Four Questions About the Covid-19 Pandemic

1. What are, and have been, the key challenges in coping with the Covid-19 pandemic?

The first challenge is to understand the behaviour of an emerging disease caused by a new variant of a virus. This concerns its infectiousness, mode of transmission, lethality, symptoms and effects, mutation, longevity on various kinds of surface, and so on. Information on these characteristics takes a long time to assemble, as at the start the virus is new and unknown, its relationship with the host population is unknown and its ability to disseminate is also unknown.

Viral pandemics can have impacts that are as significant in the socio-economic field as they are in epidemiology and viral medicine. The epidemiological approach to the virus involves constantly tracking the progress of the disease and applying measures where it flares up. It also involves promoting appropriate forms of behaviour, principally the need to practise good hygiene, physical distancing and sanitisation of environments. Hospitals need to develop very substantial surge capacity and greatly increase their infection control measures. This may involve deploying field hospitals and using the resources of military medicine.

In the socio-economic sphere, welfare suddenly becomes a vitally important issue. Basic services depend on the work of people who are in the front line of infection, such as nurses, doctors, carers, cleaners and delivery drivers. They will need a constant supply of adequate personal protective equipment. Huge changes in the pattern of demand and supply will occur during a pandemic. Sectors such as travel, hospitality, tourism, retail, the arts and entertainment will suffer closures and reorganisations. Income support will be vitally important. Lockdowns will seriously affect people's mental health.

Specific challenges involve safeguarding the residents and staffs of care homes. Covid-19 is far more lethal for frail elderly people than it is for other categories of the population. Outbreaks in care homes need to be prevented by extraordinary distancing, sanitising and protection measures. Provision of continuity of care for people with non-Covid illnesses is also a major problem. When hospital capacity is absorbed by large influxes of people suffering from Covid, the tendency is to defer treatment of patients with other illnesses. This can lead to widespread failure to diagnose and treat life-threatening and seriously debilitating conditions. It can also lead to treatment that fails because it is applied too late in the development of illnesses such as fast-growing cancers. Finally, Covid-19 can have a disproportionate impact on people with disabilities. As the range of disabilities is very wide, the effects are highly varied and they require a variety of different solutions and remedies.

Amid all the risks associated with a pandemic the policing function is important. In the interests of safeguarding the entire population, restrictions on personal freedom are necessary. These need to be measured, proportional to the risk and applied with fairness and a degree of tolerance.

2. Can we draw on expertise in the field of disaster risk management?

We can regard Covid-19 as a 'wave-disaster'. It is characterised by fluxes of infection and a wide geographical spread of 'flare-ups', which leads to a constantly changing, highly dynamic situation. Under such circumstances, disaster risk management is vitally important, especially as one is dealing with a medical emergency and a social, economic and psychological one.

It is necessary to understand people's perceptions of and attitudes to risk. Human behaviour must be studied and comprehended under the unusual conditions of lockdown, and amidst the far-reaching changes in employment, personal freedom, the risk of illness and the morale of people who suffer disruption to their normal lives.

Although the medical, virological and epidemiological aspects of a pandemic are obviously vital and extremely complex, as an emergency and disaster, the outbreak must be managed with many of the tools and precepts that apply to other kinds of crisis. It is important to understand the relative nature of risk in geographical terms, with respect to the co-occurrence of different kinds of risk, and so as to prioritise risk management interventions.

Emergency planning is an essential tool in the response to a pandemic. Planning is more a process than an outcome. It helps anticipate needs and therefore create the conditions in which preparations can be made to satisfy them. Emergency response has three ingredients: plans, procedures and improvisation. The plans orchestrate the procedures. They ensure that responsibilities are fully assigned, that participants in the response have well-defined roles and that needs are identified in time to supply them. As all emergencies contain some final, irreducible uniqueness, improvisation cannot be ruled out. However, it needs to be reduced to a minimum. Otherwise, the result is tantamount to negligence, a failure to anticipate needs in time to prepare for them. Detailed scenarios of a major viral pandemic have existed since the mid-2000s. They gave the opportunity to recognise what would need to be done during a viral emergency, what equipment and preparations would be needed, and now society would abruptly change.

Communication is a vital element of the pandemic response. It should be honest, open, transparent, measured, consistent, frequent and clear. Moreover, leaders must lead by example, as this is an essential means of maintaining the consistency in communication. There is no virtue in minimising the problems associated with facing up to the pandemic. There should be no exaggeration, distortion or concealment of the facts. Building a relationship of trust with the recipients of information, particularly with the general population, is the only way of inducing people to follow sensible regulations.

3. What should be the role of civil protection on a national and international level in this context?

No matter how large they are, all disasters are local events. The theatre of operations is invariably local. Because of the vast scale of the resources needed to manage a viral pandemic, the response must be national. Moreover, the global nature of the crisis places emphasis on international coordination of the response: sharing data, following other countries' good practices, learning from the experience of other countries, and practising international solidarity, for example in access to vaccines, palliative drugs and the fruits of research. However, the pandemic must be managed at the local level. This means that coordination between national, regional and local authorities needs to be strong and extensive. Higher levels of government need fully to support local efforts to bring the pandemic under control.

Countries need to have good, robust, extensive civil protection systems with well-thought-out national coordination systems and a strong local presence throughout the country. These systems are usually established by the passing of a national law that sets up and defines the system and specifies how it will function. Flanking civil protection, there needs to be a national higher institute of health, or similar organisation designed to manage the public health elements of a disease.

In all disasters, there is a tension between centralisation and devolution. In most countries, an excessively centralised response to the pandemic will be less than optimal because it will not promote responses that are sufficiently tailored to local realities. On the other hand, local authorities should not be abandoned as they struggle to bring the disease under control. Local services understand local conditions much better than external forces do, and for this reason they need to have a lead role, and executive authority, in managing the event, but they need to be endowed with adequate resources to be able to do so.

4. What important lessons are to be learned?

The first lesson of the Covid-19 pandemic is that there was a need to develop and take heed of international monitoring and to put measures in place quickly. Prompt reaction to the threat and the evolving situation was capable of saving many lives. This was contingent upon having plans that would enable the reaction to take place.

The second lesson is that there could be a gap, an abyss even, between a pandemic plan and its ability to be activated. For example, one of the most essential aspects to be planned and managed is the supply chain network. Personal protective equipment, palliative drugs, ventilators and other materials and supplies needed to be stockpiled and the stockpiled maintained over time. If this could not be done, there needed to be pre-arranged agreements to manufacture equipment and supplies very rapidly and predetermined logistical supply-lines. Improvisation of supply and logistics could prove to be lethal. Blockages, chronic shortages and imbalances would be inevitable.

The third lesson is the importance of regional and local approaches to managing the crisis, coordinated and harmonised (or at least mediated) nationally. Many national initiatives have failed or have proved to be inappropriate or wrongly calibrated for particular local areas. While one has to avoid interregional chaos, highly centralised command and supply is also ineffective.

The fourth lesson is that communication must be clear, consistent, honest, open, transparent and frequent. The problems must not be obscured or minimised. The response must be fair and equitable. Authorities and politicians must work hard to build up a relationship of trust with the public. The aim should be to build a consensus about responsible behaviour and sharing the burden.

Covid-19 has produced an existential crisis, not in the sense that the existence of the human race is threatened, but because it calls into question the very bases of modern life. Welfare, equity and the right to life, employment and basic necessities are all strongly implicated. Fighting the pandemic is a matter of collective action. It requires collective effort and discipline. Institutional and political responses must take this fully into account.

Kathmandu

Kathmandu fire engine, 1930s style.

