Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our Week 4 lecture on the evolution of emergency action planning. Hopefully, you've had an opportunity to review the Week 4 overview in Canvas. The overview provides you with a glimpse of the material that we will be covering this week. And specifically, it explains the importance of having emergency action plans. I wanted to lecture this week on the evolution of emergency action plans because it's important to just reflect on how the world has changed, which has had a direct impact on emergency action planning for employers in the United States.
So these are the topics that I will be discussing during today's lecture. I'm going to first start off discussing historical practices in emergency action planning. And then I'll be discussing current priorities and emergency action planning, and finally, future considerations for emergency action planning. And at the end of the lecture, I have some additional resources for you as always.
Okay. Historical practices in emergency action planning. So in what is considered modern history in the 18th and 19th centuries, emergency action planning actually predates OSHA and FEMA by hundreds of years. And so from Week 1, you know what OSHA is, and this week in your learning materials, you'll be reading about what FEMA is. And FEMA is a US government agency just like OSHA is.
FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and their mission is on their website. And it states that FEMA helps people before, during, and after disasters. Now, even still, without OSHA and FEMA back then, those employers, such as manufacturers, hospitals, retail stores, and restaurants, they still had the plan for emergencies back then. But the emergencies that they were planning for were like the floods and earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, blizzards.
All of those are natural disasters. And then workplace emergencies like chemical spills and facility fires or severe employee injuries and illnesses, so these would have been the extent of the emergencies that impacted workplaces back then. And so this is just to give you some perspective on historical emergency action planning. Now with current priorities, however, in emergency action planning, the world has continued to change very much so from the 18th and 19th centuries and into the 20th century, and even now in the 21st century.
So our priorities for emergency action planning have had to expand beyond emergencies that were prioritized in the past to include emergencies now, such as cybersecurity. We've seen the entire operations of government agencies and corporate companies come to a screeching halt during cybersecurity attacks. Terrorism, we've seen the catastrophic devastation that has been caused by terrorist attacks in the US and around the world. And workplace violence, and according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, almost 10% of the fatalities that occurred in US workplaces in 2017 were actually cases of workplace violence.
So those numbers are staggering. And even wildfires. So wildfires have actually gotten larger by 500% since 1970. And so this is not to say that the emergencies that I was mentioning on the historical practices slide are not still priorities, I just want to call your attention to how our current priorities have had to go beyond historical priorities due to how the world has changed.
So then, with future considerations for emergency action planning, as we know, the world is going to continue to change as will the next kinds of emergencies that will impact the workplace. And so these kinds of emergencies may well include biological and chemical terrorism, social or political unrest, and natural disasters 2.0 as I call them due to climate change. And so employers must be cognizant of how the world is changing around them. And that will undoubtedly bring forth new kinds of emergencies that can directly affect their operations.
So planning should start for these new kinds of emergencies at any time. And there's no time like the present. So, that does complete today's lecture. And these are additional resource links for this week. And as I mentioned during last week's lecture, these links are also provided for you directly in Canvas for easier access. And these are the sources that I referenced today when I discussing FEMA and the current priorities in emergency action planning.
So as always, please submit any questions or comments you may have about the material that was covered today via the Canvas inbox messaging feature. And thank you for tuning in.