The Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act of 1996 directed the Secretary of Defense to enhance capability and to support improvements of local response agencies. The Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 1997 authorized funding for “Metropolitan Medical Strike Teams” (MMST) that subsequently evolved into the MMRS Program. Ongoing Congressional appropriations have provided grants to 124 MMRS jurisdictions nationally.

The MMRS program is a federal resource made available at the community level in order to ensure a comprehensive and workable public health and medical response mechanism in the event of major disasters. In the Capitol Region MMRS jurisdiction, volunteers from all emergency response professions have come together to plan their joint response to the disasters none of us ever hope to experience. By supplying training and education to the responder community including local health and hospital personnel, MMRS raises the level of awareness at the local level while enhancing the response capabilities of the region.

MMRS is not designed to supplant traditional and long-standing local response plans that have worked so well. Rather, MMRS expands the conversation locally by bringing together both new and traditional planning partners to ensure that local and regional plans reflect the latest science, and so that latest technologies are made available.

Beyond the MMRS role as a facilitator of comprehensive planning that includes a public health and medical component, MMRS uniquely provides protective services specifically targeted at the first responders. The Capitol Region MMRS pharmaceutical program provides nerve agent antidotes in the event of the release of a chemical toxin, and antidotes in the event of the introduction of a biological agent into our communities, including an episode of pandemic flu.

Surely the most important contribution that the Capitol Region MMRS program makes to the local emergency planning process is to bring together planners from all areas of emergency response so that, in the event of a disaster, skills and leadership are shared with confidence. The effectiveness of the MMRS program ultimately can be measured not by the amount of equipment purchased, but rather by the improved level of coordination and cooperation among the first response agencies of the Capitol Region