A few years ago I went to Kathmandu and had the opportunity to meet members of the national and local governments, as well as the international aid community. Kathmandu suffered the impact of a magnitude 7.4 earthquake in 1934. It did much damage, but what were then grassy fields are now densely populated tenements in a chaotic, rapidly spreading urban fabric. There are 1.6 million people in the Kathmandu valley. The calculated return period of the 1934 event was 70 years: a major earthquake was overdue. If such a disaster could not be coped with locally, aid would have difficulty in arriving at an airport that was too small, cramped and difficult of access (the presence of Anapurna means that aircraft have to corkscrew down to land). The logistics remind one of Port au Prince in Haiti.

I visited the city's emergency management department, which was run by five men who occupied a decrepit office in the city hall. Their equipment consisted of a second-hand laptop computer, a rusty motorbike and a megaphone. The fire and rescue service of Kathmandu had six engines. Three were museum pieces from the 1930s: the others were relatively modern appliances dating from the 1960s. The UN emergency management arrangements had been entrusted to a young man who had no relevant experience and consequently radiated nervousness. Government ministers whom I met clearly had their minds on other matters: while I was there, 67 people were injured in a riot. Meanwhile, pro- and anti-government forces bristling with armaments put up rival shows of strength in different parts of the city.

The international community and aid agencies have spent considerable sums on consultancy work to assess the vulnerability of Kathmandu to floods and earthquakes. GIS-based mapping has produced a detailed picture. This struck me as rather like contemplating the statue of Oxymandias in the desert ("Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!"). Much more simply, one could jump into a decrepit Suzuki 800 taxi and look out the windows as it crept through the traffic jams. The vulnerability was painfully obvious to the eye, but what was being done to reduce it?

I left Kathmandu with a pervasive sense of having encountered wrong priorities. It had consultants, committees, reports, conferences and NGOs. It needed neighbourhood search and rescue, emergency response training, massive increases in hospital capacity, and retrofitting of key buildings (and of cultural heritage).  Without these developments, the result would be a fatal and debilitating aid dependency. I know that since my visit some progress has been made. However, the news that has come out of Nepal in the first hours after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake of 25 April 2015 is disheartening, largely because of the crushing predictability of the predicament in which Nepal and Kathmandu find themselves.

Nepal is a low income country that ranks 157th in the UN's Human Development Index. It is now time for a debate on the extent to which disaster risk reduction should be a key development priority in such countries. Simple, cheap measures are needed in place of the complex ones imported by the humanitarian aid industry. The measures need to involve and be supported actively by the whole population.

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Evidently, there has been progress since my visit to Kathmandu. Dr Ben Wisner recently returned from a trip to Nepal. In the discussions following the earthquake he commented as follows:-

"I was impressed by the achievements of the Nepal Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), ... other Nepali NGOs, INGOs, the Nepal Red Cross, and to some extent government—especially at the municipal level.  ... I am sure lives were saved because of these efforts to train on earthquake aware construction, enforcement of the building code in Patan (one of the historic cities that now compose the metro Kathmandu region), preparedness planning in the health sector, establishment of 68 green space safe areas, training in some of the cities in light search and rescue and pre-positioning of tools for this purpose."

Hence, there has been some positive change. The level and nature of the damage indicate that its scope is limited. Dr Wisner added that, although half of Nepal's 20,000 schools are situated in the Kathmandu Valley, only 260 of them have been given a seismic performance assessment and retrofitted. It is fortunate that the earthquake occurred out of school hours, but one cannot be sure that this will be the case in the next major earthquake.

Social and political tensions have persisted in Nepal into the present day, and they represent a distraction from the process of disaster risk reduction (DRR). The aftermath of the April 2015 catastrophe will doubtless be characterised by national unity in the face of crisis. However, as the risk of another major earthquake will remain high during the ensuing decades, it would be well to ensure that DRR remains a top priority in national development.

Emergency Command in Italy

Italy has developed a national system of disaster preparedness which integrates all levels of government through a cascading system of emergency command. It has responded to the need for devolved control of resources and has developed the professional figure of the Disaster Manager.

On average in Italy 240 people are killed and 75,000 affected by natural disaster each year. Though the figures are small by Asian or Latin American standards, Italy bears the greatest risk of disaster in Europe. A major earthquake in the Strait of Messina would affect more than a million people, while if Vesuvius were to erupt as it did in 1631 or AD 79 between 650,000 and 3.1 million people would be directly at risk. Italy has therefore put considerable effort into developing a national system of emergency planning and management.

Evolution of civil protection

In many ways, the history of civil protection in Italy is far longer than that of the rather young nation state itself. Considering only the last hundred years, three broad periods can be defined, respectively as follows: from 1905 to 1920 the reign of the liberal state, in which people were largely obliged to fend for themselves; from 1920 until 1990 the social state, in which government assumed responsibility for protecting and indemnifying the population against disaster; and after 1990 the neoliberal state, in which the government facilitates self-reliance among the general population and offers extra protection to particularly vulnerable groups of people.

As in many other countries, so in Italy the evolution of emergency management has responded to specific disasters that have opened the "window of opportunity" for legislative change. The pace was forced by earthquakes in 1968 in Sicily, 1976 in Friuli Venezia-Giulia and 1980 in Campania-Basilicata. The first reaction to these events was to appoint a representative of central government as Commissar for post-disaster relief. The Christian Democrat Hon. Giuseppe Zamberletti was the principal incumbent and his energetic and immensely capable approach earned him the reputation of the "father of Italian civil protection".

In 1982 there began a decade of debate on the revision of the basic national civil protection law, which had been passed in 1970 following the Belice Valley earthquakes of 1968 in western Sicily. This designated the Italian Fire Service as lead agency. In this context it should be noted that, whereas in Britain emergencies are often seen as public order problems which require the police to be lead agency, in Italy they are regarded mainly as technical rescue problems--hence the dominant role of the Fire Services.

Fear of the abuse of draconian powers began to abate after the end of the Cold War and hence sufficient parliamentary--and presidential--consensus developed to pass a new basic law, no. 225 of 1992, which was the first legal instrument in the country to institute a national civil protection service.

What sort of government department?

The inadequacies of emergency management based on an ad hoc Commissariat were soon recognised. The approach was purely reactive and it did next to nothing for disaster mitigation, nor did it result in adequate ability to prepare for the next major emergency. Hence in the mid-1980s Italy began to experiment with a Ministry of Civil Protection, headed by a Minister without portfolio whose funding came from the Ministry of the Interior.

Disaster management is as interdisciplinary in terms of public administration as it is in an academic sense. Thus defects were quickly found in a system in which the Minister of the Interior (i.e. the Home Office Minister) pulled the strings. Moreover, national emergencies require not only the full participation of other ministries--Public Works, for example--but also a firm hand from the Prime Minister. Hence, Italy converted the Ministry of Civil Protection to a national Department which receives instructions from the Council of Ministers (i.e. the national Cabinet). One slight irregularity remains, in that the Undersecretary who heads the Department receives authority by delegation from the Minister of the Interior and the Prime Minister. In practice this has not inhibited the process of managing emergencies. By non-binding directive of the European Union this system has become the continental standard.

Intermediate and municipal levels

Each of the 109 provinces in Italy has a government office, or prefecture, and a provincial Prefect, who is the chief representative of central government at the devolved level. Prefects have responsibility for police and fire services and hence were identified in the 1992 law as the co-ordinators of emergency response at the intermediate level.

