The Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center is a civilian command facility in Virginia, U.S. used as the center of operations for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Also known as the "High Point Special Facility" (HPSF), its preferred designation since 1991 is "SF".
The facility is a major relocation site for the highest level of civilian and military officials in case of national disaster, playing a major role in U.S. continuity of government (per the Continuity of Operations Plan).
Mount Weather is the location of a control station for the FEMA National Radio System (FNARS), a high frequency radio system connecting most federal public safety agencies and U.S. military with most of the states. FNARS allows the president to access the Emergency Alert System.
The site was brought into the public eye by The Washington Post, when the government facility was mentioned while reporting on the December 1, 1974, crash into Mount Weather of TWA Flight 514, a Boeing 727 jetliner.
Read more about Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center: Location, Evacuations, In The Media, In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words mount, weather, emergency, operations and/or center:
“Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump for a speech on conservation.”
—Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)
“Family values are a little like family vacations—subject to changeable weather and remembered more fondly with the passage of time. Though it rained all week at the beach, it’s often the momentary rainbows that we remember.”
—Leslie Dreyfous (20th century)
“War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view “realistically”; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent—war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“It may seem strange that any road through such a wilderness should be passable, even in winter, when the snow is three or four feet deep, but at that season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are continually passing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost as a railway.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)