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.

Information and Emergencies

Information is a prime necessity in disaster situations--some would say the prime necessity--as it is the essential first input to the process of making decisions about emergency response. Paradoxically, disasters are characterised by simultaneous information overload and shortage. That which absolutely must be known--what has happened, where, when and with what degree of seriousness--is often elusive and obscure in the early stages of a disaster. Instead, it is usual to receive a mass of conflicting, inaccurate and contradictory information that must be painstakingly verified and classified.

Fortunately, help is at hand: as in most other walks of life, so in disaster management, a revolution is occurring in information and communications technology. It is bringing new opportunities and challenges to the field. On the one hand, information flows have increased vastly in size and strength, while on the other, there is a need for new working methods to cope with the information overload that the new channels and technologies bring. There is even the prospect that information technology will cause a disaster, perhaps through spreading incorrect knowledge or mismanaging vital processes.

The question of the collection and use of information in emergencies can be divided into three main elements: (a) information management for professional emergency managers, (b) the impact of information about disasters on society and the mass media, and (c) the role of information in how the general public reacts to emergency situations. In hazard and disaster situations, information flows can be classified into those directed to the emergency management community, those that reach the mass media, and those that affect the general public directly. The information itself is of two main kinds: perishable and durable. The first of these refers to time-sensitive information that is liable to disappear unless it is collected and stored at the time it becomes available; the existence of the second type is not dependent on time.

This paper will examine each of the three main uses of emergency information and then draw some general conclusions about the "state of the art" in this rapidly evolving field.

Information management for the emergency preparedness community

This section will consider the place of information in emergency management first in terms of its direct role in crises and disasters and secondly with respect to new developments in training the emergency managers.

Information for managing emergencies

Faced with a disaster, the emergency manager first needs to know what has happened, where it has occurred, where the cardinal points are (these are the places where destruction and entrapment of victims are concentrated), where the boundaries of the affected area are, what level of seriousness the event has attained, what resources will be required to cope with it, where they will come from and how soon they will arrive at the scene. Viewed with hindsight, most of these questions seem very simple, but in the heat of the moment the answers are likely to be uncertain and subject to change at a moment's notice. Hence, decisions about the deployment of resources must be taken on the basis of incomplete and potentially incorrect knowledge.

The modern age is characterised by advances in technological sophistication which are so rapid that the social adjustments needed to absorb them and make wise use of them lag behind. Instantaneous or rapid communication over very long distances has changed the process of emergency management. In particular, it has engendered a pressing need to develop a new technique of managing information in large quantities and with extremely rapid delivery in order to extract the valuable data from that which is not useful.

New developments in the use of information and communications technology in civil protection include the following:-

(a) Software has been created for developing emergency plans and posting them on computer networks, including the Internet. The main advantage of this is that it allows more flexibility than traditional, paper-based methods of planning. The disadvantage is that there is no guarantee that a more rational plan will emerge, or that it will be more rationally used than its traditional counterpart (Gruntfest and Weber 1998).

(b) Many pieces of software have also been developed for managing emergencies, with standardised procedures based on spreadsheets, geographic information systems and computerised communications. The principal advantage is one of being able to handle information more efficiently during emergencies. The disadvantages include the tendency to duplicate effort in producing new proprietary software packages to do the same work (Comfort 1993).

(c) Emergency management has made ample use of modern communications networks, which in some cases are dedicated to emergency work. These include cellular networks, intranets and extranets. They have the advantage of being more robust than traditional methods, and of carrying more redundancy, which enables higher peak loading during disasters (Tobin and Tobin 1997).

The full implications of these developments have yet to be felt in emergency management. However, some trends have already emerged (Stephenson and Anderson 1997). To begin with, information and communications technology (ICT) has tended to flatten the chain of command. It allows more emphasis to be placed on collaboration than on control, and more autonomy to be gained in field operations. It facilitates clearer ideas about what is going on in an emergency, with greater ability to develop a co-ordinated overview of events as they unfold. In its prototype form, ICT gave rise to the Incident Command System (Irwin 1989), which is a participatory, bottom-up form of emergency management and has proved very successful when applied to emergencies of all sizes.

