This website inventories statewide—or intrastate—mutual aid systems in the United States. We hope that it will serve as a tool for analysis and that it will generate recommendations for the promotion of mutual aid.
The emergency management community has made a great deal of progress in simplifying and standardizing mutual aid between states though implementation of the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC). EMAC is a state-to-state agreement which facilitates the sharing of all assets with between states, as long as these assets are cloaked as agents of the state. This is an important characteristic. Because most disaster planning, response, and recovery resources are owned and managed by counties, cities, and municipalities within the states, most of our nation’s assets are not explicitly included in EMAC.
An equally important component of mutual aid is intrastate mutual aid compacts. These serve three purposes:
- They facilitate the sharing of resources from community to community within a state;
- They facilitate the sharing of resources between a county, city or municipality and its state agency; and
- They make it easier for a community and its assets to be deployed under EMAC.
The National Emergency Management Association (NEMA), the organization charged with administering EMAC, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have taken the lead in encouraging the states to develop the compacts, which incorporate the entire cross-section of emergency response disciplines and all of the political subdivisions in a state. These compacts are collected here. We have begun to compare and contrast the compacts, and to reach out to individual states for feedback about their implementation.
If you would like to comment on the data collection from a particular state, report on the progress in a state, or otherwise participate in the project please contact Keli Perrin at kaperrin@law.syr.edu.
