In terms of significant physical damage, aside from a few historical structures in Mineral, Va., and other structures near the epicenter, Washington, D.C., seemed to encounter the most publicly recognizable and costly damage. The National Cathedral, home to some of the nation’s most memorable religious services, had several of its top spires topple off, as well as some other structural damage, causing it to close for several weeks.

The tallest structure in the city, the Washington Monument, sustained enough damage to cause the National Park Service to close the famous obelisk to all visitors until all of the discovered cracks are repaired in 2012.

Probably most unsettling to everyone in Washington and New York City was the type of day on which the earthquake happened. The skies were clear and blue, the temperature was more than comfortable and the weather was perfect … just like on Sept. 11, 10 years ago.

With the anniversary of that tragic day commemorated this year, the events of 2011 served as a powerful reminder that threats and dangers in all of their forms, be they natural or man-made, are and always will be around us. The metric after each of these events, in far off places like Japan, Thailand, and Turkey, as well as the United States, is that preparedness matters. Whether it be prior to something actually happening or even afterward as response efforts are under way, the ability to sensibly react, respond, and recover makes all the difference.

That has long been an admonition of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and emergency managers in the public and private sector, but in 2011, those admonitions were tested and stressed in ways not done before.

2011 proved to be record-breaking, with Obama declaring more than 90 disasters for the year. According to estimates by the National Climatic Data Center, this year also had more billion-dollar disasters than any previous year on record.

For as costly as each has been in terms of lives, property, and money lost, how the United States responded to each disaster domestically as well as internationally shows how far emergency management has come.

2011 saw no systemic breakdowns of leadership or response operations as there were during Hurricane Katrina six years before. With a reinvigorated and recapitalized FEMA, increased public- and private-sector investments at the state, regional, local, and business levels in emergency management, and improved training, coordination, and cooperation among all parties, the various systems worked as intended. While there were challenges and disagreements that occurred among various parties at every event, wholesale operational collapses and dysfunction became vestiges of the past rather than expectations of the present. That’s a metric few have recognized, but it’s a fact that history will record.

Internationally, the level of communications between countries about the natural events as well as other threats has also increased and improved. Very simply, when a firefighter who answered a 9-1-1 call of a house fire in Annandale, Va., can be working in Ofunato, Japan, only 48 hours later to find survivors of an earthquake and tsunami, there has to be something working right.

A year from hell will teach many things: about what the threats really are; what their consequences could be; and how you decide to move forward. It will also show you how far you’ve come. Those capacities somehow don’t make the world and Mother Nature seem so hellacious after all. They give hope for the future.

This article was first published in The Year in Homeland Security: 2011/2012 Edition.