Ionel-Alin Mocioi, PhD
Police Academy, Alexandru Ioan Cuza,” Fire Officers Faculty, Bucharest, Romania

Part of the book: The Challenges of Disaster Planning, Management, and Resilience

Abstract

Every day through the media, the population is informed by news about occurrences in their country or abroad of unwanted events with negative, natural or anthropogenic consequences. Among these include fires, forest and vegetation fires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, tornadoes, heat waves that result in a large number of victims in urban areas, zoonoses, road accidents, railway accidents, technological accidents that result in the release of harmful substances into the atmosphere, explosions, etc. It is also reported that they are serious, major, catastrophic, extreme or very large. At the same time, it is frequently communicated the establishment of the state of alert, of the emergency situation, of the zero-degree alarm, of the state of emergency, of the state of crisis, or of another exceptional measure. The series of expressions used in connection with such events may continue. Thus, the “emergency situation” can be defined as the totality of fortuitous and exceptional circumstances which determine, at a given moment, the problematic conditions of the existence of a human being, a community or an activity and which require immediate resolution. There are a number of arguments that have required and still require the rethinking of the structural conception of the management of those situations which subsume exceptional and, at the same time, undesirable events, which have a non-military character and which, by magnitude and intensity, threaten the life and health of the population, important material and cultural values, and in the event of their occurrence, urgent measures and actions nedeed, the allocation of additional resources and the unitary management of the forces and means involved are necessary for the restoration of normality. The major effects of the disasters on the civilian population, as well as the alignment with the standards of the European Union and NATO, required that an integrated Emergency Management System be created in Romania, able to ensure a prompt response and avoid as much as possible the loss of human lives, namely the National Emergency Situations Management System (SNMSU/NESMS-eng.).

Keywords: emergency situation, emergency situations management, philosophy, magnitude, intensity, risk, type of risk, crisis

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