Canton on Emergency Management

Who’s Going to Use Your Plan?

Over my thirty-plus years as an emergency manager I’ve had the opportunity to review numerous emergency plans from a variety of organizations, ranging from small communities and federal agencies in the public sector to private sector companies in a variety of industries. After a while you notice a sameness to them, not surprising as most organizations follow the one-size-fits-all guidance from the federal government. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not against standardization per se and have even encouraged it in many cases. However, many of the plans I’ve reviewed seem to have a common feature: they will be largely useless in an actual crisis.

In his book Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster, sociologist Lee Clarke describes plans as “rationality badges” used by organizations to demonstrate that they are in control of a crisis, regardless of their actual level of preparedness. Writing in Disaster Response: Principles of Preparation and Coordination, Erik Auf der Heide devotes an entire chapter to the “paper plan syndrome”, the assumption that because a plan exists, an organization is prepared for crisis. In our rush towards standardization, we have made the development of a “good” emergency operations plan (EOP) the central focus and measurement of our planning rather recognizing that it is a tool we use to coordinate the activities of our crisis management team.  If your plan cannot be used by those charged with managing a crisis, you’re not ready, no matter how pretty your plan is.

Why are so many plans useless? I can point to many, many reasons: internal inconsistencies, duplication, excessive length, missing or hard to find critical information, no buy in from key stakeholders – the list is endless. But it all comes down to a simple concept: plans are not written with the end user in mind. Instead, plans are written to please a potential reviewer such as the public, a board of directors, or funding authorities such as state or federal agencies.  This results in a plan that contains information not needed by the end user but may be needed to demonstrate that the organization is conformant with specific requirements.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. The base plan is a brief description of the way an organization will approach a crisis. It is a concept of operation that describes overall strategy, relationships, responsibilities, and authorities. It should be brief and contain only essential information. yet many of the plans I have reviewed contain a lengthy description of the incident command system (ICS) to demonstrate that the organization is using ICS. Given that the implementation of ICS includes training for key personnel, the question is, “Who is going to use this?” Personnel who have been trained won’t need it. I submit that someone responding under the plan who is not familiar with ICS will not have time to read this part of the plan and would probably find it inadequate in that it isn’t task specific. If the intent was really to address lack of training, there are better ways of dealing with this problem such is just-in-time training or initial orientations.

One of the problems that I’ve encountered is that planners are not always conversant with emergency management principles and tend to create confusion when creating annexes to the base plan. A key concept in developing your emergency plan is understanding the difference between response generated and agent generated needs. Response generated needs tend to remain relatively consistent among crises while agent generated needs are created by the specific type of crisis. Functional annexes address response generated needs while hazard specific annexes address agent generated needs.

This seems a simple concept, yet I have seen many plans where hazard specific annexes recapitulate much of the information already covered in functional annexes. The problem arises when the separate annexes contradict each other instead of being mutually supportive or completely change the original concept contained in the functional annex. This usually happens when the hazard specific annex is created by a separate planning group and the annex is not vetted for consistency with the rest of the plan. At best it requires the user to switch back and forth between annexes; at worst it creates confusion and the possibility for conflict. Hazard specific annexes are essentially contingency plans based on specific assumptions and should build on the concepts and authorities already identified in functional annexes. Like the base plan, they provide a strategy for dealing with a specific type of incident and are not intended to be separate plans.

Don’t fall into the paper plan syndrome trap. Remember that the EOP doesn’t have to be a single volume that incorporates all the worlds knowledge. Demonstrating conformance with standards can be done through other evidence such as supporting plans, training records, and exercise after-action reports. Detailed information can be included in departmental plans, field operations guides, or manuals. Keep your EOP lean enough that the users can find the information they need without wading through extraneous information that could be better covered elsewhere. The plan is just a tool; it’s your crisis management team that is the important element in dealing with disaster. Make their job a bit easier by giving them a plan they can actually use.

Rethinking the Emergency Operations Center: Five Points to Consider

Besides earthquakes and fires, California can have very severe rainstorms. This is normally not a problem for San Francisco but 1997 was one of the worst El Nino years we experienced, with all California counties receiving federal disaster declarations. In San Francisco concern over a potential hillside collapse that might require evacuation of a residential neighborhood, a closed major highway that stranded motorists in the city,  and a large homeless population at risk for hypothermia prompted the decision to open a series of emergency shelters.

