Organizing for Disasters

Abstract

Disasters occur all over the world, and the response is clearly influenced by the local culture, level of development, historical context, and the national readiness to respond. The key to the response is the structure of the emergency response officials. Around the world there tends to be two main types of emergency response management structures. One is known as the incident command structure that has largely been developed in the United States. The other approach is that of the U.N. cluster organization. Both of these approaches and their current derivative management concepts are described in this chapter. First we will start with the U.S. “incident command structure,” or ICS, and then proceed to discuss the U.N.’s cluster management system.