Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: Anyone who has ever questioned the value of advanced emergency planning, especially in these perilous times, should take a hard look at the folks in the sleepy New England mill town of West Warwick, located some 20 miles southwest of the state capital in Providence.Prior to the night of February 20, Rhode Island was one of only three states in the country to have set up and completed a statewide training program instructing local level emergency management personnel on how to deal with terrorism and attacks from weapons of mass destruction.That training proved invaluable that night when fire swept through a downtown nightclub, eventually claiming 100 lives and injuring 186 people.We had been meeting and training for the past year at the state level on how to respond to terrorism and attacks by weapons of mass destruction, said Thomas Scnerchia, director of West Warwicks emergency management team.We have been preparing for something like this, I just never thought it would be of this magnitude.The terror alerts and training helped us to provide better, closer and more responsive reaction to a major emergency situation that played out here that night.Scnerchias sentiments were echoed by Town Manager Wolfgang Bauer, himself a veteran of emergency response and planning dating back to his military service as chief of an operations center and as a
Source: Journal of Emergency Management
Author: Robert Keeley
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2887432954