The premise of the Emergency Management Assistance Compact or EMAC is simple: No government - local, state or federal - has all the resources to respond to all disasters. In an emergency, EMAC allows governors to call upon valuable response and recovery resources from other states. If those states choose to provide help, they can do so, knowing that this issues of liability, reimbursement, licensure, workers compensation, etc. have already been addressed.

The steps to an EMAC deployment are very clear: after the governor of the affected state declares a state of emergency and the affected state asks for help from other member states - the EMAC process begins.

An EMAC Advance Team, or A-Team, works with the affected state to identify its needs, shares those needs with other states and determines resource availability and cost; the affected state completes requisition orders and finalizes cost negotiation; resources are sent to the affected state. Finally, the assisting state asks for and receives reimbursement. Throughout the process, various EMAC leadership teams interface and coordinate with state, regional, federal jurisdictions and other government entities. [For details on the EMAC process, refer to the EMAC Web Site at www.emacweb.org.]

EMAC COMPLIMENTS INTRASTATE AGREEMENTS

Beyond following these basic steps, and understanding that the compact does not allow for deployment of individuals acting on their own accord, what really makes EMAC function at its best are two things: 1) When local and state responders know how the compact works, and 2) when intrastate agreements - agency to agency; agency to city; city to city and/or county; county to state, etc - are already in place before disaster strikes.

In addition to the interstate agreement (state-to-state), an intrastate model mutual aid agreement is also available. Many local jurisdictions are adopting and using it in the event of a disaster that requires help from another entity within state borders. This agreement was developed by the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) in conjunction with first responder organizations, and can provide the same protections that EMAC offers in a state-to-state scenario, such as procedures to resolve workers compensation and liability issues, as well as protocols for reimbursement. Established correctly, these intrastate agreements can be used by the state emergency management agency to send non-state employees out of state under EMAC.

Having these intrastate agreements in place - pre-disaster - speeds up the entire deployment process, whether it's in response to an event affecting only one community, or a major catastrophe affecting hundreds of thousands, like Hurricane Katrina.

THE EMAC ADVANTAGE

EMAC is unique among mutual-aid compacts, mainly because it can deploy any discipline a state is willing to send to another state, including law enforcement, firefighting, public health, transportation and human services. For example, in Hurricane Katrina, EMAC deployed more than 46,000 National Guard troops.

This flexibility to manage the ebb and flow of any disaster, along with its operational system, and a clearly defined chain of command, are some of the reasons why EMAC was cited by the White House, the U.S. Senate and House After-Action Reports as one of the few success stories from the responses to Hurricane Katrina. It's also why the compact has been activated over 80 times since 1999. These have included response efforts for the 2004 hurricane season during which four major hurricanes hit the United States in a six-week period, Hurricane Isabel in 2003, as well as the U.S. terrorist attacks in 2001.

The Emergency Management Assistance Compact is an interstate agreement among all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, EMAC allows states to provide assistance across state lines when a disaster occurs. Its value was demonstrated like never before in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita when more than 66,000 personnel with equipment and other resources totaling more than $830 million from across the country were deployed to the Gulf Coast under EMAC.

By Beverly Bell, NEMA Senior Policy Analyst