Stepping up on response to local "disasters" that are small, but big to the victims

Emergency personnel on the scene of an apartment fire and possible explosion in the 2400 block of Lyttonsville Road in Silver Spring on March 3, 2022. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

There is a letter to the editor in the Washington Post ("What's next for tenants displaced by the Lyttonsville fire?") about the aftermath of a multi-building fire at an apartment complex in the Greater Silver Spring area of Montgomery County, Maryland, where two buildings were destroyed, and two still standing buildings have been condemned.

The letter makes the point that substantive resources and help aren't being provided to the tenants, who need a lot more than the ability to sign up for recreation classes--one of the offerings made available at a recent "community fair" aimed at helping the victims of the fire.

This piece, "Revisiting stories: the need to provide programs to step in and deal with multiunit properties as they age," focuses on building safety a bit more generally, not about providing assistance to tenants as a result of building failure.  That should be reconsidered.

FEMA is a behemoth, providing aid to disaster aid to victims of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, etc.  But it doesn't respond to localized disasters of a micro-scale.

But could it be a model for localities, organized perhaps at the state level, for a way to provide a coordinated response and substantive help in a case such as this, the Surfside condo collapse, condominium condemnations ("Residents of SE DC condo forced to move out due to unsafe conditions," WJLA-TV), etc.?

Resources to review for developing program models include those produced for large scale disaster management, victims of crime and terrorism, etc., for example:

-- "Helping Victims of Mass Violence & Terrorism: Planning, Response, Recovery, and Resources: Planning," US Department of Justice
-- "Disaster Relief: Help Now, Help Later, Help Better," University of Pennsylvania
-- "Immediate Relief/Individual Support," Disaster Philanthropy Playbook

In the post-9/11 world, most communities have created agencies for emergency management, separate from police, fire and other emergency services.  

This kind of function could be added to those agencies.  Although the advantage of organizing at the state scale is that in most communities such events are infrequent, meaning directing ongoing resources to such functions could be seen as "a waste," and people don't have the ability to develop substantive expertise.  Then again, at the state scale, concern and capacity could be pretty distant from local needs.  Definitely a conundrum on how to organize such programs.