Canton on Emergency Management

Emergency Management Solutions - November 2022

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Conflict Management: A Neglected Skill

    By Lucien Canton

Certificates and Certifications

    By Timothy Reiker

Why It Pays to Educate Your Employees on Crisis Management

    By Erik Bernstein

Conflict Management: A Neglected Skill

One of the most important leadership practices required of an emergency manager is the need to inspire a shared vision. Our principal job is bringing disparate agencies and groups together to achieve a common goal. However, each agency or group has its own set of priorities and operating culture that are sometimes at odds with what we’re trying to achieve. This inevitably leads to conflict. Unfortunately, conflict management is a skill often neglected in emergency management curricula.

Conflict is not inherently bad. Indeed, it is an important part of the planning process. We solve problems by being open to alternative approaches and understanding different perspectives. However, when conflict descends into an us-versus-them situation, it can have dire consequences and lead to a complete stalemate.

In her recent book, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, journalist Amanda Ripley identifies high conflict as “a conflict that becomes self-perpetuating and all-consuming, in which almost everyone ends up worse off.” Such a conflict is generally binary; that is, it forces participants to choose one side or another and cuts off any consideration of alternative courses of action. In many cases, the original cause of the conflict is subsumed by larger emotional issues.

A key point to keep in mind is that both sides claim the moral high ground. In The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy academic and political commentator Thomas Sowell makes this point, showing how disagreement is viewed not only as wrong but morally reprehensible. In one example, he shows how the War on Poverty of the Johnson administration was conceived at a time when poverty in the United States was declining and against the advice of experts who pointed out that the proposed program would increase poverty. When the program was assessed in later years and the experts were proven right, those that spoke out were pilloried as morally bankrupt for not acknowledging the many people who had been provided financial assistance under the program, even though the goal of the program was never achieved.

Ripley notes that there are many factors that exacerbate high conflict. Some are internal, such as confirmation bias and group identities. Others are external, such as humiliation, corruption, and conflict entrepreneurs who seek to benefit from the crisis. This makes diffusing high conflict particularly difficult. The key seems to be understanding what Ripley calls the “understory”, the issue behind the conflict. This means understanding not just the original cause of the conflict but the reason why that cause was important.

After a series of hotel fires in San Francisco, we pulled together a planning team to address how we could improve our response. We realized quickly that we would also need to consider mitigation and recovery issues rather than focusing solely on response. As part of mitigation, our fire marshal offered to conduct on-site fire prevention classes at each residential hotel. This was opposed by local homeless advocacy groups on the basis that residents would not come to hear the classes. Instead, they proposed that they hire one of the residents on a small stipend to encourage attendance and provide pizza at each class as a draw. The city agencies felt this was a ploy to obtain additional funding for advocacy programs, a belief that I shared. However, with hindsight, I believe the real issue was not the funding, which was minor in terms of the money already being provided to the advocacy groups, but rather community visibility, an issue with which the groups were constantly contending. We did resolve the issue amicably, but had we had this understanding at the time it would have saved us a lot of time and effort.

Understanding the understory requires listening to the other side. This is not just giving the appearance of listening but hearing what is being said and feeding it back to the speaker in a way that lets them know they have been heard. It sounds simple but it is decidedly not. It takes training and practice. As I mentioned earlier, this is an area in which many of us have received little or no training. However, the ability to manage conflict and, particularly in the current political environment, to defuse high conflict is an essential skill for emergency managers and one we should be emphasizing.

Emergency Management Solutions - October 2022

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Disaster Insurance: A Stacked Deck?

    By Lucien G. Canton

Incident Management Is a Technical Skill

    By Timothy "Tim" Riecker

5 Tips to Help You Prepare for Online Reputation Management

    By Erik Bernstein

 

Disaster Insurance: A Stacked Deck?

Some years ago, my colleague Valerie Lucas did an analysis of data from the Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP) and found that emergency managers performed better in preparedness and response than in mitigation and recovery. This was not altogether surprising since many emergency managers at the time came primarily from tactical or operational backgrounds. The skills developed over a career in various emergency services were easily transferred to preparedness and response. However, mitigation and recovery are strategic in nature and require a more nuanced approach that is very different from that required for operational tasks. As emergency management has evolved, so has the need for emergency managers to be more strategic in their thinking.

This need for strategic thinking demands that emergency managers be more adept at identifying and addressing strategic issues that can affect community restoration, particularly as related to mitigation and recovery. It is only within the last few years that we've come to realize the importance of planning for long term recovery and to recognize the value of the harm reduction achieved through mitigation. As we've become more cognizant of the strategic issues involved, we have begun to realize that our approach to community restoration has serious systemic issues. This is particularly true when dealing with issues related to insurance.

