MARS - George Mason University

$30,200 in 2010. Each home is inspected for eligible damage, ownership, and whether it
can be made habitable within the allotted dollar amount.
FEMA has defined four phases of disaster work:
Preparedness: building federal, state, and local capabilities through emergency
management policy making, contingency planning, exercise coordination and evaluation,
and training;
Response: immediate activity after a disaster;
Recovery: activities once all the emergency needs have been satisfied; and
Mitigation:
activities designed to prevent and reduce losses from future disasters, such as
building codes, land use planning, requiring safe rooms, etc. (Waugh 49).
Preparedness and mitigation are similar. Preparedness focuses on the requisite
response activities taken after a disaster event, such as trainings and exercises so that a
community will be ready to respond once a disaster has occurred. Mitigation focuses on
reducing the likelihood and consequences of a future disaster, such as strengthening
dams, moving houses out of the floodplain, etc. (G. D. Haddow, Bullock, and Coppola
102). Agreement as to when disaster activity moves from response to recovery or when
recovery moves into mitigation is rare. FEMA generally states, chronologically, that six
months marks the transition to recovery work, i.e., the focus changes from addressing
immediate needs to long-term activities and planning. This varies depending on the
magnitude and type of the disaster. FEMA usually does not leave a disaster site for many
years. 52
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FEMA still has an office at Northridge Earthquake (1994), and has just finished its work from Hurricane
Andrew (1992).
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