No, I’m not using some form of new math. What I’m referring to is the juxtaposition of rural and urban areas that exists in each state. Every state has at least one urban area. Some, like Florida and California, have more than one. Other states have one large urban area that dominates the politics, infrastructure, resources and attention of business, industry and state-level politicians. New York has New York City and upstate. Illinois has Chicago and then the rest of the state. Even a state like Nebraska has Omaha versus the more rural areas.
Emergency management is not immune from these urban versus rural differences. Perhaps the biggest disparity is the number of resources, generally meaning money, but that translates quickly into funding for staffing and the number of program areas that can be supported. In many ways these 100 state emergency management “districts,” which I’ll call urban and rural, use different methods to achieve success.
I don’t know of an urban emergency management program that believes it has all the resources it needs to provide a fully capable service. Even New York City believes it needs more than the gargantuan sums it receives from the federal government in the form of homeland security grant funds. While urban areas get more funding and have more resources than their rural counterparts, the populations they serve, the terrorism threat and sometimes their physical proximity to hazards — many times on the coasts — means they really don’t have unlimited funding when compared to the threats they face.
What urban areas do have are many more professional responders in the form of law enforcement, fire and other public agencies with associated response functions like transportation, public works and utilities. When it comes to large-scale emergencies and the smaller, normal-size disasters, urban districts typically have the internal resources to respond to these events without asking for help.
On the other side of the equation, some suburban and rural emergency management agencies are lucky if they have one full-time emergency manager. Emergency management is more likely to be located in a department like the sheriff’s office, and the emergency management function may only be an additional duty performed by a person with other primary responsibilities.
However, there is one huge advantage these smaller jurisdictions have over the larger urban area emergency management programs. To exist and respond appropriately to incidents and disasters, they have learned to cooperate with one another. There are stronger interdisciplinary and cross-jurisdictional partnerships that exist day to day. The integration with state and federal agencies that are collated in small districts is much stronger because of the need for a closer working relationship and sharing of resources.
In your state, wherever you are, consider reaching out to emergency managers from “the other state,” be they in a rural or urban environment. The more dialog you can achieve before a disaster, the more effective you will be when the chips are down and you have to work together as one state.