Seven years later, in 1999, two paragraphs of the so-called 'Bassanini Law' took this power from the prefects and conferred it on the regional and provincial administrations. Bassanini was responding to a national desire for more devolved government which the prefects, as agents of the Ministry of the Interior, were not equipped to provide. The Region of Lombardy, for example, is 15 per cent larger than Wales and has more than twice the population of Ireland. Its 12 provinces co-ordinate no fewer than 1546 local authorities and the range of civil protection problems encountered is impressive, as the region encompasses both Italy's industrial heartland and a section of the Alps.

In operational terms disasters must be tackled primarily at the local level. In Italy this means the 8104 municipalities, or comuni, whose mayors are identified by Law no. 225/1992 as the chief local authority for civil protection. Most of them delegate the practical aspects of this work to trained employees of the municipal technical office, but they are not allowed to delegate final responsibility.

Architecture of command

Emergency preparedness and management is accomplished in Italy using the 'Augustus System', which is described in another article in this publication. Augustus is designed to provide a fully compatible means of preparing and planning for emergencies, deploying resources and communicating during them, and recovering from them. It operates at all levels of government from that of the humblest comune (Romagnano al Monte in Campania, for instance, has only 80 inhabitants) to that of million-plus cities such as Rome, Naples and Milan and, of course, the national government.

At the highest level, the response to national emergencies is co-ordinated from the Department of Civil Protection's headquarters in Via Ulpiano, Rome, next to the Law Courts on the banks of the River Tiber, and from the national emergency operations centre (EOC) on the Via Salaria.
According to the provisions made in the 1992 law, at the intermediate level of government Rescue Co-ordination Centres (known by the acronym CCS) were to be set up in prefectures when and where needed. Devolution has displaced this function to regional and provincial government offices. The provinces have the most direct role in co-ordinating assistance to municipalities, while the regions manage general support, as well as preparing hazard management plans for broad areas of land.

At the local level the larger municipalities house Mixed Operations Centres (COM), which co-ordinate the work of the Municipal Operations Centres (COC) which all of the smaller local authorities must have and which are often located in town halls. The level of provision for emergencies varies with the magnitude of local risks, with local experience of disasters and with the willingness to invest in response capability. The Comune of Florence, for example, has a dedicated emergency management centre with a brand new two-storey operations centre that is fully wired for information technology. When managing emergencies it also makes use of a very detailed geographic information system.

Volunteers

Italy is one country that makes very wide use of volunteer forces in disaster management. In Florence, for example the Venerable Archiconfraternity of the Misericordia has a 761-year-old tradition of not-for-profit work in emergencies. Thus, although the Comune of Florence has only 12 civil protection employees, it can put 5000 volunteers to work in the field within two hours of the start of an emergency and can activate 1000 of them within ten minutes. Likewise, Lombardy has 16,000 emergency response volunteers.

Volunteers in Italy must be organised into trained, equipped forces that require legal accreditation before they can collaborate in emergency management work.

Training and the Italian Disaster Manager

In Italy 24 universities and numerous other organisations offer courses on disaster management. Indeed, it is such a huge growth area that Lombardy has approved a Regional Standard for civil protection training. In the 1990s training was considered a national matter administered by the Department of Civil Protection from its multi-function campus situated in the Roman countryside. However, the demand is now so great that the process has been devolved to the regions and provinces. One legacy of the earlier approach is that the figure of 'Disaster Manager' has acquired a national resonance, though it has also assumed rather variable political overtones!

Devolution versus centrism

As in other countries, so in Italy there has been something of a tug of war between centripetal and centrifugal forces in politics. For a few months in the late 1990s the national government experimented with an independent Agency for Civil Protection, but the Home Office Minister quickly brought it back into the structure of delegated powers, largely because the Fire Service, as the lead agency in disasters, remain an organ of the Ministry of the Interior.

The conflict between central government's desire to satisfy demands for devolution and its reluctance to cede powers has produced some grey areas of emergency preparedness, particularly at the provincial level, where responsibilities are not fully defined. Interestingly, where provinces and regions have statutes that guarantee extra autonomy, civil protection has forged ahead, including in some places, such as Sicily and Sardinia, which were traditionally considered slow to innovate.

All things considered, Italy has succeeded in producing a clear, consistent system of civil protection with which, despite the usual lamentations, most participants are broadly satisfied.

Symbolic and Practical Interpretations of the Hurricane Katrina Disaster in New Orleans

Introduction

In the 1960s some valuable sociological research was carried out on the plight of black people in US disasters (Anderson 1970a) and some more on the role of the military in such events (Anderson 1969, 1970b). Although these topics have not been totally neglected since then, they have tended to lapse in the social scientists' agendas (cf. Wright 1997). Now the disaster in New Orleans has thrown them once again into high relief.

The begin with, Hurricane Katrina quickly became a "class-quake" with divisions arranged along lines of social status and ethnic origin (Blaikie et al. 1994 p. 6, Fothergill et al. 1999). Secondly, the descent of emergency relief activities into increasingly strenuous attempts to restore law and order was strikingly anomalous with respect to other disasters elsewhere (Johnson 1987).

Two conceptual models can be applied in order to understand this situation. The first, a symbolic model developed from popular culture, can only be utilised in a negative sense. The second is an evolutionary model that analyses disaster response in terms of the global development of civil protection.

First model: disaster as spectacle

The "Hollywood" conception of disaster is one in which a destructive event leads to the spontaneous breakdown of the social order (Couch 2000). People's true natures are revealed, and violent and egotistical traits are the dominate ones. In the descent into anarchy people are divided into heroes and villains. Among the heroes, a leader spontaneously emerges, more by natural selection than any form of training or preparation, and law, order and calm are restored using drastic means to suppress the villains and stop the anarchy (Mitchell et al. 2000).

The "Hollywood" model, as one might call it, may be ridiculously simplistic but it is endlessly repeated in popular entertainment. Surprisingly, few attempts have been made to assess the extent to which it conditions the views on disaster held by ordinary people. It is certainly often at the back of journalists' portrayals of disastrous events. One wonders whether it has begun to assume the status of a self-fulfilling prophecy, such that in disaster people conform to it because that is what they are familiar with from television, radio and the print media (Bahk and Neuwirth 2000).

Second model: disaster as a problem of civil protection

The second conceptual model charts the progress of emergency preparedness in recent times. Modern civil protection [1] emerged gradually from its progenitor civil defence during the period since 1970 (Drabek 1991). Various basic principles have been established, including the following:-

(a) Military forces are not the best source of civilian disaster management. Their organisation, rationale and command structures are not fully appropriate to the management of a typical civilian emergency. Hence, in most cases the military should be the forces of last resort, and disasters should normally be managed by civilian organisations that are both more accountable and more sensitive to civilians' needs (Wright 1997).

(b) Good disaster preparedness is a collective effort that requires a system of organisation and administration which is integrated vertically from local to national levels and horizontally among neighbouring jurisdictions (Trim 2004).

(c) The gradual evolution of civil protection requires members of the public to assume progressively more responsibility for their own safety and security. This does not mean abandoning them to their own devices, but ensuring that they understand the risks of disaster that they run and have the means to face up to them. Traditional, indigenous and social coping mechanisms need to be reinforced wherever that would be appropriate (Kirschenbaum 2004).

(d) Civil defence is a progenitor of civil protection. In an epoch of global terrorism the two must co-exist. The maintenance or restoration of law and order may be fundamental to civil defence, but civil protection is based on the encouragement of social solidarity rather than the repression of anti-social tendencies (Dynes and Quarantelli 1997).

A further important principle to take into account when analysing disaster situations is that what transpires will be a function of both the event itself and the pre-existing conditions, including:-

(a) the level of preparedness of government agencies, non-governmental organisations and the general public;

(b) the quality (if not the presence or absence) of emergency planning at the institutional and community levels;

(c) the degree of homogeneity or division in society, including the level of equality or inequality.

