Quick, Clever, and Ready

Imagine hiding under the stairs as glass panes rattle in their frames, walls are pelted with hail, and debris swirls in the air. And then the tornado passes, leaving behind a trail of devastation, which will spur emergency management professionals to begin the complicated work of ensuring your community’s safety.

Response to an emergency — be it a storm, fire, or flood — is a huge draw on staffing, budgets, and other resources allocated according to population, region, and politics. And while emergency management, or EM, falls under provincial and municipal mandates, the asset most heavily relied upon in catastrophic situations is federally controlled: the Canadian Armed Forces. “CAF, an organization developed first and foremost to fight wars,” Johanu Botha writes in Boots on the Ground: Disaster Response in Canada, “is the one organization that links all three levels of government during disaster response.” With his book, the first major study of Canada’s EM...