Jumping in for a short educational moment.
The way that Emergency Prepardedness is set up in the country is that the responsibility lies at the state level. That is where planning, budgeting, training and facilitation is supposed to happen. 99% of this stuff is local—hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. each area has their “thing.” My area is blizzards and ice storms. The same plan applies to the occasional hurricane.
FEMA is deployed as a back up. They are mostly the folks that coordinate federal support. If you recall, part of the problem with Katrina was that Bush did not nationalize it and the Governor did not act well.
So, this is the 1% of incidents: War and pandemic. Trump has not done a good job explaining how all this is supposed to work. The focus should be on the states’ public health departments. The county health commissioner is really the tip of the spear in most of the US.
Spot on. It starts locally, and goes up from there.