The future is undeniably bright for information technology (Alexander 1991) in the service of emergency management, but some important traps and pitfalls must be avoided. To begin with, one hopes that we are not moving from the 'syndrome of the paper plan' to that of its digital counterpart. It was once easy to write an emergency plan that was then ignored or neglected rather than diffused, practised and updated (Fischer 1998). However, despite the greater immediacy of computerised methods, there is no guarantee that the paper plan's digital counterpart will be treated any differently, despite the ease with which it can be activated and revised. This is true despite the existence of a plethora of digital products for information management in disasters. Much reinvention and duplication have occurred, leading to shortages of compatibility and interoperability. The problems becomes acute when international collaboration is involved.

Modern information management demands a radical reorganisation of working methods. It requires that emergency manager learn quickly to scan potentially vast amounts of information, to judge that which is useful, discard that which is useless and judge the quality and accuracy of what remains. Through this process, there has been a reduction in reliance on face-to-face and verbal communication. This is potentially a worrying development when we consider that the world's worst air disaster resulted from a mere verbal misunderstanding (Quarantelli 1997).
There are other ways in which information technology is potentially the author of disaster. It controls vital processes in industry, transportation and power generation and, moreover, an increasingly large proportion of companies and organisations depend on it for record-keeping and business transactions. Thus, failure of information systems, above all where back-up systems are inadequate or missing, could have catastrophic consequences with complicated knock-on effects throughout society. This could greatly complicate the development of scenarios upon which to base emergency plans.

As there is every sign that information technology will be widely used in training emergency managers, it is to be hoped that it will also teach them how to use it wisely when managing risks and disasters.

Information and training of emergency managers

During the 1990s in the field of emergency preparedness there was a huge increase in information dissemination via the Internet. Growth has now levelled off and the emphasis is changing. There will probably be a considerable development of on-line courses in various aspects of the field, including management, medical response, psychology of emergencies and business continuity maintenance (Neal 2000). For example, 22 of the United Kingdom's 135 universities are already involved in initiatives of this kind.

One central aspect of training refers to the availability of scientific and managerial literature, which in this field is notoriously hard to obtain as many journals and books tend to be limited in publication and circulation. This problem will gradually be solved by increasing access to material on line. For example, the journal Disasters is available in a web-based subscription format and electronic access to it will soon be donated by UN agencies to the universities and institutes of poor countries. Eventually, we could see the development of "distributed geo-libraries", in which there is a drastic reduction in the restriction of access to information on the basis of geographical location.

These examples imply that information and communications technology can radically alter the attitude to learning of trainees. ICT, of course, is also causing deep changes in the collective attitude of society to emergencies and disasters, as discussed in the following section.

Disasters, information and society

In 2001 Americans donated $16 million to the survivors of the earthquake in Gujarat, India, in which 19,700 people died and about one million were made homeless: they donated 100 times as much, $1,600 million, to the families of victims of the collapse of the World Trade Center, in which 2,890 people died and no one was left homeless. The reasons for the discrepancy have to do with patriotism, personal relationships with events and the degree of immediacy of events, but they are also a function of the collective images of disasters as managed by the news media. Although the news media can motivate the public to contribute to relief appeals, they can to a certain extent turn disaster relief on and off like a tap by arbitrarily highlighting, minimizing or ignoring the plight of survivors (Benthall 1997).

"The medium," wrote Marshall McLuhan, "is the message." Mass media are both created in the image of society's values and designed to reflect those values, in an endlessly circular relationship that is as true for L'Osservatore Romano as it is for the New York Post.

Disaster researchers who have studied the news media tend to divide into two categories: those who believe that the media will always seek to distort the news in order to increase sales or ratings (Goltz 1984), and those who believe that the media can be treated as responsible agents of information diffusion and if this is done they will collaborate with the emergency managers in order to get the story right (Scanlon 1983). In either case, the media cannot be ignored. Rarely do emergency operations centres lack television receivers, as what the media tell the public may well determine what the public do during an emergency.

Modern technological changes affecting the mass media have profoundly altered the way in which disasters are viewed. To begin with, there is a greater sense of immediacy and--in a certain manner--participation. There is also a tendency to conflate news values with entertainment values and to exalt disaster as spectacle. The picture is complicated by the ceaseless accretion of more, and more copious, sources of information, which are available at more times of the day and week.

