Rapid Deployment Teams are put together to bring structure to a major crisis situation. Rapid Deployment Teams assess, manage, and deploy resources to natural or other types of disasters. Their main goal is to minimize the impact of the disaster on the direct victims and the community. Rapid Deployment Teams act under the direction of a March 2005 Department of Homeland Security Universal Task List (UTL) that defines the three main objectives for response missions: (1) assess the incident; (2) minimize the impact; and (3) care for the public. Rapid Deployment Teams are a cooperative effort that brings together professionals from many emergency response agencies and training them to deploy to disaster scenes. Issues involving the deployment of a Rapid Deployment Team are considered and include the requirements that the Team is self-sufficient, flexible, trained, and multi-disciplined. They also must have the necessary resources at hand in order to avoid over-burdening the existing emergency systems and must be prepared to deploy at short notice. Training requirements for Rapid Deployment Teams are discussed and include the requirements that the Teams be trained in advance so they are prepared for any type of crisis once it arises. The types of training needed by Rapid Deployment Team members are operations-based training, awareness of special needs populations, awareness of specialized programs to assist certain populations of people in crisis, and tactical training. Operations-based training should consist of incident command training. Finally, an appropriate and clear authority must be assigned to coordinate response from the field. Exhibits, endnotes