SEATTLE - The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, bolstered by the West Coast's Nisqually earthquake and the World Trade Organization protests, have led colleges to take a serious look at emergency management as an academic discipline.
Some colleges are considering turning the field of managing natural and man-made crises and disasters into a degree or certificate program. Others, such as the University of Washington, have expanded course offerings to include dealing with urban terrorism.
"We have a lot of questions from young people saying, 'How do we get into this field?'" said Jim Mullen, director of emergency management for the city of Seattle. "For many people, the earthquake and (man-made disasters) are no longer an abstraction. We had a very interesting run of difficult events."
The field, which for decades garnered little attention in the academic world, has become one of the fastest-growing disciplines.
Five years ago, only five colleges offered degrees or courses in emergency management, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reports. Now, the number has increased to more than 70, with many more in the planning stages.
Much of the interest has come from the state of Washington, which some say has had more than its share of disasters. Besides the earthquake last year and the WTO melees of late 1999, there was last year's Mardi Gras riot and the arson at the UW Center for Urban Horticulture.
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"Certainly all that was magnified after Sept. 11, and everybody realized that disaster management is critical to the safety and well-being of the economy," said Col. Richard O'Connor, who heads the emergency-management education initiative for the Washington state Army National Guard.
"We can see from (the terrorist attacks) that just one event can have an incredible impact on businesses," said Richard Fiscus, a spokesman for Clover Park Technical College in Lakewood, Pierce County, which is considering offering a two-year program in emergency management.
"We started looking at private businesses and asking them, 'Do you have a contingency plan in place? A recovery plan in place?' And what we found was no, they don't.
"During the earthquake, there were workmen in hard hats carrying out computers because they (businesses) didn't have their data backed up or stored off-site, so all their data was in the office that has received major damage."
In a few months, Washington State University will decide whether to offer a master's program in emergency management, which would include dealing with toxic hazards and disaster recovery.
The state National Guard said the demand is so great that it would be willing to provide financial backing to WSU to get the program started. The guard also plans to lobby WSU to offer a doctorate program in the field.
Others already have programs under way. Western Washington University recently started online courses toward a certificate in emergency management, and Seattle University last fall offered a new course in the field.
The increased interest at universities underscores just how far the profession has come since its emergence during the Cold War, when fear of nuclear attack was a factor. Emergency managers were usually volunteers and part-timers who learned on the fly and had "an office in the basement of the courthouse or city hall," says FEMA spokesman Wayne Blanchard.
Three years ago, Bob Freitag of the University of Washington was among the first in the state to teach emergency-management courses on topics such as disaster assessment, which covered identifying flood plains and finding solutions.
This quarter, the former FEMA disaster-recovery expert added an urban-terrorism component to his introductory course, focusing on security.
"The (Feb. 28) earthquake opened my eyes," said Andrew Bohlander, a University of Washington graduate student. "Someone has to be there to clean up the mess. Not just the debris but the economic mess, and deal with the loss of life."
Knight Ridder Tribune
