard operations for events.  

Having watched many a report waste away pending legislative action, we'll have to see what happens with this report. 

Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.