Hurricane Katrina: a preliminary analysis

These two models represent diametric opposites. Where is the Hurricane Katrina disaster in this spectrum?

New Orleans is a vibrant and creative place but one in which poverty and deprivation afflict the inner city. Gang warfare and a flourishing market in illicit drugs have contributed to a murder rate that is ten times the national average. Some 120,000 residents lack cars and 80 per cent of the inner city is floodable, to depths that in places exceed three metres. The year before Hurricane Katrina was marked by a debate on the problems of evacuating the coastal towns and cities of the Gulf of Mexico. Scenario-builders had predicted in detail what would occur (Laska 2004, Nolan 2005). Lack of revenue and other resources, lack of political will, free-market ideology, lack of environmental protection, destruction of wetlands and excessive reliance on fallible structural protection are all factors that conspired to make the eventual--and inevitable--disaster what it was. Citizens of New Orleans had been warned that help would be inadequate, especially regarding evacuation. Yet they were not given any alternatives on which to build a strategy of resilience.

Apart from a notable absence of individual, emergent "heroes", the "Hollywood" model seemed to fit quite well to the mayhem that occurred in the wake of Katrina. Yet in truth the reality on the ground defied such a glib analysis. In post-Katrina New Orleans it was impossible to gauge the real significance of sniping, rape, murder and looting (the last of these a myth in many other disasters). Commonly, the darker side of disaster response is exaggerated by the claims of witnesses in the field who are overwhelmed by what they experience (Ploughman 1995). The mass media tend to dramatise events to the extent that damage becomes "devastation" and a shot fired becomes "shootings", or even "urban warfare". Moreover, some looters were people who strove to find basic supplies for themselves and others who were left behind in the city.

Whether or not the anarchy and violence should be played down, there is no doubt that the situation was without a precedent among recent natural disasters. As both commentators and participants have remarked, it resembled post-invasion Baghdad rather than a US metropolitan area (Tracisk 2005).

In disaster situations, epidemics are rare and diseases are usually only a threat if they are already endemic in the afflicted area (De Ville de Goyet 1999). The same is true of social diseases, and in this respect disaster opens an extraordinarily revealing window on the inner workings of society.

Images of heavily armed police and soldiers patrolling the flooded streets of New Orleans bring to mind the extraordinarily ham-fisted response to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, when people were spontaneously shot dead as looters while foraging in the wreckage of their own homes (Hansen and Condon 1989). I know of no other case of short-term, post-disaster evacuation in which evacuees had to be sought by police, soldiers and dogs and taken away in handcuffs. It is axiomatic and well-known in the emergency management community that compulsory evacuation orders are impossible to enforce: attempts to impose them are as time-consuming as they are futile (Perry 1994). Yet it is less appropriate to criticise the instantaneous response than the lack of foresight and preparation that might have made draconian measures unnecessary.

Whatever the resonance--or lack of it--of the "Hollywood" model, the 'civil-defence-civil protection' model leads to some interesting and pertinent observations on what happened in New Orleans. Seen from the perspective of an outsider, the initial response to the disaster was more characteristic of civil defence than of civil protection: i.e., it harked back to an earlier time when civilian disasters were tackled in a paramilitary way under the assumption that the principal problem was how to restore law and order, rather than how to restore health, safety and dignity to the affected population (Alexander 2002).

Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 some influential commentators have argued that US disaster response has taken a step backwards (Mitchell 2003). Paradoxically, the renewed emphasis on preparedness seems to have weakened the Federal capability. Under President Clinton and James Lee Witt, FEMA made disaster prevention the central rationale of its approach. In reality, despite the desire to make the reorientation from response to events to prior prevention their consequences, such was the press of disasters in the USA of the 1990s that two-thirds of FEMA's budget nevertheless went on post-disaster emergency efforts (National Journal 1993). However, when FEMA was subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security its budget was severely cut and the revenue diverted to preparing to respond to terrorist outrages. As there is an infinity of possible scenarios in both conventional and CBRN terrorism, such events are very expensive to prepare for, as well as being for the most part hypothetical (Bailey 1996).

With these reflections in mind, and with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to point the finger of accusation at the US Federal Government (Dynes 1991), but it is not exactly fair to do so. In a federal republic one cannot expect federal institutions to override state and local ones unless the national interest is very directly threatened, and then only as far as the threat should be countered. FEMA's key role used to be one of encouraging the states and cities (their SEMAs and LEMAs, state and local emergency management agencies) to prepare for disaster. The reduction of that role may have been a crucial factor in the failure of initial responses to Hurricane Katrina, rather more than the failure of federal institutions to respond adequately.

The US National Weather Service is famous for its ability to forecast hurricane activity and paths (Sheets and Williams 2001). Hurricane Katrina joins the list of major events (such as death of 23,000 people in the eruption of the Colombian volcano Nevado del Ruíz in 1985) in which prediction and warning became disengaged (Voight 1990). Warning systems involve technological-scientific, administrative and social components (Lindell and Perry 1987). The heart of the failure in New Orleans lay in the evaluation and translation of scientific information into public action. Moreover, the inefficiency of evacuation from New Orleans during Hurricane Ivan in September 2004 should have furnished some clear lessons, for example regarding the staffing and extension of contra-flow evacuation of vehicles on freeways and the organisation of an efficient public transit evacuation system (Laska 2004, Wolshon 2001). Instead, it seems that the well-known "gambler's fallacy" prevailed (Burton and Kates 1964): Ivan was a near-miss hurricane, that may have implied that New Orleans had already had its quota of major threats for the time being.

Conclusion

In 1972 Sims and Baumann published an article in Science magazine which suggested that responses to similar tornado threats differed between the north and the south of the United States. Southerners, they opined, were more fatalistic and less practical than northerners and hence less prepared for the damage, destruction and casualties. Since then, few other articles have tackled this theme, perhaps because culture is extraordinarily difficult to analyse, and perhaps because Sims' and Baumann's conclusions had overtones of cultural determinism.

This is a field in which there are no absolutes. Shortage of resources need not deter a community from organising itself (Buckle et al. 2003). Poverty need not be synonymous with vulnerability and incapacity (Alam 2005). Good things can come out of adversity. One striking aspect of the intellectual response to Hurricane Katrina is that left- and right-wing commentators have sought diametrically opposite moral conclusions from the same evidence (e.g. Tracinsk 2005, Wisner 2005). Either excessive reliance on welfare has weakened the underclass in New Orleans or the same has resulted from lack of welfare. At the time of writing this, barely two weeks after the hurricane, it is impossible to predict what lessons will be judged important and to what extent they will be taken on board. However, it is clear that substantial lessons are there to be learned at the federal, state and local level, and regarding environmental protection, early warning, evacuation, emergency planning and reconstruction. In emergency preparedness most positive changes follow specific events, which are thus catalysts for legislative, institutional, organisational, technological and social change. Seldom has there been such a good opportunity for this to occur as in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and so we must hope that the proposals that emerge are intelligent, practical, far-sighted and broadly acceptable.

References

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Alexander, D. 2002. From civil defence to civil protection--and back again. Disaster Prevention and Management 11(3): 209-213.

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Anderson, W.A. 1970a. Role in salience and social research: the black sociologist and field work among black groups. American Sociologist 5: 236-239.

Anderson, W.A. 1970b. Military organizations in natural disaster: established and emergent norms. American Behavioural Scientist 13: 415-422.

Bahk, C.M. and K. Neuwirth 2000. Impact of movie depictions of volcanic disaster on risk perception and judgements. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 18(1): 63-84.

