American Emergency Management System

The development of science and technology as well as the wave of globalization have made the already troubled world brimmed with more and more crises, which have become a major public concern. Crisis management has a history of no more than half a century as an independent discipline. Yet there is still no authoritative answer to the definition of crisis. The author of this paper decides to make a study on emergency management-a subject within the realm of public crisis management, searching for lessons and experience in establishing a complete emergency management system through analyzing and summarizing American emergency management system.After years of lessons learnt in practice, the American emergency management system has become relatively complete in its structure with FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) serving as the core agency coordinating different departments. Yet there are still many tough problems to be solved, especially within the government itself. How to balance the triangle relationship among the media, voluntary organizations and federal agencies has constituted a major problem before the American government in emergency.With regard to research in this field, the U.S has developed its own modelsin theory and practice, which have attributed to successes and failures of numerous cases. While the evaluation of these models mainly focuses on the gap between governmental norms and the emergent norms, it still takes time for these models to be improved.After each disaster, people will always ask: why disasters still happen in spite of seemingly sufficient preparation and mitigation efforts? Therefore, a truly successful emergency management is to prevent rather than passively respond to imminent disasters and minimize losses of those inevitable disasters. This has also become a major trend in American emergency management system and development in this field as a whole.