Canton on Emergency Management

Emergency Management Solutions - May 2022

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It Is Time to Rethink Emergency Management

    By Lucien G. Canton

EMPG ROI 2022: Another Wasted Effort

    By Timothy Riecker

It Is Time to Rethink Emergency Management

The emergency management system in the United States is without question one of the best in the world. I, like many of my colleagues, have always been proud of my association with it. It’s not perfect, by any means, and there have been some colossal failures, usually influenced by politics. However, it’s an excellent system.

But not, unfortunately, for everyone.

Our emergency management system has been at its best when dealing with response. If one considers how the system developed from its roots in civil defense and the early influence of managers drawn mainly from the military, fire, and police, this is understandable. However, the mission of emergency management is not emergency response; it is the restoration of communities. That means our focus must ultimately be on recovery. Historically, recovery planning, along with mitigation, has not been adequately addressed by emergency managers, as evidenced by my colleague Valerie Lucas-Mckuen’s 2005 analysis of the Emergency Management Accreditation Program baseline assessments and the absence of recovery plans in many jurisdictions.

Over the past few years, there’s been a growing understanding for many of us in emergency management that recovery is biased against those who most need our help in time of disaster. This point is made very strongly in a recent book by Dr. Samantha Montano, Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis, a book that should be required reading for emergency managers and elected officials. Despite the title, the book is about the emergency management system and its failure to meet the needs of disaster victims during recovery. It’s about the intersection between emergency management, social justice, and climate change and how each affects the other. Most importantly, it demonstrates why we are not prepared to deal with the consequences of climate change.

One of the key points that Dr. Montano makes is that while it is important that we work to limit the effects of climate change, climate change is not something that will happen in the future. We’re already seeing increased erosion that is affecting coastal communities. Fire seasons in the western United States are growing longer, floods, tornados, and hurricanes are becoming more frequent and more destructive. This increased frequency of events has stretched the capabilities our emergency management system to the breaking point. COVID-19 created a situation where emergency management offices in all states were activated simultaneously. If we are to respond effectively to more frequent and destructive events, we must drastically improve our emergency management system.

This brings us back to the need to understand why we are failing in recovery. Our system is designed to reward those who have resources rather than those in need. Several months ago, I highlighted the research by Dr. Junia Howell on racial and economic inequality in disaster recovery that demonstrates that much of recovery funding goes to affluent neighborhoods rather to those most in need. Part of this is the result of historical discriminatory practices, such the redlining housing policies that resulted in the segregation of vulnerable populations, mainly people of color, into less desirable areas that are more vulnerable to the impacts of disaster. Federal policies intended to prevent fraud can also create convoluted application processes that are barrier to applicants less well educated than those in affluent neighborhoods. Lacking resources, those most vulnerable to disasters are slow to rebuild, a situation exacerbated by the fact that recovery funding is predicated on property value rather than on actual cost to rebuild.

This marginalization goes beyond recovery. People who lack the resources for day-to-day necessities do not have the capacity for mitigation or preparedness measures. They may lack the ability to comply with evacuation orders. They may be unable to afford necessary medical care. This creates a reliance on government assistance and increases the stress on the emergency management system at the time of disaster.

There are two barriers that we need to overcome. The first is deciding what role government must play in disaster recovery. Historically, there has been resistance from Congress to providing recovery funding. Our system has evolved piecemeal overtime in response to focusing events, high visibility disasters that created a demand for political change, and through any coherent strategy to provide assistance to the most vulnerable. The pushback has always been the concern that substantial post-disaster government assistance will serve as a disincentive to pre-disaster preparedness and mitigation.

The second barrier is what Stanford professor Michele Landis-Dauber refers to as “moral blamelessness,” the concept that disaster victims must be viewed as innocent of creating the need for assistance before being receiving aid. Prejudice against the poor and people of color play into stereotypes that generate considerable public resistance against a “government giveaway.”

These two barriers to recovery assistance are inextricably linked and raise the question, “How do we provide assistance to the most vulnerable in a way that is fiscally responsible and will not encourage an over-reliance on government assistance?” There are no easy answers to this question as it must ultimately be determined by politicians, not emergency managers. This suggests that we need to rethink emergency management from a social justice perspective that focuses on those truly vulnerable to disasters. It also means that we must be vocal advocates and, to a certain extent, activists. Politicians seldom listen to emergency managers, but they will pay heed those with strong community support. Encouraging and supporting community action means, as Dr. Montano suggests, truly applying the Whole Community concept.