Insurance becomes important when one realizes that most of the funding provided for recovery and reconstruction comes from insurance and not from the government. Following Hurricane Harvey in 2017, for example, insurance accounted for 61 percent of assistance dollars, amounting to $16.2 billion. Of that 45% was provided by the National Flood Insurance Program, with the remaining 55% was provided by various private insurance. However, insurance company practices often create major barriers to community restoration.

In a 2016 documentary on Hurricane Sandy, Frontline made the case that there were significant systemic issues in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The documentary found that the federal government did not have data on whether the fees charged by insurance companies for administering the program had any relation to actual administrative costs. Further, the government had no idea what percentage of profit was being earned by the insurance companies and whether those profits were reasonable.

As costs to the NFIP continued to increase following events like Hurricane Sandy in 2012, congress began to pressure insurance companies to reduce costs. As a result, insurance companies began a program to significantly reduce the amount of payout provided to disaster victims. While much of this was accomplished by simply denying claims using a convoluted adjustment process, Frontline found evidence of fraud where reports of damage were altered to deny claims. Where these fraudulent reports were successfully challenged in court, the NFIP reimbursed court costs to the insurance companies but not to the victims.

But fraud isn’t always necessary, given the requirements that insurance companies have put in place for making claims. For example, insurance companies frequently demand itemized lists of building contents before approving a claim. These lists often request information that most homeowners don't have at the best of times, let alone following the destruction of their home and records. This information may include such things as date and place of purchase, initial cost, and current market value. In addition, there is may be a factor for depreciation which further lowers the amount of the claim. In a series of books related to insurance and recovery author Sean M Scott discusses these practices and methods for working with an insurance adjuster. In his presentations, he demonstrates how the contents of the “kitchen junk drawer” or the bathroom cosmetics drawer can have high replacement costs that can never be documented.

One further area of concern related to insurance is the proliferation of insurance fraud by unscrupulous and often unlicensed contractors. This is common after disasters. These contractors will approach homeowners while they are still in a state of shock from the disaster and get them to sign contracts for home repair. In many cases these contractors will convince the homeowner to allow the contractor to bill and receive payment directly from the insurance company. If any work is actually done, it is often shoddy and subpar.

Our concern as emergency managers is that if the system is failing the people we are intending to serve, we need to be advocates for reforming the system. For too long we have ignored strategic issues such as these and focused solely on response related issues. Response lasts a relatively short time compared to community restoration, the goal that is our ultimate end state. A flawed system that prevents us achieving that goal does no one any good. it is time we looked beyond response to consider how we can do the most long-term good for those we serve and that means becoming involved in larger strategic issues such as insurance reform.

Emergency Management Solutions: September 2022

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Is an Economic Crisis an Emergency Management Issue?

    by Lucien G. Canton

NIMS Change – Information and Communications Technology Branch

    by Timothy "Tim" Riecker

How Much Pain Does It Take Before You Care About Crisis Prevention?

    by Erik Bernstein

Is an Economic Crisis an Emergency Management Issue?

During the last recession, a colleague of mine in a neighboring county proposed that his office become involved in planning for the economic impact of the recession on his community. He received considerable pushback not only from his elected officials but especially from a good part of our local emergency management community. The consensus was that since this did not address disaster response, it was not an emergency management issue.

I received similar pushback when my office became involved in a potential garbage strike in San Francisco. I had been asked to provide maps to the mayor’s staff who were planning for the strike and then invited to help select possible collection sites because of my local knowledge. It soon became evident that the planners were faced with a problem in assessing the sites because of the many agencies involved. I suggested they form multi-agency teams and pointed out that this was something our office had considerable experience in doing. Within a couple of hours, our office had created and staged several such teams using our emergency plan. The pushback again came from emergency managers who felt a garbage strike was not an emergency management issue.

This goes back to an issue we have yet to fully resolve in the emergency management community, “What is emergency management?” Emergency managers of my generation frequently came to the profession as a second career. We tend to be comfortable dealing with disaster response and hierarchical organizations and view our roles as primarily response oriented. This is one of the reasons the introduction of the comprehensive emergency management model with its emphasis on mitigation and recovery planning was a hard sell and still has implementation problems. But emergency management is not static and is continually evolving, so maybe it’s time to recognize that we have responsibilities beyond just responding to a major disaster.

If we are truly committed to all-hazards planning, we need to be cognizant of anything that has the potential to harm the communities we serve. I wrote recently of the need to for emergency managers, particularly those in senior positions, to understand political economics. This becomes even more critical as we enter another economic downturn.

While an economic recession may not in itself seem like an emergency management issue, it increases a community’s vulnerability and anything that increases vulnerability should concern emergency managers. People with limited resources are not able to prepare for disaster by stockpiling emergency supplies nor do they have disposable income to afford insurance or to perform repairs to damaged structures. We can also expect to see an increase in the homeless population as people lose jobs and homes, which will place increased demand on shelter and feeding operations following a disaster. There is also the possibility of increased crime and the potential for civil disturbance.

