Many councils have agreed with unions to run emergency cover for vital areas such as social care.
"The post-9/11 customers were more focused on business continuity and facilities security," said Robert I. Thompson, chief executive of Complient, which designs and runs emergency response programs.
Improvements are already apparent, Parsa says: "People used to say to us: 'You've never run emergency before; how do you know can you run emergency?" But since the trust has taken over, the local strategic health authority confirms that it has moved from having the worst figure for four-hour waits of the three trusts in Cambridgeshire to the best.
On Wednesday, the city asked Michael Callaghan, a Roman Catholic priest who runs emergency housing programs for Nazareth Housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to spend the night helping the volunteers at Brooklyn Tech.
A large building on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, owned by Google which houses several other service providers as well, was relying on a 90,000-gallon tank of diesel fuel to run emergency operations, according to one of the building's tenants.
"We hope that a lot of people have been able to find alternative placement by now, but I really do anticipate there's going to be a significant need," said Tim Rickey, the senior director of the society's field investigations and response team, which ran emergency shelters in Joplin, Mo., after the 2011 tornadoes.
Look around the food bank's neighbouring streets and you find yourself in the middle of two-tier Britain: in Jane's words, a "posh" part of the capital that also runs emergency food parcels out of the local community centre.
Many of you were moved to donate by reports you have read in the Guardian, such as Suzanne Moore's compelling account of her visit to the camps in Calais, where one of our appeal charities, Doctors of The World, runs emergency health services.
"We're trying to run emergency services for those people who really need accident or emergency care," she said.
