Emergency Management; Today and Yesterday - a Comparison

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Hearing it from the front line

The after-math of a disaster led to lessons learned and new directions in national preparedness for a similar event. Donahue and Tuohy describe in their paper on lessons learned, that some of the same mistakes are done over and over again, even there is a simple fix for some (Donahue & Tuohy, 2006). Their study objects were eleven expert incident managers, which were chief-level officers. The major pitfall in their study was identified as uncoordinated leadership. Here the main complaint was that there was no consistent line. If there are multiple effected locations of a disaster, each location will establish an Incident Command with the hope of graduating to “Command and Control” (Donahue & Tuohy, 2006). Additional, if an incident has evolved to a larger scale, delegates assigned to the Emergency Operation Center (EOC) were not respected if they did not have any decision-making authority (Donahue & Tuohy, 2006).

Other continuous failing points were failed communication, weak planning, resource constraints, and poor public relations. The communication failure was pointed out in both regards – information sharing amongst each other (responding agencies) and interchangeable equipment from a technological standpoint. Hurricane Katrina showed how vulnerable technology can be, when the needed infrastructure is destroyed. It is important that all agencies for a region agree on a shared system (Donahue & Tuohy, 2006).

Hurricane Katrina revealed as well the impact of weak planning. The evacuation plan for New Orleans was severely inadequate. Donahue and Tuohy pointed out the importance in the planning process the buy-in of each involved party and the participation of the major stakeholders (Donahue & Tuohy, 2006).

Budget cuts lead to resource strains, but also inadequate logistics and resource management can lead to trains in resources. Another pitfall is the tracking of resources and the ability to have them activated in a timely manner. This leads to redundancy of resources or the underutilization of available assets.

Public relations are a major concern in the preparedness and mitigation effort. Many lives could be saved if the public would comply with the recommendations the local authorities make in the onset of a weather based disaster (anticipated flooding). Sometimes the message is not clear enough for the individual and sometimes the delivery method is not productive. Other issues are the willingness of the public to comply with the recommendations, because they are still in denial that nothing would happen to them (Donahue & Tuohy, 2006).

Adjusting to new situations and disaster

The environment is constantly changing. Disaster can strike at any given time, man-made and natural. Recently more violence attacks initiated by single persons (active shooter incidents) are reported in the news. It will sooner or later impact our privacy rights in public spaces. It will have an impact on building codes to implement safe areas and more emergency evacuation routes, as well as limited accessibility of secondary or employee entrances. The global climate is changing and shifting, areas which used to be green and lush develop to desert or sub-desert like states, while other areas not used to large amounts of rain suddenly drown in the middle of the summer. Polar caps and glaciers melt, leading to rising sea levels. It will displace people to new locations. Populations are constantly growing; more food supplies have to be grown on smaller areas. These new situations have impact on the emergency management of tomorrow.

Conclusion

Emergency Management will be always an important measure to mitigate disasters. The past has shown that well prepared communities recover faster from a disaster than ill prepared ones. Costs in recovery efforts are rising. Emergency management is designed to initiate response and recovery operations for different types of disaster, man-made or natural. New available technology will create new challenges, decontamination of new developed hazards or pre-existing hazards (chemicals or radioactivity from power-plans) to emergency management as well as it creates new opportunities (new building materials and codes, location devices). Political changes can influence the approach in emergency management, as well as scientific data on natural hazard assessments (Lindell. et. al., 2007). With the increase of population hazard-prone areas will be urbanized, with the knowledge of possible disastrous effects. Disasters can leave an area inhabitable, which leads to the displacement of a large amount of people. All these possible scenarios need to be managed and organized through emergency Management.

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REFERENCES

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Donahue, A.K., Tuohy, R.V. (2006). Lessons We Don’t Learn: A Study of the Lessons of Disasters, Why we Repeat Them, and How We Can Learn Them. Vol. 3(2). Homeland Security Affairs. Retrieved from http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=2.2.4 on 13AUG2016.

Haddow, G.D., Bullocl, J.A., Coppola, D.P. (2014). Emergency Management.(5th ed.). Waltham, MA; Butterworth-Heinemann.

Lindell, M.K., Prater, C., Perry, R.W. (2007) Introduction to Emergency Management. Hoboken, NJ; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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NIMS Training Guidelines for FFY 2009. Retrieved from http://www.dhses.ny.gov/training/nims/documents/nims_training_guidance.pdf on 08AUG2016.

Strohm, C. (2005). DHS failed to use catastrophe response planin Katrina’s wake. Government Executive. Retrieved from http://www.govexe.com/defense/2005/10dhs-failed-to-use-catastrophe-response-plan-in-katrinas-wake/20436 on 09AUG2016.

11th Annual All-Hazards Emergency Management Higher Education Conference (2008). National Incident Management System (NIMS). Retrieved from http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu/08conf/presentation/Chandler%20-%20National%20Incident%20Management%20System.NIMS.doc on 10AUG2016.