Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell attended the National Emergency Management Association’s Mid-Year Forum in Alexandria, Va. to discuss ongoing recovery efforts across the nation and to propose overhauling the nation's emergency recovery response programs.
Criswell emphasized current recovery efforts across the nation and a focus of the speech was the current disaster situation in the region of Rolling Fork, Miss., which recently suffered devastation from a tornado, according to a March 27 news release.
“I heard amazing acts of heroism from community members crawling from the rubble to quickly rush and help their neighbors,” Criswell said in the release. “And I talked with local first responders and health care professionals who quickly stood up a makeshift clinic in the armory to help those who were injured. All of you in this room are managing more events like this - events that as the initial incident is getting stabilized, are already planning for recovery.”
With national disasters becoming more frequent, Criswell said the need for recovery programs may need to evolve, the release said.
“As the disasters become more frequent, as the needs become more complex and as the expectations continue to rise, the call to act will keep getting louder,” she said in the release.
She questioned how we address these needs, according to the release.
“So, where do we go from here? Perhaps, we start by looking at the systems in place, identify what works and make the right investments to enable those systems to grow,” Criswell said in the release. “And, it is this kind of thinking that can inspire a paradigm shift in how we recover from disasters, how we evaluate our programs across government and how we resource our agencies.”
According to a March 26 news release, President Joe Biden officially declared a major disaster for the state of Mississippi, authorizing the use of federal disaster assistance to bolster standard recovery operations. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas and Criswell have traveled to the affected regions in the state to assess the damage.
