Mission of the
Damascus Emergency Management Team
The mission of the Damascus Emergency Preparedness Team (DEPT) is to serve the Damascus community by identifying and creating the resources — both inside and outside the community — necessary to be prepared to meet an emergency that may occur within or affect Damascus.

Not every local emergency will be of catastrophic proportions. Unforeseen interruptions to electric, gas or telephone utilities, water supply, and sewage disposal are obvious and more or less routine examples that can met with, with more or less conventional measures. Less obvious emergencies pose the greater threat in that they require a wider range of vision and imagination to conceive, anticipate, prepare for and respond to.
Contrary to popular belief, the most difficult of emergencies may be that one which has it origins not locally, but in an adjacent community or even a distant one. A biological or “dirty bomb” terrorist attack on Washington, DC could easily produce a glut of itinerant traffic that could clog our venerable Route 27 beyond capacity, to say nothing of the potential contamination effects that would attend such an event. A more serious recurrence of the venting problems experienced nearly two decades ago at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor just outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania could confront us with radiation challenges for which at this very moment we might not yet be completely ready.
Under such widely diverse circumstances the mission of the Damascus Emergency Preparedness Team is to provide a community emergency response mechanism, manned and operated by Damascus citizens, capable of meeting virtually any local emergency of any magnitude with appropriate measures to contain, manage and survive it.
For more information, please contact DEPT president Paul Laing at plaing56@verizon.net