The governor’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission has heard testimony from an array of experts on school security, mental health, and gun violence prevention in the past year and a half, but none spoke more authoritatively on the impact of sudden chaos on the orderly life of a community than Newtown First Selectman Pat Llodra. She addressed the panel last Friday. Commissioners sat rapt as Mrs Llodra described what it was like in the days following December 14, 2012 to keep a local government functioning in the eye of a storm of 6,000 phone calls, 200,000 pieces of mail, 65,000 teddy bears, the spontaneous proliferation of memorial funds, cash and material donations, wave after wave of relentless media, and volunteers showing up with therapy dogs, massage tables, and professional mental health services. One impressed commissioner told the first selectman, “You have set a new standard.” Mrs Llodra’s message, however, was that what Newtown went through shouldn’t be the standard.

Newtown was fortunate to secure the volunteer services of four executives from General Electric, expertise from Microsoft to create a system to inventory donations, the Adventist Community Services Disaster Response group to help with the distribution of gifts, and uncounted others who stepped forward to support official efforts to respond to the 12/14 tragedy. It would be nice to think that whatever tragedy prevention measures that emerge from the advisory commission’s work will be 100 percent effective. But as Mrs Llodra noted, “probabilities and possibilities tell me that there will be no such guarantee.” Her point? “Let’s be prepared better to manage a crisis should one come our way.”

For tragedies on the scale of what happened in Sandy Hook, the state should have contingency plans ready to roll out – particularly for organizing fundraising efforts and mental health services, which proved to be particularly unwieldy in the aftermath of 12/14. For example, One Fund Boston, a 501c3 organization, was created at the direction of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Thomas Merino the day after the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013. It gave those rallying to support the people of Boston a focus for their generosity, and it gave local officials better coordination of benefit distribution. Also, the ad hoc nature of the mental health services that showed up in Newtown in December 2012, left local officials without a means to vet the credentials and services of the providers. It would be better for the state to have an action plan for a variety of disaster events that includes mental health support. It should be, as Mrs Llodra observed, “part of what happens naturally, and not an add-on.”

All of Newtown should be grateful that ordinary people rallied in an extraordinarily difficult time to help the community withstand the crush of challenges thrown at it. But no town should have to make it up as it goes along to the extent that Newtown was forced to do. We trust that the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, after hearing Newtown’s remarkable story, will recommend a statewide system of disaster response that anticipates the worst a community may face and then addresses it.