Becoming emergency foster parents

Well, I can tell you what emergency placements are like where I live. It might differ in other areas. Here, emergency kids can arrive at any time. And usually with almost no notice. More like "we have a 5 year old in the car, can we drop him off in 10 minutes?" Regardless of whether it's noon or 2 am. The 2 am ones are fastest, because there is no open DCF office for the child to hang out in for a couple hours while a placement is looked for, and the DCF worker who picked up the child wants to go home to bed ASAP. They're the times that workers are most often wrong about the children. Names, ages, even genders. A child in diapers wearing a pink shirt will get called a girl. A preschooler with a crew cut will be called a boy. Things are just happening too fast for anyone to check anything. They're also all too often the ones who just saw their parents get arrested. It takes a LOT to not have your removal into foster care be even slightly planned. The midnight drunk-driving arrest. The house fire with a stoned parent. The domestic violence report that turned out to be too bad a situation and both parties were arrested. Kids who need removed immediately are almost always more immediately traumatized than most. (But not always, because there is also the Friday night toddler left alone while parents went out to party. And the apparantly healthy kid who was never picked up from daycare when it closed for the day.) Emergency placements can last any amount of time. A relative could show up in minutes or hours. Or it could go to adoption. There is no telling, especially if the family had no prior history with DCF and the caseworker may not have even met the parents. I wouldn't believe a worker's guesstimate about an emergency placement, and would put much more emphasis on the results of the placement hearing than any worker's opinion. Of course these are just "tendencies". There are always kids who break the mold. Unusual situations. And they apply to here. Hopefully you'll get several answers.