Emergency Managers: Predicting Social Impacts

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Predicting social impacts can allow emergency managers to create strategies that can help protect groups facing social vulnerabilities and reduce the degree of the social impact caused by a disaster. Social vulnerability refers to the groups that are at the highest risk within a community during a disaster, these groups will need special assistance in order to effectively prepare, respond, and recover from a disaster (Lindell, Prater, & Perry, 2006). Therefore, it is important that emergency managers take social vulnerabilities into consideration when they develop the different phases of their Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) in order to minimize the casualty toll, property damage, and prevent or reduce the degree of the social impact, which could have long term negative consequences for the community. …show more content…

al, 2006). Understanding pre-impact conditions and event-specific conditions will not only help identify factors such as groups in social vulnerability, but they will also help predict the social impacts that a particular disaster could cause within a community. Although predicting social impacts is a very difficult process, it is very important that the local government and the emergency manager takes time to conduct this process because if not, the community could face a major economic, demographics, or political changes in the future that could affect in a negative way a large portion of the community (Lindell et. al,

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