As Professor Quarantelli (1997) has noted, "The IT revolution is clearly undermining the traditional quality control framework." It has not substituted another, but most members of the public are not trained to distinguish reliable from inaccurate information, especially if the latter is presented as authoritative. However, in a healthy, democratic society information management does not signify centralised control of the information or the means of diffusing it. Indeed, the independence of journalism is to be safeguarded as one of the prime means of ensuring proper public evaluation of official decision-making. Hence, emergency plans that seek to control the media are bound to be flawed.

Information management for the public

As noted, a freer information market also leads to the greater diffusion of inaccurate information. A simple test can be done by looking up the key words 'earthquake prediction' on an Internet search engine. The short-term prediction of earthquakes is a scientifically contentious issue, but one that fascinates the fringe scientists and assorted futurologists. Typically, the search will yield sites dealing with the scientific progress on (and impediments to) prediction, but also sites in which charlatans claim to have discovered infallible means of predicting earthquakes, perhaps by "conjunction of astral rays" or some such nebulous means.

In a certain sense, in the modern world a large disaster defines itself by the information flows that it generates. Hurricane Mitch in 1998 gave rise to 29 dedicated websites. A similar figure pertained to the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake of 1995 in Kobe, Japan. Thus the public has free access to copious amounts of information, but not necessarily to an independent assessment of its quality. Some of the information is likely to be inaccurate, potentially even deliberately misleading. That, of course, has always been a risk, but it has been compounded by the huge increase in sources of and outlets for information.

In disaster preparedness, one of the great challenges of the 21st century is to involve the public in managing its own safety. This will require a more open attitude to the diffusion of official information on risk, preparedness, emergency planning and emergency operations. In some quarters the age-old attitude "don't tell the people, they may panic" still prevails, despite decades of sociological research that shows convincingly that instead of panicking the public tends to become more responsible when it is properly informed. The corollary on the part of ordinary people is the attitude that emergency preparedness should be left to the experts. Studies tend to show that resilience in the face of disaster is greatest in communities that are fully involved in protecting their own resources.

Disasters have long been the subject or rumour, myth and misconception. Many myths are remarkably persistent. For example, there is little or no evidence that the presence of unburied dead bodies in a disaster area gives rise to a significant risk of disease epidemics among the living. However, there are numerous--and recent--examples of unwarranted hasty burial or cremation, which can demoralise survivors and compromise arrangements for death certification and, where necessary, autopsy. Mere increase in access to information, and in the rate at which it is supplied, does not appear to have reduced the level of dependence on misconceptions. Indeed, it is worrying that under commercial and political duress, the purveyors of information are becoming increasingly superficial and manipulative (Wenger and Friedman 1986).

Concluding remarks

As the United States has for long been the world leader in emergency preparedness, its policy and attitudes towards disaster management have had a considerable impact elsewhere. The effect of the events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent "War on terrorism" have led to a sudden interruption of a developing trend, followed by a considerable change of direction. Prior to September 2001 emergency management was steadily becoming more inclusive, open and comprehensive. Subsequently, the emphasis on 'homeland security' has engendered a retreat towards secrecy and a restricted form of preparedness. Some experts fear that this will destroy some of the gains in resilience achieved to date, or at least set back progress. Whether or not this is so, there is little doubt that greater emphasis is now placed on restricting the flow of information to the public instead of augmenting it (Mitchell 2003).

The world has learned how to create sophisticated networks for the supply of information but all the signs are that it has not yet learned how to use them to overcome some very traditional problems. New developments in technology have tended to reinforce traditional images of reality and symbolic constructions and to have done little to change the cultural and perceptual filters that change the value and quality of information as we receive and interpret it. As T.S. Eliot wrote in 1934 in his poem The Rock,

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

References

Alexander, D.E. 1991. Information technology in real-time for monitoring and managing natural disasters. Progress in Physical Geography 15(3): 238-260.

Benthall, J. 1993. Disasters, Relief and the Media. St Martin's Press, New York, 267 pp.

Comfort, L.K. 1993. Integrating information technology into international crisis management and policy. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 1(1): 15-26.

Fischer, H.W. III 1998. The role of the new information technologies in emergency mitigation, planning, response and recovery. Disaster Prevention and Management 7(1): 28-37.

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.

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.

Irwin, R.L. 1989. The Incident Command System (ICS). In E. Auf Der Heide (ed.) Disaster Responses: Principles of Preparation and Coordination. Mosby, St Louis, Missouri, 133-163.

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

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.

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.

Scanlon, T.J., 1983. Canadian communications in crisis situations. In B.D. Singer (ed.) Communications in Canadian Society. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts: 268-281.

