Canton on Emergency Management

Emergency Management Solutions - February 2021

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Featured Articles

Where Do We Go From Here? Learning From COVID

    By Lucien Canton

FEMA’s First Lessons Learned From COVID-19

    By Timothy (Tim) Riecker

Critical Planning for High-profile Events

    By James Dudley

Katherine Heigl Puts Grassroots Crisis Management To Work In Hollywood Return

    By Erik Bernstein

Where Do We Go From Here? Learning From COVID

One of the unique demands on emergency managers is the need to set disasters in context, to view the big picture even while engaged in immediate response. We need to be able to both look to our current experience to glean important lessons for future response and, at the same time, to try to project potential long-range impacts of the current crisis.

There are two things that both experience and research teach us. The first is that all disasters have ripple effects that produce both short and long-term changes. The second is that memories are short and the further we are from a disaster, the more inclined we are to forget the lessons we have learned. This means that our response to short-term impacts tend to fade over time and there is pressure to return to pre-disaster conditions.

If we look at historical pandemics, it’s relatively easy to identify their long-term impacts. I’ve written elsewhere about the impact of the Black Death on the economy of Europe. The flu pandemic of 1918 brought about major changes in how doctors are trained and licensed in the United States. This not unexpected. Pandemics are, like most major disasters, focusing events that highlight potential policy failures, and by nature precipitate major changes. The challenge is in recognizing changes that are likely to fade over time and those with long range consequences.

In considering COVID-19, I believe the first casualty will be, of course, social distancing. While there will be public pressure to maintain some safeguards, simple economics will ultimately drive us to eliminate many of the protective measures we have put in place. Consider restaurants, for example. As we reopen, we may see initial public expectation driving limited occupancy. However, the need for economic recovery will eventually push us towards permitting full occupancy.

Those safeguards that survive will be those that offer an economic advantage. Businesses are recognizing that a remote workforce offers cheaper access to talent, increased diversity, and significant savings in infrastructure. In my own city of San Francisco, many large corporations have committed to full or predominately remote workforces and have begun to either lease out or divest themselves of unused office space. This has led to an exodus of both company headquarters that are no longer tethered to the need to recruit a highly skilled local work force and to employees who are taking the opportunity to move to areas with a cheaper cost of living.

Remote work will have a ripple effect on local economies. Businesses that rely on office workers as their main source of income will have a hard time surviving. Their loss will translate to reductions in the tax base with a concurrent effect on the ability of local government to provide services such as public transportation.

The other side of the coin is what lessons we can carry forward. After September 11^th, we created a mechanism for responding to terrorist attacks using weapons of mass destruction.  As part of this program, we considered aspects of response to a biological attack including mass prophylaxis. Judging from our response to COVID-19, we failed to consider the application of the system to a widespread pandemic. The lack of a logistical system capable of supporting a nationwide vaccination program is one of the results. There will be future pandemics and we can no longer afford an ad hoc system.

One other area that we need to rethink is how we manage pandemics. Many jurisdictions chose not to take advantage of the coordination skills offered by the emergency management community. While there is no question that this was a public health emergency, emergency managers have the technical skills to help organize teams, coordinate diverse agencies, and marshal resources required to implement the decisions made by public health officials. In addition to the logistics of vaccine distribution, we have also relearned lessons on multi-agency coordination and sustained operations. This would suggest that the lessons of COVID-19 response could lead to a major rethinking of emergency planning, particularly in terms of large-scale events. It may be time to revisit how we plan for catastrophic events, as we did after Hurricane Katrina.

I have argued repeatedly that in the world of disasters, there is nothing new under the sun. Pandemics are predictable. They have happened in the past and will happen again. In past years, we planned for catastrophic events and for biological attacks. We need to leverage past planning to prepare for future events.