Like many jurisdictions, we had always assumed our emergency operations center would accommodate all our key personnel. However, when we included supporting agencies, voluntary agencies, and community groups, our shelter branch alone numbered over 50 people, completely filling our operations room. If we had also needed to respond to the hillside collapse, we would have exceeded the capacity of our EOC.

This highlights one of the dichotomies of our current approach to EOC’s. Establishing a permanent EOC, even one of modest size, is expensive, not only in initial construction and equipping but in upkeep and maintenance. This limits the size of many EOCs to one that is sufficient for small emergencies but totally inadequate for major disasters.

Add to this the fact that many of us have rarely considered how many people will need to be accommodated in the EOC. This is partly because many EOCs are activated for local events and emergencies that seldom go for more than a few hours, serving more as command posts supporting tactical operations rather than operational coordination. Our exercises run for a few hours and rarely involve shift changes or activation of alternate sites. This creates a false expectation that EOC staffing will be of a manageable size and all functions will be able to be performed there.

The reality of a major disaster will be quite different. All the senior department heads who were too busy to come to an exercise? They’ll be there looking over the shoulders of the department representatives you trained. Community organizations and business leaders will all want access to your information. Representatives from state and federal agencies, liaison officers from mutual aid agencies, teams from volunteer agencies, the list is endless. And don’t forget the media. This won’t be just the local reporters with whom you probably have a good working relationship; we’re talking about national media who have no interest beyond getting a story that plays well on the national news channels,  preferably one that highlights your perceived failures.

Think I’m overstating the problem? Following the loss of their EOC on September 11^th, the New York Office of Emergency Management established a new EOC on a vacant pier. The original EOC was designed to house 68 local agencies. I couldn’t find figures for how many people were at Pier 92 but the company that provided the emergency management software supporting the EOC reported more than 1,700 users, representing over 150 federal, state, and local agencies, as well as public and private companies. Could your EOC handle even a fraction of these people?

I’m not suggesting that we eliminate EOCs completely nor am I in favor of building mega-EOCs that might never be used. I am suggesting, however, that we should seriously consider how we can use them more effectively and what other facilities will be needed to support response operations. We need to accept several key facts that we tend to ignore:

1. The organizational chart we put in the Emergency Operations Plan is not how the EOC will be staffed. Have you ever counted how many people it would take to fill those neat little boxes? Your organization probably doesn’t have enough people on the payroll to do it. Similarly, the teams and positions described in the multiple resource typing documents issued by FEMA probably won’t be there. Be realistic in your planning and who you actually need in your EOC.
2. The EOC is a point of coordination, not necessarily where work is performed. This, of course, depends on the size of your organization and how you plan to use your EOC, but we already recognize this concept using department operations centers (DOCs). Teams may be more effective if collocated with the lead agency with supporting coordination done through their representative at the EOC. Alternatively, they may need to operate from a location separate from the main EOC.
3. The EOC may be where you initiate operations before moving to an alternate site capable of housing more personnel. You need to identify alternate sites and exercise your ability to activate and conduct operations from these sites. During the COVID emergency, the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management established an operations center at their alternate site at the Moscone Convention Center that housed over 400 city workers and representatives of city government.
4. With decentralized operations, technology becomes critical, both for sharing a common operating picture and creating ad hoc task forces to deal with emerging problems. Parallel communications systems and multiple options for internet access are essential.
5. Databases are more important than hardware. This was a key lesson learned from September 11^th. Hardware can be replaced relatively quickly, either through purchase or through personal laptops, tablets, and cellular phones. Plan for both access and connectivity rather than stockpiling hardware

Remember that what makes emergency managers so effective is our ability to react quickly to the unexpected by creating ad hoc task forces and adapting plans as needed to solve the problem. Plan your response to maximize this ability and don’t get too attached to a single facility. An EOC is not a building; it’s the EOC team that makes the difference in a crisis.