Stephenson, R. and P.S. Anderson 1997. Disasters and the information technology revolution. Disasters 21(4): 305-334.

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

Wenger, D. and B. Friedman 1986. Local and national media coverage of disaster: a content analysis of the print media's treatment of disaster myths. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 4(3): 27-50.

Do You Want to be Commanded and Controlled? Reflections on Modern Emergency Management

It has long been clear that people react to circumstances on the basis of their perceptual models of reality, and that these may or may not reflect how things actually are (Burton and Kates 1964, Saarinen et al. 1984). Over the last half-century a considerable body of information has been accumulated on the ways in which people perceive and react to disaster (Drabek 1986). Emergency managers who know their field are well aware that public perceptions of hazard and risk present both opportunities to improve disaster management and constraints upon it (Scanlon 1991).

There are also wider questions of how events are perceived; indeed how the course of human history is envisioned. We tend to have a short-term view of things. For example, capitalism has become so powerful and pervasive around the world that it is often treated as if it were the result of some natural law of human organisation. Yet for much of human history it has not been the dominant force. The polarisation of society and competition between its members may to some extent be natural, but they are not the only alternatives for humanity. Relying as it does on competition, capitalistic organisation is something of an anathema to the welfare functions that go with managing emergency situations. This may explain why it is difficult and unwise to privatise disaster management (cf. Horwich 1993).

Secondly, there is nothing particularly immutable about the modern nation state. Sovereignty, fixed boundaries, territoriality, patriotism and national defence may have ancient antecedents, but their modern interpretations are not subject to any natural law about how societies should be organised. Many of the moral and legal principles on which they are based could be interpreted in radically different ways without loss of basic freedom or democracy. Terrorism has its origins and causes in questions of statehood and governance: on the other hand, natural catastrophes show no respect for political boundaries. Hence, both forms of disaster call into question the modern concept of statehood (Hewitt 1994).

In emergency management, the political problem boils down to a question of centrism versus devolution (Wolensky and Wolensky 1990). In principle, disaster management systems need to be organised on a local basis, with regional and national coordination of the many separate local systems (Sink 1985). In fact, despite decades of hard work by many different pan-national agencies, the world disaster management system remains in its infancy, poorly coordinated and unable to make the crucial effort to stop the relentless rise in impacts and losses.

Thirdly, there are broad questions about how knowledge is perceived and managed. The practise of dividing it up by department and degree is a remarkably modern one. It is also becoming increasingly counter-productive, especially in emergency management, a field which requires some level of synthesis of anything up to 35 academic disciplines. Moreover, in the present decade it is becoming increasingly clear that risks can only be reduced successfully by using holistic, integrative methods. This calls into question the basic framework of emergency planning and management (Alexander 2000).


Management and disaster management

In the modern world, the academic and practical discipline of management has its roots in capitalism (the organisation of production, distribution and consumption) and the nation state (through civil administration). However, disaster management has more diverse roots, and for this reason it may enter into conflict with its nominal parent discipline (Greening and Johnson 1996). Let us examine how.

To being with, in disasters, order does not spring from chaos by management alone. The essence of managing an emergency is to apply available resources to urgent problems in the most timely and efficient manner: in this respect ordinary management principles should be followed. However, there is also a vital need to understand and anticipate contingencies before they materialise--in other words, to reduce the level of improvisation in a disaster to a minimum. Thus emergency planning is at least as important as emergency management and should always precede it (Alexander 2002). The field is strongly allied to urban and regional planning, not least because both should tackle the question of the 'hazardousness of place'--i.e. reducing the risks of human settlements and activities (Britton and Lindsay 1995). Disaster management is thus much more than a technique to be learned in advance and applied ad hoc. It requires careful consideration of the scenarios for hazard, vulnerability, risk, impact and emergency action (Alexander 2000). It adds up to a need to develop techniques of "thinking the unthinkable" and "foreseeing the unforeseeable". This can, and should, be done.

The essence of disaster management is therefore not leadership in chaos--management as reaction--but rather the application of procedures that have been carefully worked out in advance. The degree of maturity of a country's emergency preparedness system can therefore be judged by the extent to which it is based on detailed (but flexible) planning and to which it is participatory. In my opinion, low levels of development are represented by the command and control approach (Waugh 1993).

