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An official report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that the U.S. government is not fully prepared to handle nuclear terrorist attacks or a large-scale natural disaster. The report goes on to say that the government lacks effective coordination and, according to congressional investigators, is “years away from ensuring adequate emergency shelter and medical treatment” in some cases.
According to a report in the website inquisitr, the report also stated that the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has “hampered” the level of preparedness for the U.S. by not consistently keeping account of disaster efforts by different government agencies, even after Superstorm Sandy hit in 2012. “FEMA is not aware of the full range of information,” says the report, which relied partially on documents from the Homeland Security Department, which oversees FEMA.
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Investigators also said that FEMA, which leads an inter-agency group formed to create disaster response plans, also needs to set clear deadlines and better estimated costs in order to ensure that all agencies fulfill their individual goals.
The GAO’s report further explains that the U.S. would still need one to five years in order to create a strategy to help determine whether citizens have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation, in the instance that the U.S. is attacked by nuclear weapons, and five to ten years to create a full medical response plan. The report also says that other basic needs considerations, such as making shelters available and providing guidance for communication protocol among first responders, was lacking in the U.S.
This report is just one of several reports focusing on the U.S. level of disaster readiness – or unreadiness, as the case seems to be in this instance – in upcoming months.
