Over the past two years, the Republic of Croatia has been hit by two very significant crises - high-intensity earthquakes and the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper provides a historical overview of the development of civil defense organizations and their operational forces at local and global levels. The primary purpose of accounting historical data is not to exhaustively state thier genesis but to understand how and under what assumptions these changes occurred and what we can learn from these historical events about their origin and development From the Introduction, the thesis arose that all significant cases of development of civil protection organizations can be attributed to the disasters that made them important and forced them to develop. Also, the thesis was presented and described that unfortunately these systems with the disappearance of the threat are unfortunately mostly forgotten and neglected, except within the legal framework. The third chapter describes and includes Croatia's legal postulations governing the existence of civil defense system, its organization, their powers and tasks in "peacetime" periods and also crises to better understand the position of stakeholders within the system. During the elaboration of topic, all the important technological achievements of the civil protection system at the national level, as well as of the individual operational forces, whose activities the system coordinates, were presented and described. Institutional examples of the implementation of new technical solutions are given, as well as non-institutional examples arising from innovation and the need of civilians themselves for selfpreservation and protection of their own and their environment's safety. Within the last chapter, all the findings and theses generated within the paper are summarized, and the importance of horizontal stakeholders - self-organized individuals and companies in the integration within the operational forces of the Croatian civil protection system is described.