One of the critical elements of disaster response is the emergency operations center (EOC). The concept of the EOC is simple: a focal point that brings together the organizations involved in response and coordinates their activities to avoid inefficiency and duplication of effort. Used effectively, the EOC gathers data from these organizations to create a common operating picture that allows organizations to operate with maximum efficiency.
Good luck with that. Anyone who has spent time in an EOC knows that it’s closer to the tongue-in-cheek definition formulated by emergency communications guru Art Botterell: where uncomfortable officials meet in unfamiliar surroundings to play unaccustomed roles, making unpopular decisions based on inadequate information, and in much too little time. While the EOC is important to an effective response, it is far from efficient and may actually give a false sense of readiness to deal with a major crisis.
One problem with the EOC concept is our assumption that there is such a thing as a “typical EOC”. EOCs evolve based on several variables. Budget and space availability are two main drivers of EOC design. Another is purpose; some EOCs are intended to assume command and control over an operation while others are points of coordination. Corporate culture and the needs of participant organizations also influence design. For example, some EOC teams are organized using the Incident Command System while others choose to organize along the lines of the Emergency Support Function concept. Despite the best efforts of the National Incident Management System and FEMA training courses, while there are similarities among EOCs, there is still a considerable difference among them. Search on the term “emergency operations center” on YouTube and compare the results to see what I mean.
If there is no typical EOC, how can we be sure our EOC will be effective? The two indicators we use are exercises and activation for actual events. These are important and I don’t mean to make light of them. However, since a major crisis is, by definition, unexpected and exceeds local resources, I submit that we need to think beyond these methods of assessment. They are not true indicators of your ability to handle a major crisis. Instead, we need to think on a larger scale and think about what happens in a large crisis. Research shows that organizations fail in a crisis not solely because of the crisis but by an inability to manage the influx of resources and assistance.
We invest a lot of resources in an EOC. What we don’t always acknowledge is that no matter how big it is, your EOC is too small. EOC design is usually based on expected occupancy by the organizations expected to be present in the EOC. We also assume that everyone that is participating in the response will be present in the EOC. During my time in San Francisco, our EOC operations room could handle about 80 people. During a major storm we activated only our shelter team and found that we needed seats for 50 just for that one working group. During the COVID response, San Francisco responders realized the EOC was inadequate and took over a convention center to have all the necessary city agencies under one roof. The same experience occurred in New York after September 11th. Because the New York EOC was destroyed in the attack, the emergency management team re-established a new one on a pier that allowed them to accommodate the city agencies and supporting federal agencies.
This suggests that if we are truly to be ready for a major crisis, it may be time to rethink EOCs. There are three principal areas that I believe we should consider immediately:
- We need to think about how we coordinate decentralized operations. We already understand the need for department operations centers but the strength of EOC operations has always been the ability to create ad hoc task forces to deal with specific issues. The challenge will be how to create them in a decentralized environment, where to locate them on short notice, and how to coordinate their operations.
- Secondly, we need to rethink the resources available in the EOC in a view to making them deployable rather than fixed assets. We need to be able to relocate quickly to accommodate loss of the main EOC or the need to expand available space.
- Finally, we need to be prepared to integrate outside agencies, both in terms of integration into the local incident management system and into communications technology.
EOCs are not buildings, although we frequently think of them as such. They are the organizations and people who respond to the crisis. We need to stop over-investing in fixed assets and instead consider how the work of response really gets done and how we can best support it. I’m not suggesting we do away with fixed EOCs but that we instead leverage what we have to support a larger decentralized operation that makes full use of all our supporting resources.