Politics and the Emergency Manager – Part 2

Last month I wrote about the importance of emergency managers understanding and being involved in their local political process. However, that’s only part of the issue. Local and state politics are more immediate but national politics can have long range implications for local emergency management programs. While an emergency manager will naturally be more focused on local political issues, it is critical that they also be cognizant of what is happening at the national level.

To understand why participation in national politics is important, we need to understand that our current emergency management system is not the product of intelligent design. Instead it is a collection of programs and directives resulting from legislation driven by what sociologists refer to as “focusing events.” A focusing event is a disaster that is so serious in its consequences that it creates sufficient public concern to force politicians to make changes to policies and laws. In other words, bad things happen and public outrage forces politicians to react, or in many cases, overreact.

In 2007, sociologists Claire Rubin and Irmak Renda-Tanali and attorney William Cumming prepared a series of disaster time lines that charted major focusing events and their outcomes. The timelines show the events, significant reports on consequences, directives and statutes developed as a result, and actions taken by the federal government. The timelines are a brilliant illustration of how our emergency management system has developed through reaction to events rather than through careful risk analysis and strategy development.

Unfortunately, public concern and elite panic have often produced an overreaction to focusing events. The most glaring example of overreaction in recent history was the fallout from the September 11^th where the policy of fighting terrorists outside the continental United States was implemented at the expense of increasing resilience within the US infrastructure and strengthening emergency management capabilities. The result was the debacle of Hurricane Katrina.

A second reason why national politics should be on an emergency manager’s radar is the disruption to plans and policies following a Presidential election. Key positions, such as that of the FEMA Administrator, are political appointments and change at the whim of the new President. Policies, directives and budgets and even reporting lines can change. During the Clinton administration, the FEMA director was part of the President’s Cabinet, in the Bush administration that followed, the director reported to the Secretary of Homeland Security rather than directly to the President. Of more concern is that changes in administration can result in policy changes driven by politics. President G.W. Bush’s FEMA director cancelled the poplar Project Impact program that provided minimal seed money to increase community resilience and proposed cuts to the National Flood Insurance Program.

Politics also play out in disaster declarations. We sometimes forget that disaster declarations are discretionary. A request is not automatically granted but is at the discretion of the President. In a 2003 study of disaster payments, researchers Thomas Garrett and Russell Sobel found that states politically important to the President had higher rates of declarations and that the mean level of declarations tended to be higher in certain election years than in non-election years. A similar study by researcher Andrew Reeves in 2007 found, “a highly competitive state can expect to receive over 60% more presidential disaster declarations than an uncompetitive state …these decisions have the intended electoral benefits… A president can expect a 1.7% increase in a statewide contest in return for a single presidential disaster declaration.”

What can a local emergency manager do? Clearly, with the demands of the job, national politics are the last thing on your mind. But there are things you could and should do:

• Educate yourself on the political process. A good place to start is Richard Sylves excellent book, Disaster Policy and Politics: Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
• Get to know your local congressional staff. Remember that politicians rely on their staff to help them formulate positions on legislation. Building a good relationship with a congressional staff person may well be more useful to you than a brief meeting with a politician.
• Know your local government’s process for lobbying federal representatives and taking official positions on legislation.
• Support the International Association of Emergency Managers. IAEM monitors national legislation so you don’t have to and lobbies for emergency management interests on proposed bills. They have successfully fended off significant cuts to emergency management funding and work hard to educate congressional staff on emergency management issues.
• Make use of your local constituency: volunteer organizations, community groups, professional associations. A handful of personalized messages from local community members carry more weight than a score of copied email messages or preprinted postcards,

Emergency managers tend to avoid politics and rightly so. Otto von Bismarck is famously quoted as saying, “Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.” Unfortunately, we need to ensure that our positions are heard on legislation that affects us. Politics is a numbers game, and we need to make sure we’re counted.

Politics and the Emergency Manager

“I don’t play politics!” How many times have you heard this expression or said it yourself? I know I have. Emergency managers like to consider themselves apolitical, that we provide relief to those in need and base our planning on the best available evidence without regard to political agendas. The truth is that politics is an integral and necessary part of the emergency manager’s job. You may not think you play politics, but it certainly plays you.