Bailey, K.C. 1996. Policy options for combating chemical/biological terrorism. Politics and the Life Sciences: 185-187.

Blaikie, P., T. Cannon, I. Davis and B. Wisner 1994. At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters (1st edition). Routledge, London, 320 pp.

Buckle, P., G.L. Marsh and S. Smale 2003. Re-framing risks, hazards, disasters, and daily life: a report of research into local appreciation of risks and threats. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters (2002) 20(3) and Australian Journal of Emergency Management 18(2): 81-87.

Burton, I. and R.W. Kates 1964. The perception of natural hazards in resource management. Natural Resources Journal 3(3): 412-441.

Couch, S.R. 2000. The cultural scene of disasters: conceptualizing the field of disasters and popular culture. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 18(1): 21-38.

De Ville de Goyet, C. 1999. Stop propagating disaster myths. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 14(1): 9-10.

Drabek, T.E. 1991. The evolution of emergency management. In T.E. Drabek and G.J. Hoetmer (eds) Emergency Management: Principles and Practice for Local Government. International City Management Association, Washington, DC.

Dynes, R.R. 1992. FEMA: disaster relief or plain disaster? The World and I. 7: 110-115.

Dynes, R.R, and E.L. Quarantelli 1997. The Role of Local Civil Defense in Disaster Planning. Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware.

Fothergill, A., E.G.M. Maestas and J.D. Darlington 1999. Race, ethnicity, and disasters in the United States: a review of the literature. Disasters 23(2): 156-173.

Hansen, G. and E. Condon 1989. Denial of Disaster. Cameron and Company, San Francisco, 160 pp.

Horlick-Jones, T., A. Amendola and R. Casale (eds) 1995. Natural Risk and Civil Protection. E&FN Spon, Andover, Hants., UK, 550 pp.

Johnson, N.R. 1987. Panic and the breakdown of social order: popular myth, social theory, empirical evidence. Sociological Focus 20(3): 171-183.

Kirschenbaum, A. 2004. Chaos, Organization, and Disaster Management. Marcel Dekker, New York, 328 pp.

Laska, S. 2004. What if Hurricane Ivan had not missed New Orleans? Natural Hazards Observer 29(2). http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/o/nov04/nov04c.html

Lindell, M.K. and R.W. Perry 1987. Warning mechanisms in emergency response systems. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 5(2): 137-153.

Mitchell, J.K. 2003. The fox and the hedgehog: myopia about homeland security and U.S. policies on terrorism. Research in Social Problems and Public Policy 11: 53-72.

Mitchell, J.T., D.S.K. Thomas, A.A. Hill and S.L. Cutter 2000. Catastrophe in reel life versus real life: perpetuating disaster myth through Hollywood films. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 18(3): 383-402.

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[1] The term 'civil protection' is widely used around the world to denote emergency planning and management activities, in part because it translates easily from English into some of the major languages (Horlick-Jones et al. 1995). In the USA the synonym 'emergency preparedness' is used instead, though in Canada 'civil protection' remains current.

The Role of Emergency Management Training in an Advanced Civil Protection Degree

Emergency management is a relatively new field but one that can call upon an 88-year tradition of scholarship and research. Whereas it is sometimes included with management science, in reality it is a distinct discipline that has other bases. It sets out to achieve four objectives:

- to match available resources with urgent needs effectively in situations of crisis

- to enable organisations to work together effectively under difficult and probably unfamiliar circumstances

- to communicate with units in the field and with other operational centres in order to achieve adequate command and control of emergency situations

- to apply the provisions of the emergency plan, as well as operational protocols and any mutual assistance pacts that might need to be exercised in a crisis.

This process requires an understanding of how specialists and organisations work. Emergency management is thus a transverse discipline, that seeks to create a common language and common culture among at least 35 different disciplines and professions that participate in the disaster cycle (mitigation, preparedness, emergency response, recovery and reconstruction). The process of co-ordinating complex emergency work requires the ability to understand and liaise with the exponents of the different disciplines, in effect to "talk their language" to the extent of being able to help the various protagonists apply their skills to the problems efficiently and effectively.

Emergency management is a holistic, applied, problem-solving discipline. It is indissolubly linked with emergency planning, business continuity management (BCM), emergency medical response and other practical fields. Its imperative is to save lives, help co-ordinate the rescue of victims, contain and reduce damage, and ensure a speedy recovery to acceptable normal conditions.

In the modern world, there are numerous societies which emergency managers may join. The Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management (formerly the Institute of Civil Defence and Disaster Studies), which was founded in the United Kingdom in 1937 and is a learned society. The UK Emergency Planning Society (EPS) has 3000 members and the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) has 4500. It offers a professional qualification of world-wide validity, the Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) examination. Throughout the world, IAEM vigorously promotes the following eight principles of emergency management (see Table 1). From these it is evident that managing emergencies requires leadership and co-ordination skills along with a fine understanding of what emergencies consist of.

There are at least 400 books of relevance to emergency management that are presently in commerce and more than 19,000 books and journal articles have been published on this and related subjects. When teaching emergency management it is important to utilise the fruits of research and to marry theory with experience derived from managing past events. Theory is the road map of emergencies that enables the manager to make sense of apparently chaotic situations. Complex processes must be explained and fully understood by trainees. These include command and control, evacuation, vulnerability analysis (social, economic and physical), communications (again, both the social and physical components), warning, search and rescue, and emergency medical response.

An emergency manager must be able to create, disseminate, maintain, apply and update emergency plans of three kinds. First there is the permanent plan that disposes resources. This requires impact and response scenarios to be built (with great rigour), resources to be audited and procedures to be designed and tested. Pre-emergency contingency planning is followed by short-term strategic planning during the emergency phase. Plans must be compatible between many levels of public administration, jurisdictions and geographical areas, and different emergency services. There is also an international dimension which includes the European Union and the United Nations, for example the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN-ISDR) and the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA). Emergency management work can be local, inter-regional (in the case of a national emergency), European (in the case of an event that effects more than one country or is large enough to require extra help to be sent) or overseas (in the case of humanitarian interventions in developing countries). Standard methodologies for emergency planning exist and must be taught.

In terms of hazards and scenarios, the modern emergency manager must understand and respond to a wide variety of risks. Natural hazards such as floods and earthquakes represent one category. Technological hazards such as transportation crashes and toxic spills are another. Social hazards such as mass gatherings and protests constitute a third. In the fourth category there are acts of terrorism, which also involve intelligence gathering and responses by civil defence and military forces. Then there are the emerging risks: pandemics are considered to be the most dangerous, but climate change and shortages of basic necessities are also very important threats. As the outlook for civil protection could change radically in a matter of only a few months, flexibility is a vital quality of the emergency manager (see Table 1).

An information and communications technology revolution is occurring in emergency management. It has had profound effects on how the response to disasters and crises is co-ordinated. It is important to teach both the mechanics and the human side of communication, including the associated research in sociology, psychology and perception. As about four fifths of emergency planning consist of a spatial problem, geographic information systems are an essential tool. Activities are likely to be concentrated in the emergency operations centre (EOC), and the emergency manager must fully understand its potential and functions.

Recently there has been an enormous growth in business continuity management (BCM). This new discipline has been applied to both the private and public sectors of the economy. It is designed to make companies and public administrations resistant to disasters and crises and able to overcome their impact without going into liquidation. This is a very strong risk for business that have not made preparations and modern emergency managers are heavily involved in promoting preparedness.

