My experiences in disaster management began as an officer with a volunteer fire department in New York.  I served for roughly three years, until 1995, when I moved to Maryland.  I then started volunteering with the Prince George’s County Fire Department (PGFD), Maryland.  I have been a member of the College Park Volunteer Fire Department (CPVFD) since 1997, a line officer since 1999, and currently hold the rank of Captain. 
     It is within these last 5 years with CPVFD that I have truly had my first taste of disaster management.  Having only moved up the chain of command to the line officer position, my first-hand experiences of managing disasters are limited in such a way that I have lead only small crews, or managed the smaller pieces of a larger picture, during disasters. However, I feel between actions during specific incidents and my overall experiences of the past few years, I can offer a founded opinion on the state of our local disaster management system in the metropolitan Washington area.
     Does anything ever happen in College Park?  Well, not everyday, but if you hang around long enough you will go to fires and multiple-fatal car accidents. When the Boy Scouts of America have a nation-wide gathering in a non-air conditioned field house in the middle of a heat wave, you might also see a mass casualty incident.  And what happens when your nationally ranked collegiate basketball team beats their rivals?  Not as much as when they LOSE!  Being one of a few satellite HAZMAT companies in a metropolitan area will keep you busy when terror comes to down, and if Anthrax is on the mind of a million of your closest customers you will be dealing with it for weeks on end.  Lastly, just when you think it could not get any “greater” than 9-11, a category F3 tornado may come to town and prove you wrong.
     In my time so far, for as many “patients” I have seen become “victims”, I have seen five times as many return to my firehouse to say “thank you”.  And for as many arguments I have seen take place between different departments or agencies during an incident, about what the other one is doing wrong, I have witnessed five years of what I truly believe is successful disaster management. 
There is no question in my mind that the organization, training, and technology available to our emergency management field allows us to be extremely successful in saving lives and protecting property.  I have received hundreds of hours of instruction and continuous refresher training, and I have millions of dollars of equipment at my hands everyday for use to respond to a bad thing and make it better.  Which, in the end, has always been the outcome.  And in my mind, that is a qualifier of good disaster management. 
Institutional memory, in the form of state of the art training, combined with the best technology allows our front lines to be capable of doing what we expect them to do.  Years of working together and communicating intra- and inter-agency give all emergency managers in the metropolitan Washington area the ability to get almost any resource you could think to use at your command post there – and have it in an hour or less.  Collapse rescue, Medivac helicopters, medical “go teams”, and some of the nation’s best hazardous materials response teams are just a few of the those resources that I have personally put to use, or had available for use, in the past five years.
     It is not always a smooth operation, but I cannot criticize the system, as it exists today.  When I mentally prepared this article I was making a laundry list of what was wrong with the disaster management world that I operate in.  But when I asked myself, “well, what’s good”, I found that the list was longer and more meaningful.  Tomorrow’s technological advances are a given; it will be amazing to see how it will affect the emergency management field.  Add to that the fact that the principles of managing the crisis will probably not change too much and I have to say I am excited to see what the next 50 years of my life in this field will be like.