The recent fires in Maui, Hawaii, have highlighted a major problem with emergency management that we continue to ignore. It raises once again the basic question of what qualifies a person to be an emergency manager.
On the morning of August 8, a combination of high winds and downed power lines resulted in a series of fires on the islands of Maui and Hawaii, with the worst hitting the town of Lāhainā on Maui. Loss of power and the high rate of advance of the fires disrupted communications, making warning and evacuation extremely difficult. Before it was over the fires would claim over 115 lives, with 388 people confirmed missing as of this writing, making the third deadliest fire in US history.
One of the major controversies that have emerged from the disaster is the decision by the Maui emergency management administrator to not activate the island’s emergency warning sirens. His decision was based primarily on concerns that the sirens were used primarily for tsunami warnings and activation would cause people to move to higher ground, directly into the path of the fires. He also noted that sirens were primarily on the coast, and few were in the affected fire areas. His decision is being investigated by the state’s Attorney General and criticism over it contributed to his resignation citing health concerns.
Whether his decision not to activate the sirens was sound is not the issue, however. Instead, the question that has arisen is whether the administrator was qualified to make the decision. Note that the argument is not over his competence but about his qualifications. Prior to accepting the position, the administrator had never received any formal training in emergency management or held a position as an emergency manager. His position prior to appointment had been as the mayor’s chief of staff.
In response to this criticism, the administrator pointed out that he had been present for activations of the emergency operations center in his capacity as chief of staff, taken numerous online courses, and had been selected in a civil service process involving 40 other candidates, a civil service exam, and interviews by a panel of experts including seasoned emergency managers. At the time of the crisis, he had held his position as administrator since 2017.
So, was the Maui emergency management administrator qualified for the job or not?
I think the better question is by what standard are we qualified to judge him, given that we have never defined any qualifications for the position.For years now we have danced around the issue of a competency framework that defines the minimum qualifications for various positions in emergency management. We have developed academic curricula that may or not be adequate for our needs. We have a hodge podge of certifications, some respected, some not, but no single certification that can serve as a minimum qualification for employment. We have not developed entry level positions and career paths to develop future emergency managers. In short, we have not identified anything resembling a generally accepted set of minimum requirements for any emergency management position, let alone attempted to meet those needed to formally define what we do as a profession.
Traditionally, our focus has been on response and, indeed, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook continues to define the position of emergency management director solely in terms of response, ignoring the emphasis on comprehensive emergency management that dates to 1978. The problem is that competency in emergency response does not equate to competency in emergency management.
Emergency management has been growing more and more complex due to changes in our operating environment and evolving doctrine, placing more demands on emergency managers. Our role has shifted from the operational to the strategic, from being technicians to being managers. More and more the demand is for risk assessment and analysis and the anticipation of the unexpected. Our job is to build the framework for community resilience and that means having a working knowledge of the research that constitutes our specialized body of knowledge about how people and institutions react to disaster. It means understanding that response alone is not effective without mitigation, which defines our operational environment, and recovery which defines our desired end state. It means developing the ability to work with non-responders to develop long-term strategies.
The problem is that we are our own worst enemy. For example, although the Occupational Outlook Handbook suggests a typical entry level education requirement of a bachelor's degree for the position of emergency management director, but we have spent years arguing whether a degree should be required for certification. We have seen the emergence over the past fifty plus years of an academic discipline that has contributed immensely to our ability to deal with crisis, yet we continue to resist making an understanding of this specialized body of knowledge a requirement for entry to our field. Indeed, we have no mechanism for restricting someone from identifying themselves as an emergency manager because we have refused to take the steps to formal classify what we do as a profession.
Whether this resistance is the result of the attitude, “I couldn’t meet that requirement, so it’s a bad one,” or because of the need to preserve post-retirement jobs or for some other ill-defined reason is moot. The real issue is that so long as we do not define minimum qualifications for emergency management positions and do what is necessary to define ourselves as a profession that can restrict access to those who do not meet those qualifications, we will continue to see positions filled by people with little or no qualifications for the jobs they hold. And there will be absolutely nothing we can do about it.
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