In synthesis, the modern emergency manager is involved in creating societal resilience. The term resilience derives from rheology and is rapidly becoming a distinct philosophy of organisation against hazards, crises and disasters. In aiming to create resilience the challenge is to ensure the professionalism of emergency managers by training them well and endowing them with respectable qualifications. It is also important to ensure that the job of managing emergencies is handled by trained professionals, in other words that there are institutional roles for graduates. Other countries are forging ahead in this field (particularly the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and India). It is important that Italy not be left behind.
_______________________________________________
Table 1. The IAEM Principles of Emergency Management

1. Comprehensive: emergency managers consider and take into account all hazards, all phases, all stakeholders and all impacts relevant to disasters.

2. Progressive: emergency managers should anticipate future disasters and take preventative and preparatory measures to build disaster-resistant, resilient communities.

3. Risk management: in co-ordinating priorities and resources, emergency managers should use sound risk management principles, based on hazard identification, risk analysis and impact analysis.

4. Integrated: emergency managers should ensure unity of effort among all levels of government and all elements of a community.

5. Collaborative: emergency managers should create and sustain broad and sincere relationships among individuals and organizations to encourage trust, advocate a team atmosphere, build consensus, and facilitate communication.

6. Coordinated: emergency managers should synchronize the activities of all relevant stakeholders to achieve a common purpose.

7. Flexible: when solving disaster challenges, emergency managers should use creative and innovative approaches.

8. Professional: emergency managers should value a science and knowledge-based approach based on education, training, experience, ethical practice, public stewardship and continuous improvement.
_______________________________________________

Planning and Management of Complex Emergencies

Introduction: the complex emergency

In the 1990s, particular strategic and physical circumstances led to the definition of the "complex emergency" in developing countries affected by the lethal combination of warfare, socio-economic breakdown and natural disasters.[1] A good example is the current situation in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, where large-scale population displacements, insurgency, drought and the injuries caused by landmines combine to make each day a disaster for local people.[2]

However, in the debate over such events it has been pointed out that all emergencies are complex to a greater or lesser degree.[3] Therefore, emergency planning and management are first and foremost about making sense of complexity. In industrialized countries, disasters have not merely become more common and more destructive, but also more complex. For instance, it has been suggested that despite measures to protect Florence against floods, and manage such events effectively, a repeat of the 1966 event would lead to worse effects than those experienced 35 years ago. The relentless accumulation of physical capital and the presence of 10,000 vehicles in the city centre would significantly complicate emergency operations.[4]

The hard part of the planning process is no longer the estimation of physical forces and their distribution--the where, when and how much of floods or earthquakes, for example--but the prediction of consequences for the socio-economic system: complex patterns of damage, lost production, medical costs, compensation and liability issues, etc.[5]

Fortunately, powerful new tools have been developed to reduce complexity in disaster to manageable levels. But are they sufficiently well understood to be used effectively? Do we have enough consensus, training, funding, expertise and experience to benefit from the tools, or do they merely complicate emergency preparedness and distract attention from the real problems of bringing aid to stricken populations? This essay will consider ten of the most salient issues in planning for and managing contemporary emergencies.

1. From the paper planning syndrome to the digital planning syndrome

Lack of real commitment to emergency preparedness can lead to the formulation of plans that are treated as static documents and deposited in archives without the necessary adaptation, testing and updating that would render them functional and efficient. This was long ago identified as the "paper planning syndrome", in which only the letter, and not the spirit, of civil protection regulations is honoured.[6] In theory, the application of digital computing technology to emergency planning should make the syndrome a thing of the past, as computers offer a vastly greater degree of flexibility in how plans are devised, stored, displayed, communicated and utilized, as well as making it very easy to amend and update them.[7] But has the digital revolution merely substituted one syndrome for another?

To begin with there is no absolute obligation to use computerized planning procedures any more effectively than their typewritten antecedents. Secondly, the use of computers and the Internet involves questions of balance. Possibly, products with superior marketing strategies are likely to accumulate the most followers regardless of their degree of usefulness. Moreover, the most vocal people and companies can flood the market with their views. Hence, digital technology can become a vehicle for diffusing, not only valuable advances in methodology, but also inaccurate information.

It has also been suggested that, by reducing the degree of personal interaction, computer use diminishes opportunities for non-verbal communication and introduces a sense of artificiality into emergency management, akin to that which prevails in modern aerial warfare, where screen-watching and button-pushing replace more direct action.[8]

Unfortunately, most emergency preparedness courses do not include guidelines on how to make the best use of computerized technology and how to guard against problems such as artificiality and misuse of information. Indeed, as far as I know, no widely accepted guidelines exist: they should be formulated as a matter of urgency.

The interim solution is to use computer technology with a large dose of self-awareness and self-evaluation. No procedures should be implemented without considering their eventual effectiveness. No expenditures should be made without some form of cost-benefit analysis, and without specification of the criteria for identifying and judging benefits (which are often less easy to quantify than are costs).

Computers and associated communications technology have enormous potential for reducing the complexity of disasters to levels that are intelligible and manageable.[9] However, at the same time they introduce a new level of complexity--and vulnerability--into emergency preparedness. Systems therefore need to be robust, complemented by adequate redundancy and back-ups, and above all user-friendly. Both designers and users should contribute to the process of achieving such goals.

2. The role of the scenario in emergency planning

There is often a tendency to write emergency plans backwards, and thus to try to match the problem to be tackled to the resources available to tackle it, rather than the other way around. Such plans tend to be very vague about the nature of the emergency situations that they will be applied to. Many emergency plans either have no base scenario or make an uncritical, untested assumption that the last great event in the area covered by planning is exactly diagnostic of what to expect next time. In contrast, a well-constructed plan should be based on a thorough analysis of the kinds of event that it will eventually have to tackle. This requires the full-scale use of scenario modelling.[10]

A predictive scenario is an exploration of what is likely to happen under a particular set of circumstances. It asks the question "what if...?", but this should be backed up by scientific forecasting of hazards and strict logical investigation of the chains of consequences that may occur when a hazard strikes.[11] The aim is to draw out the most likely train of events, and reactions to them, in order to form a secure basis for planning. As the principal objectives of emergency planning are to reduce the gap between the resources that are needed and those that are available, and to apply the latter as effectively as possible to the urgent problems caused by disaster, it follows that the planner will need an accurate and detailed assessment of what is likely to happen.

The base scenario, or scenarios, used in emergency planning should be subject to logical evaluation. As they are a predictive tool, they will have to make a considerable number of assumptions about what is likely to happen under certain sets of conditions. This should not be an impossible task, nor necessarily a daunting one if sufficient background research has been conducted. Such work should be based on the fundamental relationship[12]

hazard × vulnerability [× exposure] = risk --> impact

Hence, successive stages in the formulation of the scenario involve collecting information on the spatial and temporal distribution of hazards, assessing the vulnerability of populations and structures to these, deriving patterns of risk and considering how the risks are likely to materialize as impacts. As the best modern planning is generic (all hazards)[13] rather than restricted to single hazards or risks, this process should be carried out with a sufficient level of generalization and flexibility that it is unlikely to break down in the face of unexpected developments.

3. The relationship between emergency planning and urban and regional planning

One of the most remarkable aspects of emergency planning in the modern world is its lack of relationship with urban and regional planning. Disaster preparedness is not usually taught to students of planning, and trainee disaster managers are not usually given a grounding in land-use planning. Yet the links between the two disciplines ought to be self evident: they lie in the concept of the "hazardousness of place".[14]

One of the principal and most successful means of reducing the risks to life and property posed by natural and technological hazards is to restrict land uses in the most threatened places. In 1986 a petroleum tank explosion and fire claimed several lives and rendered 2600 people homeless in central Naples. In 1998 150 died in the towns of Sarno and Quindici in predictable mudflow disasters. Both of these represent cases in which an identifiable hazard did not simulate vulnerability reduction measures. The simplest, and often the cheapest of these, is to separate incompatible land uses. At the very least, this requires a strong dialogue between emergency planners, who can formulate scenarios for future events, and municipal planners, who can institute measures to restrict development in hazardous areas.

