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Emergency Management: Crisis Management and Response

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Encyclopedia of Security and Emergency Management

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Definition

A community crisis is a potentially overwhelming situation that requires an urgent response to avoid severe consequences that exceed a community’s capability to absorb. Often its cause, effects, and means of resolution are ambiguous (Pearson and Clair 1998) because of its unpredictability, speed of onset, and scope and duration of impacts (Perry 2018). These event characteristics produce a sense of uncertainty and urgency as households, organizations, and government agencies seek to rapidly mobilize and deploy available response resources.

Introduction

Community crises typically threaten both physical (casualties, damage to buildings, infrastructure, and agriculture) and social (psychosocial, sociodemographic, economic, and political) impacts (Lindell 2013, 2019; NRC 2006a). These potential impacts create agent-generated demands for actions to limit or avoid these impacts and response-generated demands for actions to coordinate all of the individuals and organizations that...

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants CMMI-1760766 and CMMI-1826455. None of the conclusions expressed here necessarily reflects views other than those of the author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Hazards Mitigation Planning and Research, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Michael K. Lindell

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  1. Michael K. Lindell
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Correspondence to Michael K. Lindell .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept of Security, Fire & Emergency Mgmt, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, USA

    Lauren R. Shapiro

  2. Dept. of Security, Fire & Emergency Mgmt, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY, USA

    Marie-Helen Maras

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Lindell, M.K. (2020). Emergency Management: Crisis Management and Response. In: Shapiro, L., Maras, MH. (eds) Encyclopedia of Security and Emergency Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69891-5_103-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69891-5_103-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69891-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69891-5

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