Free Essay Example on the Stafford Act

Over the years, the Federal Government has experienced a history of involvement in the local and the large-scale catastrophic events through the design and enactment of various policies and regulations. For instance, The Stafford Act, which was enacted in the year 1988 and amended in the year 2000, formed the foundational basis for federal disaster policies. The provisions therein stipulate the federal disaster declaration procedure and help in the determination of any assistance provided by the federal government in the case of a disaster (Katz, Attal-Juncqua & Fischer, 2017).

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

The major drawback of the Stafford Act is that the provisions here have been designed with disasters of small scale in minds such as winter storms and floods. Therefore, the regulations for dealing with the small-scale disasters often hamper disaster response and recovery in the cases where large-scale disasters are experienced like Hurricane Katrina (Siddiki et al., 2018). Most importantly, these policies provide the basis for risk assessment and evaluation through prioritizing the likeliness of a hazard and the magnitude of the resultant threat caused by the hazard.

National Flood Act

The United States Committee on Banking and Currency, on the other hand, enacted the National Flood Act in 1956 after a series of studies concerning federal disaster insurance. This act gave the provisions for the creation of the federal contract program, federal flood reinsurance program, and the federal flood insurance program (Nukpezah, 2017). However, the major shortcoming of this act is that there was no satisfactory mechanism that was developed to implement the programs recommended therein - the law aimed at the provision of financial assistance to those affected by floods and other related disasters.

The role of federalism in emergency management

Federalism, as provided for in the United States Constitution, has been the guiding principle in the provision of assistance to the citizens after disasters. The US government to assist all the disaster-stricken citizens created the Federalism Emergency Management Agency (Kousky, 2018). The team is often dispatched to the disaster scenes in the cases of wildfire outbreak, earthquake and tornadoes, among others.

References

Katz, R., Attal-Juncqua, A., & Fischer, J. E. (2017). Funding public health emergency preparedness in the United States. American journal of public health, 107(S2), S148-S152. URL:https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2017.303956

Kousky, C. (2018). Financing flood losses: A discussion of the National Flood Insurance Program. Risk Management and Insurance Review, 21(1), 11-32. DOI:/full/10.1111/rmir.12090

Nukpezah, J. A. (2017). The financial and public health emergencies in Flint, Michigan: Crisis management and the American federalism. Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, 8(4), 284-311.URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/rhc3.12117

Siddiki, S., Carley, S., Zirogiannis, N., Duncan, D., & Graham, J. (2018). Does dynamic federalism yield compatible policies? A study of the designs of federal and state vehicle policies. Policy Design and Practice, 1(3), 215-232. URL:https://doi.org/10.1080/25741292.2018.1505186