A second aspect refers to the possible role of urban planning in improving conditions for emergency management. Roads may need to be straightened, widened and cleared of obstructions to ensure either that evacuees can get away quickly or that emergency vehicles can arrive in minimum time. Emergency scenarios should identify critical nodes, points in the urban system that are vitally important to operations in disaster. These include hospitals, fire stations, emergency operations centres, assembly points, and also places where disaster may strike, such as floodable areas, unstable slopes or warehouses stocking hazardous materials. Urban design can do much to facilitate emergency management if this is explicitly incorporated into it.

The solution is to integrate emergency plans with urban plans as much as possible. It requires dialogue and cooperation between both sorts of planner, who must appreciate each other's terms of reference and problems to be solved.[15]

4. The vertical and horizontal integration of emergency plans

Another common fault of emergency plans is that they are often written in isolation from one another. In Italy the prevailing legislation is vague about the relationship between plans at the municipal, provincial, regional and national levels. Provinces and regions have coordinating roles, but these are poorly specified. At the same time, there is no guarantee that municipal emergency plans will mesh with plans for factories, hospitals, airports, and so on. As disaster planning becomes more common, this problem is set to grow. The result is a vast area of potential conflict between the objectives and procedures of overlapping plans. This could lead to duplication of effort, or failures of communication between organizations, or other forms of inefficiency. In Italy, a municipality that is the seat of a COM during a national disaster may have as many as 37 desks for 9-14 different support functions, if one takes into account national, prefectural and municipal operations centres. The more such desks there are, and the more duplication of functions occurs, the more opportunities there are for failures of coordination and communication.

Municipal emergency planners should act as catalysts to stimulate disaster planning in other organizations, such as hospitals and factories. But there needs to be a high degree of compatibility and interaction between the planners and their plans. This will enable tasks to be delegated and will ensure that communication is effective between the organizations during emergency situations.[16]

5. The achievement and recognition of adequate professional standards

The current consensus is that emergency preparedness is not quite a profession.[17] Typically, those who practice it also have other jobs, or come from unconnected fields, to which they may well be asked to return. No adequate professional standards exist and no widely accepted protocols govern the content of training courses. Few academic institutions offer courses or degrees in emergency planning and management[18] and there is, in any case, little agreement about exactly what an emergency responder ought to know. Furthermore, what training courses exist offer an exceedingly heterogeneous mixture of information and usually impose no control on the quality of instruction. The first result of this is that the knowledge levels and capabilities of emergency managers vary enormously, and the second is that both interchange and ability to learn from others are hampered by lack of compatibility and an agreed body of common knowledge.[19]

It is time to devise better standards and norms for emergency training and eventual certification. These should specify a minimum number of hours of instruction and define the content of courses. They should also specify the appropriate balance between of learning between theory and accumulating practical experience.

The increasing complexity of disasters requires that emergency responders be acquainted with many different aspects of the problem. Some 30 different academic and applied disciplines are involved, as well as many practical skills.[20] In the absence of adequate guidelines about what to study and how to go about it, the best strategy is to supplement one's knowledge by reading widely among the materials that are internationally available. Several World Wide Web sites offer guided reading, for example, the U.S Emergency Management Institute site http://www.fema.gov/emi/.

Theory should not be treated as inferior to practical experience, as it is, in the words of one expert in the field,[21] the "road map" that orientates the disaster manager in times of confusion and uncertainty. Successful learning is marked by the realization that theory and experience qualify one another and render one another intelligible. This aspect will be explored further in the next section.

6. The gap between research and practice: the need for dialogue

Few disaster managers are regular readers of academic literature and few academics write up their research with disaster managers in mind as their primary audience. Academic writing is often abstract and laced with jargon, which legitimizes it to the peer groups who are its main readership but makes it unreadable by others. In any case, much of it is hidden away in publications that are not easily accessible to disaster managers. As a result, many useful applied research results have failed to come to the notice of the very practitioners who could benefit from them.

At the world level, several institutions are actively trying to combat this state of affairs. Paramount among them is the Natural Hazards Centre at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. This institution offers a well-furnished web site (http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/), three periodicals in printed form and one in e-mail format. Likewise, the Emergency Preparedness Information Exchange at Simon Fraser University in Canada (http://hoshi.cic.sfu.ca/epix/) is an important academic resource for emergency responders. So is Emergency Management Australia (http://www.ema.gov.au) and the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness (http://www.ccep.ca/).

Dialogue requires that both sides demonstrate willingness to interact. Disaster managers must make their research needs known and identify gaps in their knowledge. Researchers must learn to communicate, without lowering the tone of their discourse, in ways that non-specialists can understand and benefit from. Both groups need their horizons widening and both must learn to listen more effectively.

7. Information management in an age of superabundant data

The paradox of information technology is that it vastly increases the quantity of information available but does not necessarily improve its quality. Thus we all need to evolve a survival strategy in order to cope with information management. This means:

• avoiding dependence on sources of vital information that could fail at critical moments


• ensuring that essential information does not become archived or destroyed and thus lost through failure to recognize its importance


• ensuring that "perishable" information is collected when it is available (usually during the early phase of disaster)


• learning to discriminate rapidly between valid and invalid information, useful and useless data, appropriate and inappropriate material


• learning to cope with information overload


• avoiding overdependence on computer technology and situations in which the available hardware and software determine the solution, rather than letting it be governed by the nature of the problem itself


• developing a critical ability to recognize what is useful


• learning to interpret data in human and operational terms[22]

Recent major disasters have spawned as many as 20 web sites each,[23] but this has not guaranteed that the free availability of information over the Internet actually improved their management, especially as no control was exercised over the quality, accuracy and usefulness of the information posted.

Nevertheless, information has become a very valuable commodity and much of commerce, banking and industry is now dependent on its diffusion by electronic means. Emergency planning must thus be extended to ensuring that information is part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Communications breakdown can lead to huge losses if money cannot be transferred electronically, orders cannot be fulfilled and customers informed about what they need to know in order to purchase goods and services. Information loss is therefore not just a risk for emergency management but also a significant and growing part of general disaster losses to be mitigated by taking precautions before disaster strikes.[24]

8. Political acumen of the disaster manager

Modern courses usually involve teaching aspects of management science and psychology to trainee disaster managers. However, it is clear that such people will not only have to direct people under their control but also hold their own in the political arena. The disaster manager is, above all, a facilitator, whose job is to obtain the consensus that is necessary in order to innovate in the field of emergency planning and management. This requires knowledge of the legal, social and political consequences of decisions taken in times of quiescence and during emergencies, and to communicate effectively so that political hierarchies are convinced of the need for better civil protection systems.

However, both during emergencies and in the intervening times, the disaster manager should have a perception of the prevailing situation that does not exceed his or her command of the available resources.[25] Obviously, realism is the key ingredient. In addition, command structures need to be free of equivocality.

9. The challenge of involving the public in disaster mitigation and creating a culture of risk mitigation

Recent trends in emergency preparedness have demonstrated the importance of democratizing the field. People will not relate to disaster prevention if efforts are not made to involve them in it. Conversely, they need to be empowered and given some responsibility for their own safety. The assumption that civil protection is a matter exclusively for experts is both widespread and dangerous.

