Disaster Preparedness: Are You Prepared?
Castle Disaster Preparedness – How It Was Then:
Roman forts and hill forts were the main antecedents of castles in Europe, which emerged in the 9th century in the Carolingian Empire.
The Early Middle Ages saw the creation of some towns built around castles. These cities were only rarely protected by simple stone walls and more usually by a combination of both walls and ditches. From the 12th century hundreds of settlements of all sizes were founded all across Europe, which very often obtained the right of fortification soon afterwards.
The founding of urban centres was an important means of territorial expansion and many cities, especially in eastern Europe, were founded precisely for this purpose during the period of Eastern Colonisation. These cities are easy to recognise due to their regular layout and large market spaces. The fortifications of these settlements were continuously improved to reflect the current level of military development.
During the Renaissance era, the Venetians raised great walls around cities threatened by the Ottoman empire. The finest examples are, among others, in Nicosia (Cyprus) and Chania (Crete), and they still stand, to this day.
Castle Disaster Preparedness – How It Is Now:
Disaster Preparedness (also known as Emergency Management) is a public authority field, a group of professions and an interdisciplinary research field that deals with the processes used to protect a population or organization from the consequences of disasters, wars and acts of terrorism. Emergency management doesn’t necessarily extend to the averting or eliminating the threats themselves although the study and prediction of the threats is an imminent part of the field. The basic level of emergency management are the various kinds of search and rescue activity.
Emergency management is independent of but closely interconnected with the fields of law enforcement and military.
Hurricane Sandy and 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan were the most large-scale and cost-intense single instances of emergency management in history.