Leaving aside national politics, which is in itself a major topic for discussion, consider the fact that many local emergency managers work directly for elected officials. For example, in California the defacto  director of emergency services for a county is the sheriff unless otherwise stipulated by law. My own position in San Francisco was as a political appointee to the mayor. In such a situation, the minimum expectation is that you at least support the policies of the elected official for whom you work. There may also be pressure to take an active part in political campaigns.

And don’t think that because you’re in the private sector that you’re immune. Although different from public sector politics, corporate politics can be just as mean and  ruthless. I once lost a position with a private company because my boss became unwillingly embroiled in competition for the presidency of the company and the ultimate winner decided to replace us with his own team.

Assuming you can reconcile your responsibilities with the expectations of your elected officials, understanding the political process becomes essential for two important reasons. The first directly impacts your ability to get your job done: budgeting. In any organization, public or private, there is always competition for resources, usually money. You need to understand how budgets are formulated and how you can influence the process. This means knowing who the key players are and how they can be influenced. My colleagues in California and I challenged the state’s formula for distributing grant funding by showing a united front and leveraging our relationships with our federal elected officials.

A second major reason for understanding the political process is the ability to influence legislation that can either improve resilience or may have a detrimental effect on public safety. One of our Board of Supervisors intended to improve environmental conditions by eliminating the monthly generator tests performed by many organizations. The expectation was that this would save fuel and reduce harmful emissions. My office ended up working with a lobbyist hired by our local hotels, who were understandably concerned about the impact of not regularly testing generators. Together we were able to educate the supervisor as to why these tests were essential and he withdrew the legislation. Having the consensus between the hotel group and our office was the key to our success.

Influencing local legislation is not the only situation in which you may find yourself. Your jurisdiction will have a process to take an “official” position on state and, in some cases, federal legislation. In my case, this meant appearing before a working group of key executives to explain the reasons for requesting an official position. Once the group agreed and the mayor concurred, the city would instruct our lobbyists in the state and federal capitols as to our position. And before you say, “Hey, that’s not really my job,” it’s part of the Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP) Standard:

3.5.2 The Emergency Management Program has a process for identifying and addressing proposed legislative and regulatory changes.

So how do you deal with politics when you’re not a politician and really don’t want to get involved? Here are the five things I suggest:

1. Accept that it’s part of your job – You may not like it but you need to accept that monitoring the legislative process and intervening as appropriate is an important part of your job. Changes to policy and the allocation of resources frequently will require legislation and you need to be part of that process. You need to be aware of when legislation will affect how you perform your program, whether for good or ill.
2. Learn the process – To influence legislation, you need to know how laws are made and the best time to intervene. The most effective way is to educate legislators while the legislation is being developed and before it is introduced. It is much easier to change a politician’s mind before they have taken a public stand. You can learn the process by reading municipal codes or by consulting the clerk of your legislative body.
3. Build a consensus - My old boss, Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr. writes in his biography, Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times, “No matter how righteous your cause, you’ve got to do heavy political lifting to secure the consensus you need to get anything done in the actual political arena.” Emergency managers are at a disadvantage as we have a very small constituency. However, we can muster support from other department heads, citizen volunteer groups, the community, and businesses depending on the cause. It is not the size of the constituency that matters as much as how many people show up at a public hearing to support your position. Seek allies wherever you can find them.
4. Understand motivation - Unfortunately, most politicians are looking for short term wins that aid in reelection, so be prepared to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” We were able to get funding for a mitigation program to limit residential hotel fires because we found an ally in a new supervisor who was looking for a cause and was willing to listen to our proposal.
5. Do your homework - Just because your cause is righteous isn’t enough. Be prepared to answer how much your proposal will cost and suggestions for how it will be funded. Conversely, if you’re opposing legislation, have solid reasons why it should be modified or withdrawn such as cost, political consequences, and quantifiable risk.

If you’re thinking, “If I’d wanted to be a politician, I’d have run for office,” you’re right and I’m in total agreement. But if you want to do the best for your community and your program, if you want the resources you need, if you want to avoid bad legislation, then you have no choice but to get involved in the political process.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

Does The Private Sector Really Need ICS?

