Operations
The Division of the Strategic National Stockpile (DSNS) successfully deployed 12-hour "Push Packages" to New York City and Washington, D.C. in response to 9/11 and Managed Inventory (MI) to numerous locations in response to the anthrax terrorist attacks of 2001. These so-called push packages are warehoused in a dozen, classified, non-descript facilities under 24-hour, contractor armed guard protection. Geographically situated to allow rapid delivery anywhere in the Continental U.S., material will deploy by unmarked trucks and/or airplanes within 12 hours of the receipt of the request by CDC. The U.S. Marshal provides armed security from these federal sites to local destinations.
Following landfall of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the Gulf coast of Mississippi and Louisiana in September 2005, CDC deployed SNS assets, technical assistance and response units, plus federal medical contingency stations to state-approved locations near or in the disaster areas. Disaster responses to Hurricane Katrina included new "Federal Medical Stations" (FMS) -- austere, rapidly deployed, minimal care medical kits capable of housing, triaging and holding displaced patients for whom local acute care systems are incapacitated.
FMS-equipped facilities are not designed for routine, comprehensive community care. FMCS (Federal Medical Contingency Station) is intended to offer last-resort care and life support for critical-care patients during situations in which normal, day-to-day operations are disrupted. CDC is now developing rules under which staff operations can surge from normal 8 hour days to unrestricted work hours; rules governing the scope of care FMCS was designed to support, and systems to standardize and automate CDC business processes.
The SNS released one-quarter of its antiviral drug inventory (Tamiflu and Relenza), personal protective equipment (PPE) and respiratory protection devices to help every US state respond to the H1N1 Influenza 2009 swine influenza outbreak in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Strategic National Stockpile
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“You can’t have operations without screams. Pain and the knife—they’re inseparable.”
—Jean Scott Rogers. Robert Day. Mr. Blount (Frank Pettingell)