President held a consultation with the leadership of the Ministry of Emergency Situations

Today, President Serzh Sargsyan visited the Ministry of Emergency Situations (MES). At first, the President observed the memorial of honor of the Devotees of Rescue erected by the donations of the Ministry employees, then he visited a group of structural units of the Ministry staff, familiarized with working conditions and talked to employees about their functions and works carried out by their departments, as well as inquired about upcoming plans and existing problems. Subsequently, President Serzh Sargsyan held a consultation with the leadership of the Ministry at the conference hall of the Crisis Management Center of the Ministry. The Directors of the Ministry’s Marz structures also took part in the consultation via live video connection.

During the consultation the Minister of the MES, the Deputy Ministers, the Director of the Rescue Service and the Head of Staff reported about the works implemented in specific fields under their supervision, the current problems, and works being done to deal with those problems, as well as about the development programs.

During his report the Minister Armen Eritsyan presented the main results of the 2010-2013 activities of the MES, the development objectives of the Ministry and its separate agencies, the works accomplished by now in the framework of institutional reforms of structural units under the Ministry both in Yerevan and Marzes, the steps taken to boost the effectiveness of the services delivered by different subdivisions and the progress achieved as a result. In addition, he spoke about international cooperation projects and the activities of disabled people as the vulnerable segment of Ministry employees.

The Deputy Minister of Emergency Situations Haykaram Mkhitaryan reported on the activities of the structural units working under his supervision, including the Agency of Seismic Protection Survey, 4 State Non Commercial Organizations (SNCO) and the Center on Active Impact to Atmospheric Phenomena SNCO, as well as the outcomes of the working activities of those structural units and the existing problems.

The Deputy Minister of Emergency Situations David Karapetyan reported on the ongoing activities and problems of the State Reserve Agency of the Staff of the Ministry and the Hydrometeorology and Monitoring Service and the Disaster Medicine Regional Center.

The Director of the Rescue Service of the Ministry, Major-General Sergey Azaryan presented the organizational structure of the division headed by him. He noted that the division is saturated with human resources, furnished with necessary equipment, the analysis of the response to accidents of emergency situations by the Service’s different subdivisions, the main tasks of the Rescue Service, as well as the various directions of activities of the Service and the works to be accomplished this year.

The Head of Staff Hamlet Hakobyan introduced the organizational structure of the Ministry and the steps taken to raise effectiveness of the personnel management and activities.

After listening to the reports of the Ministry’s leadership, the President gave instructions to the staff in charge on separate issues and touched upon the forthcoming tasks and the priority activities of the Ministry.

“I appreciate that in reality without any exaggeration we have recorded progress in capacity building of emergency situations management and, in general the process of the institutionalization of the Ministry moves forward normally.

It is very important that we don’t pace down the process, right the opposite pace it up in order to be able to finally state that the MES is well established and the reforms have delivered services that reach out to our citizens whenever they find themselves in non-conventional situation. I think that now you should pay serious attention to the interoperability with other services, more specifically I meanthe police and healthcare services. Of course, I know that some work has been done on this direction. However, here we also face huge challenges that we need to overcome. Finally, many of our citizens do not know and I think they do not have to know which ministry or service is assigned to deal with the danger they face. Therefore, we need to develop the 911 service and after a single call of a citizen the system should operate in synergy and the must receive quality service within short period of time.

The next issue that the solution is demanding is the geographic expansion of the services offered to our citizens and availability of equal and qualified services across the territory of the Republic, regardless of whether the citizen lives in Meghri, Tashir, Tavush or Yerevan. All your services must be available to all of them. This is crucial, and we should work on this direction. The people in Marzes think that the population of Yerevan get high-quality services (not only in the sphere under the responsibility of the MES), while they do not. Everybody thinks that the works being done in Yerevan are not so urgent and that those resources should be spent in Marzes. Definitely, this approach is very subjective but based on the nature of your duties it is evident that quality work is also required in Marzes as well.

I wish you all good luck. I want to assure once more that we will do everything to solidify the material base of both the Ministry and the services and of course in the first place to improve the social conditions and solve social problems. In this respect, the social conditions of the MES servicemen will not be any different from their peers in the Ministry of Defense or other bodies. We are going to introduce certain changes from June 1, and then everybody will clearly see the correlation between the employees of those bodies. I am saying this also because I know that some people complain by saying that fighting against fire is not less dangerous than struggling at the border. I understand that those duties are hard, difficult, but nevertheless, we should be able to differentiate the functions. Our every employee and serviceman must be socially secure. We will reach this goal,” said President Serzh Sargsyan.

The President of Armenia also answered the questions of the participants of the consultation related to the internal and foreign policy of Armenia, the socio-economic problems, the defense and security of our state, the possible solutions to the existing separate problems within the Ministry.

At the end of the consultation a group of MES employees were awarded encouragements for their conscientious and effective work. Deputy Head of the Rescue Service, Major-General of rescue service Vrezh Gabrielyan, Head of the Department of Foreign Relations of the Staff Mariam Gevorgyan, Head of the Department of Population Protection and Elimination of Disaster Consequences of the Rescue Service, Colonel Hovhannes Yemishyan, Head of Department of Service Management of the Rescue Service, Colonel Artur Khachikyan and the Head of the Department of Public Relations of the National Center of Technical Safety SNCO Sevak Mkhitaryan were awarded Letters of Commendation.