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What Will the Future of Disaster Response Look Like?

One perspective from Pete Gaynor.

What role will the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) play during disaster response in the future? Well, Pete Gaynor, the immediate past FEMA administrator, took a crack at writing up a vision for the technologies that will exist and the mission of FEMA in the future, post-2040.

Check out his article: “Future FEMA: Reimagining Crisis Response.”

Some of it is far-fetched, but there will likely be huge gains in the use of technology in responding to and recovering from disasters. For instance, the concept of building using 3D technology already exists and just needs to be applied more broadly.

Telecommunications continues to evolve and along with artificial intelligence could revolutionize our ability to communicate across agencies and jurisdictions, and with the general public.

Someone needs to take the article that he wrote and put it in a time capsule somewhere and then see how close he got to reality — 20 years from now.
Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.