The impact of a recession goes beyond just increased vulnerability of the local population; it will also have a direct impact on our ability to respond. High unemployment and home foreclosures mean a reduced tax base which will result in budget cuts. When a community is struggling to fund essential services, the logical choice is cut contingency services, such as emergency management planning, training, and exercises.

While emergency managers may have a very limited role in dealing with an economic crisis, we need to at least be aware of the issues and proposed response being formulated by elected officials. More importantly, we need to consider the potential impact of such a crisis on our ability to prepare and respond to disaster and to plan for increased vulnerability and reduced resources. Most of all, we need to acknowledge that if we are truly dedicated to all-hazards planning, anything that has a negative impact on the communities we serve is indeed an “emergency management issue”.

Emergency Management Solutions - August 2022

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Is It Time to Rethink The Emergency Operations Center

    by Lucien Canton

Legislative Advocacy in Emergency Management

    by Timothy Riecker

What is Crisis Management and Why Do We Need A Plan?

    by Erik Bernstein

Is It Time to Rethink Emergency Operations Centers?

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 11^th. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Emergency Management Solutions - July 2022

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Featured Articles

Political Economics and Emergency Management

    by Lucien G. Canton

The Value of a Plan

    by Timothy "Tim" Riecker

Experts Share Top Indicators You Might Be Headed Towards A Crisis

    by Erik Bernstein

Political Economics and Emergency Management

When I left active duty for graduate school, my sister asked me why I was making such a radical change. When I told her how fascinated I had become with the interactions among European countries over history, she said, “You need to take a course in political economics.” Now these were two words in which I had no interest, but since she was the smart one in the family, I took her advice. I was fortunate to have an incredible professor who became a friend and mentor and found a whole new interest. Over the years I have become more and more convinced that emergency managers could benefit from an understanding of political economics.

I’m not suggesting that this became a mandatory field of study for the average emergency manager. I’ve maintained for years that one of problems is that we view emergency management as monolithic and have never developed a competency framework to define our profession. Emergency management has several career paths that require specialized knowledge and has a range of competency levels roughly equating to tactical, operational, and strategic issues. Political economics, although beneficial at all levels, is most relevant to the strategic level.
So why should senior emergency managers understand political economics? The answer is that it affects everything we do. Political economics is the study of the interrelationships between individuals, government, and public policy and how economic theory drives public policy. It creates the environment in which we operate by affecting vulnerability and hampers our ability to successfully recovery from disasters.

A classic example of the impact of poor public policy on vulnerability is the history of “redlining” in the United States that restricted the neighborhoods in which Black Americans could live. The effect of this policy was to both limit the acquisition of wealth and to create low-income neighborhoods in the least desirable parts of communities. From an emergency management perspective, this greatly increases the vulnerability of these communities. I witnessed this in my own city of San Francisco when “urban renewal” destroyed the vibrant Black community in the Fillmore District and moved the residents to Hunter’s Point, an industrial area that include a power plant later closed for excessive pollution and a former shipyard that is a superfund cleanup site.

This increased vulnerability ripples into recovery as well. I have mentioned previously the research done by Dr. Junia Howell, Dr.John Mutter, and others that demonstrate how wealth inequality has a negative impact on disaster relief. Because properties are of low value and in undesirable areas, the amount available for repairs (based on value of the property) is often insufficient to fund adequate repairs. Additionally, the neighborhoods will most likely have a very low priority for rebuilding or be candidates for government buyouts at low prices. The ultimate impact is the destruction of the pre-disaster community and the scattering of the residents.

I want to stress that so far, we have been talking about largely unintended consequences based on past poor public policy. Unfortunately, the situation after a disaster is even bleaker. In her landmark book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein demonstrates how in times of crisis people are in such a state of shock that governments can implement economic and social policies that would never have been acceptable in normal times. Among the examples is the conversion of almost all the public schools in New Orleans to charter schools following Hurricane Katrina. The results of this “market-based reform” are mixed and depends on who is doing the analysis.
This brings us back to the need for senior emergency managers to understand political economics. Clearly, there are issues here on which we can have negligible impact. However, there are things we can do:

1. We can study the history of our communities and understand where that history has created specific inequalities and vulnerabilities.
2. We can consider inequalities and vulnerabilities as we develop our plans for response, mitigation, and recovery.
3. We need to be advocates for at-risk communities when public policy is being formulated. This has been a constant theme for me: we need to be trusted advisors to our elected officials with a seat at the policy table.
4. We need to support reform of our disaster relief programs and policies on a national level.

Political economics is not by any means everyone’s cup of tea. But we must understand the impact of economic theories and public policy on vulnerability and our ability to restore the communities we are charged to protect.