Successful schemes for involving the public require first a certain selectivity about which groups to work with and secondly the collection of information on the effectiveness of projects--i.e. feedback from the users. Publicity needs to be designed carefully and its impact evaluated in terms of the results it produces and knowledge it diffuses. Awareness of results is critically important: in the past, schemes to increase the level of public awareness of hazards have sometimes led to the diffusion of misassumptions.[26] At the very least, public indifference is indicative of a failed publicity program.[27]

In the past public information programs have failed for the following reasons:

• warnings that have not resulted in disaster


• information about what is likely to happen, but not what steps to take when it does


• vagueness about hazards and warning signs


• conflicting orders and information


• failure to involve the public in decision making, so that decisions are resented by those people who feel they have had no say in them


• failure to observe local cultural norms, patterns of activity and ways of communicating.[28]

All of these pitfalls can be avoided by adequate attention to the local context of public education programs and careful monitoring of their impacts.

10. The mass media: friend or foe?

The news media are critically important to awareness campaigns both during disaster and at other times. Research has given split results about the role of the media in disasters. The balance probably leans towards regarding them as irresponsible and unreliable[29] though some researchers have shown how the media can be a vital part of emergency management if journalists are properly engaged.[30] In either case, disaster managers ignore or mistreat representatives of the news media at their peril: they cannot stop reports being published or broadcast.

Mass media cannot be coopted in disaster. The best that can be hoped for is that they can be engaged constructively and induced to collaborate in the diffusion of correct information and the discounting of incorrect news. Treated as responsible they will usually rise to the challenge and behave responsibly. They must, however, be given adequate representation and facilities in emergency operations. Attempts to drive them away will only lead to negative reporting about the quality of emergency operations, and possibly the diffusion of misassumptions. This can lead to reductions in the degree of public cooperation with emergency authorities. Hence, many of the best emergency plans include chapters on managing the news media and treat this aspect as vitally important, which indeed it is. A useful primer on news media liaison during emergencies can be found at the U.S. FEMA website http://www.fema.gov/media/.

Conclusion

In summary, a good emergency plan is:

• generic (all hazards) rather than restricted to single hazards


• written on the basis of carefully compiled scenarios of hazard, vulnerability, risk and impact


• integrated with plans made by other organizations and levels of government


• a process and not an end in itself--i.e. constantly updated, revised and tested


• linked to urban planning with the objective of reducing the "hazardousness of place" by land use control processes.

A good emergency planner is

• well versed in the applied hazards literature


• well versed in the political and legal implications of his or her work


• a person who facilitates rather than commands


• able to appreciate the connections between different disciplines and methodologies


• able to work effectively with the public and news media representatives.

Notes

1. A classic paper on this topic is Duffield, M. 1996. The symphony of the damned: racial discourse, complex political emergencies and humanitarian aid. Disasters 20(3): 173-193. A more didactic one is Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 1995. Complex, humanitarian emergencies: I. Concept and participants. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 10: 36-42.

2. See the situation reports of Action by Churches Together (ACT) available at the Volunteers in Technical Assistance web site http://www.vita.org/.

3. Kirkby, J., P. O’Keefe, I. Convery and D. Howell 1997. On the emergence of complex disasters. Disasters 21(2): 177-180.

4. See Alexander, D. 2000. Confronting Catastrophe. Terra Publishing, Harpenden, UK, and Oxford University Press, New York: 99-101.

5. Ellson, R.W., J.W. Milliman and R.B. Roberts 1984. Measuring the regional economic effects of earthquakes and earthquake predictions. Journal of Regional Science 24: 559-579.

6. See discussion in Auf der Heide, E. 1989. Disaster Response: Principles of Preparation and Co-ordination. Mosby-Yearbook, St Louis, Missouri, 363 pp. This book can be downloaded for free from the Internet at the following address: http://coe-dmha.org/dr

7. Gruntfest, E. and M. Weber 1998. Internet and emergency management: prospects for the future. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 16(1): 55-72.

8. Quarantelli, E.L. 1997. Problematical aspects of the information/ communication revolution for disaster planning and research: ten non-technical issues and questions. Disaster Prevention and Management 6(2): 94-106.

9. Tobin, R. and R. Tobin 1997. Emergency Planning on the Internet. Government Institutes, Inc., Rockville, MD, 230 pp.

10. Alexander, D. 2002. Principles of Emergency Planning and Management. Terra Publishing, Harpenden, UK (http://www.terrapublishing.net), and Oxford University Press, New York (http://www.oup-ny.com/).

11. Alexander, D. 2000. Scenario methodology for teaching principles of emergency management. Disaster Prevention and Management 9(2): 89-97.

12. After UNDRO 1982. Natural Disasters and Vulnerability Analysis. Office of the United Nations Disaster Relief Co-ordinator (UNDRO), Geneva, and Burton, I., R.W. Kates and G.F. White 1993. The Environment as Hazard (2nd edn). Guilford Press, New York, 304 pp.

13. Quarantelli, E.L. 1992. The case for a generic rather than agent specific agent approach to disasters. Disaster Management 2: 191-196.

14. Hewitt, K. and I. Burton 1971. The Hazardousness of Place. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

15. Britton, N.R. and J. Lindsay 1995. Demonstrating the need to integrate city planning and emergency preparedness: two case studies. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 13(2): 161-178.

16. McLoughlin, D. 1985. A framework for integrated emergency management. Public Administration Review 45 (special issue): 165-172.

17. Drabek, T.E. 1988. The Local Emergency Manager: The Emerging Professional (Part 1). National Emergency Training Center, U.S. Federal Emergency Management Association, Emmitsburg, Maryland.

18. About 3.5 per cent of U.S. colleges and universities (70 institutions) offer courses in emergency preparedness. Even fewer courses are available in other countries.

19. Neal, D.M. 2000. Developing degree programs in disaster management: some reflections and observations. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 18(3): 417-438.

20. Alexander, D. 1993. Natural Disasters. UCL Press, London, and Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 632 pp.

21. Professor Thomas E. Drabek, in one of the FEMA outline courses cited above.

22. Quarantelli, E.L. 1997. Problematical aspects of the information/ communication revolution for disaster planning and research: ten non-technical issues and questions. Disaster Prevention and Management 6(2): 94-106.

23. For example, the Hanshin-Kobe earthquake in Japan (1995) and Hurricane Mitch in central America (1998), both of which spawned up to 20 websites.

24. U.S. National Research Council 1996. Computing and Communications in the Extreme: Research for Crisis Management and Other Applications. Computing Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, Washington, DC, 174 pp. This and similar publications can be obtained from http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/.

25. Alexander, D.E. 1999. How are emergency plans written, tested and revised? In P. Fontanari, S. Pittino, D. Alexander and S. Boncinelli (eds) La Protezione Civile verso gli Anni 2000. CISPRO, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Florence, Italy: 151-177.

26. Alexander, D. 1993. Natural Disasters. UCL Press, London, and Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, pp 16-20.

27. In one notorious case (the River Thames flood warning exercise of 1981 in the city of London) a costly and extensive publicity campaign came to nothing: social surveys after the event revealed that 50 per cent of respondents did not hear the warning, and of those who did, 30 per cent did not understand what it meant and 60 per cent did not know what to do (IDI 1981. The Physical and Social Consequences of a Major Thames Flood. International Disaster Institute, London, p. 44).

28. Southern, R.L. 1995. Warnings that failed, warnings that worked. Stop Disasters 25: 9-10.

29. Goltz, J.D. 1984. Are the news media responsible for the disaster myths? A content analysis of emergency response imagery. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 2(3): 345-368.

30. Scanlon, J., S. Alldred, A. Farrell and A. Prawzick 1985. Coping with the media in disasters: some predictable problems. Public Administration Review 45 (special issue): 123-133.