Since our nation’s beginning, emergency responders have helped protect the people of the United States from the effects of natural and manmade disasters. From the bucket brigades of colonial times to...

Since our nation’s beginning, emergency responders have helped protect the people of the United States from the effects of natural and manmade disasters. From the bucket brigades of colonial times to today’s highly complex, multiagency response community, response workers have taken action in emergencies to save lives, preserve property, and protect the public good. The devastating attacks on the world trade center and the pentagon on Sep. 11, 2001, cast a powerful new spotlight on the vital role that responders play in containing and mitigating unexpected crise. Members of the response community disregarded injuries and fatigue, and bring the situations under control.
The tragic events of September 11 showed that response organization are a central component of our homeland security system against both natural and man-made threats. This renewed reliance on emergency response has focused fresh attention on the imperative to protect these individuals from the hazards inherent in the work, not just for the good of the community, but of the nation. While responders should be protected for their own sakes, their safety is also crucial to the effectiveness of the response force as a whole. Injuries individual members affect their organizations ability to perform overall, both immediately and in the long term. A responder injured is not only prevented from assisting in today’s emergency, but may also be unavailable to reopened to an attack tomorrow.

In the military context, this understanding is embodied in the concepts of force protection and force health protection, in applying these concepts, the military aims to preserve its forces fighting strength by protecting individual service- men and women against the threat of enemy action and by talking steps to minimize the effect of hazards on unit effectiveness, readiness, and morale. The unprecedented potential for multiple terrorist attacks drives home the need for comparable thinking in the response community. Sustainability becomes key: Incidents must be managed with an eye on ensuring the readiness of response organizations to meet future challenge.