Since its development in the California wildfires in the 1970’s, the Incident Command System (ICS) has emerged as the default mechanism for managing crises. Mandated for use in the public sector under the National Incident Management System (NIMS), ICS has seen growing application in the private sector. However, while ICS has been relatively successful in the public sector where organizations tend to be hierarchical, is it really the best choice for the private sector?

To be sure, ICS has an impressive track record as an incident management system. It has been applied in small local incidents up to Presidentially Declared Disasters. It has been adapted to unusual situations such as organizing recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina. But even in the public sector, we find problems. In a 2014 paper, The United States’ Experience with the Incident Command System: What We Think We Know and What We Need to Know More About, researchers Jessica Jensen and William L. Waugh Jr. suggested that, despite what we may believe, ICS is not applied consistently among jurisdictions. While ICS has often been used as designed, it has just as often been ignored, partially used, underused, misused, and used in organizations and jurisdictions in ways that are 
necessarily compatible with the way the system is used in other organizations and jurisdictions.
If the organizations that are best suited to employ ICS have trouble maintaining consistency, what can we expect when ICS is applied to the private sector?

There are certainly good reasons for a private organization to adopt ICS. As I mentioned, the system has been proven to be effective and adopting it would simplify integration with public sector agencies. The problem is that many organizations, in both the public and private sector, adopt ICS in name only and don’t understand what it is they are committing to.

When my corporate clients suggest organizing under ICS, my first questions is always about their corporate culture. ICS was designed to work as a hierarchical structure, something that can be foreign to many organizations. I once reviewed a plan for a major high-tech organization written by a colleague. It was a beautiful plan, well-reasoned and logical, based on ICS. The problem was that the client was a chaotic organization with no organizational structure, policies, or processes. ICS was not something they could even understand.

This highlights the key problem with ICS for many private sector organizations: the imposition of a system for managing crisis that varies considerably from their day-to-day operating systems. This becomes critical when one understands that people under stress default to what they are used to doing. That is, they rely on their trusted leaders and try to use the systems they are used to. To overcome this barrier requires considerable training. Jensen and Waugh note that ICS training has three important dimensions: frequency, depth, and specificity, and that success is often a factor of the time between the crisis and the last training session. In my experience, private sector organizations do not fully grasp the training burden required to implement ICS and are rarely willing to commit to it.
The second major problem with ICS in the private sector is common to the public as well: equating the Incident Command System with the ICS operating structure. Research suggests that denying flexibility in response by slavishly following standard operating procedures or using a structure that cannot be modified to meet an evolving situation is counterproductive and that it is more useful to adapt resources and tactics to the situation.

I am not, however, suggesting discarding ICS completely. Instead, I advocate using the system rather than the structure. By this, I mean incorporating ICS principles, such as unity of command, management by objectives, and incident action planning into your crisis management planning and focusing on the five management functions of Command, Operations, Planning, Logistics, and Finance/Administration. Using this as a foundation, your crisis management team can be structured in a way that is most consistent with your corporate culture. The closer the crisis management team resembles day-to-day operational management with managers and teams performing accustomed roles, the more effective it will be.

For those that would argue that this is not “pure” ICS, I would respond, “So what?” There are very few occasions where private sector organizations and public agencies operate under a unified command, which is the only time similar operational structures become relevant. NFPA 1600 Standard on Continuity, Emergency and Crisis Management requires only the establishment of a crisis management capability that assigns responsibilities and establishes processes; it does not specify that the organization use ICS. If the organization bases this capability on sound ICS principles and can respond effectively to a crisis, I believe this is a better approach than trying to force an ICS structure on people who have limited training and experience when the organization is trying to respond to a major crisis.

So, the answer to the question, “Does the private sector need ICS?” is a qualified “Yes, but…” with the “but” being the need to integrate ICS principles with corporate culture. Don’t create a new structure that will solely be used for crisis; build on existing processes that have already demonstrated success in problem-solving. Disasters are qualitatively different from day-to-day problems, but your chance of success in a crisis increases the more you take advantage of existing processes and leadership rather than relying on a system for which your team is not adequately trained or prepared.