Command and control has its origins in both warfare and colonialism. It divides participants into a disaster into commanders and commanded, and sets ground rules for how the former will control the movements and activities of the latter. Granted that some degree of control must be exercised over public safety and the efficiency of emergency operations, it is nevertheless easy to take this approach too far.

The challenge of the 21st century is to democratise emergency preparedness in such a way that ordinary people take more responsibility for their own safety. This will require them to know the risks, face up to them and make informed choices (Platt 1999). In extreme situations, it will also involve safeguarding their rights, not setting these aside.

Much progress has been made in designing and implementing civil systems for the management of civilian emergencies. The civil defence that grew up in response to 1940s air raid precautions and subsequent Cold War attack scenarios has mercifully ceded ground to civil protection against floods, storms, earthquakes, toxic spills and so on. But the cold warriors have not disappeared, they are in fact ready to stage a come-back. The terrorism threat is drastic enough to require more authoritarian methods of management than do most civil emergencies. It also involves different levels and criteria of predictability than most other non-military hazards. But need it require the suspension of participatory emergency management? Has anyone asked the general public whether it wishes to be commanded and controlled, and if so to what extent? Is authoritarianism really the way to manage great crises? These questions remain largely unanswered.

In addition, there are both small and large issues of democracy. With regard to the former, public support for emergency management must depend to some extent on sharing information and guaranteeing rights. The large issue is that command and control structures may in extremis be used either to safeguard the chosen few, rather than the public in general, or to safeguard the state against the demands of the public. At present there is a serious risk that civil protection services, which prize their own neutrality, could inadvertently be drawn into situations of extreme polarisation and forced to side with one party or the other. This is a risk that has loomed very large at recent anti-globalisation protests.


Command and colonise

A 1979 United Nations report on disaster management in developing countries observed that technologies and management techniques developed in Western countries are often inappropriate for managing emergencies in the world's poorer countries (U.S. National Academy of Sciences 1979). Knowledge and expertise are not necessarily directly transferable. Despite this, there has been a tendency to assume that such methods are etic--i.e. independent of specific cultural referents. In reality they are emic--dependent on assumptions about cultural acceptability and feasibility (Brislin 1980). Thus, in local indigenous circles, the foreign expert who arrives in an unfamiliar country and seeks to apply his or her knowledge to local problems has become something of a detested obstacle to good emergency preparedness (Allinson 1993).

The problem has its origins in the colonial epoch in such historical events and the British mismanagement of famines in the Indian subcontinent (Hall-Matthews 1996). It has persisted in the extraordinary poverty of solutions offered by countries that purport to manage disaster well and transfer their expertise to those that lack appropriate knowledge and structures. For whom are disasters being managed? By educating a professional class and diffusing a universal body of know-how are we pitting professionals against local people (Beatley 1988)?

At its worst, globalisation can be interpreted as an integrated system of commercial exploitation that has had the effect of increasing the world's income differentials, concentrating wealth in few hands, and spreading poverty, marginalisation and polarisation. If that is so, then it is a situation that facilitates the return of the colonial approach to emergency management, in which dissent, as much as disaster, has to be managed, order and stability have to be restored at any cost.


Conclusions

Is it inevitable in a divided world that we be separated into those who manage and those who are managed? In terms of preparedness for disasters the problems have steadily worsened, despite decades of hard work on devising new solutions. Besides the importance of well-known factors such as increased risk-taking, rising urbanisation and burgeoning populations in hazardous areas, the problem is also a result of the primacy of science, management and autarchic establishments (Wisner 2001). We may talk, not about policy, which ought to be sensitive to real, fundamental needs, but about "policy metaphors", which impose parameters where variables are warranted.

Civil protection against the peacetime emergencies that threaten populations need to be managed from a grass-roots perspective. The key words are 'participatory' and 'empowerment' (Wisner et al. 1977). Volunteer groups need to be trained and encouraged to improve their professionalism; ordinary people need to take more responsibility for their own safety (Wolensky 1979; Bowenkamp 2000). Modern information flows need to be the catalyst for sharing the burden of disaster. The technical component of disaster management is set to increase in both developed and developing societies. There will thus be a convergence of problems and solutions, but not one in which there will be any right or other justification for imposing solutions upon people.

In synthesis, the prospects for democratising civil protection worldwide need to be evaluated in the light of global trends in exploitation, diplomacy, hegemony and the uses to which new technologies are put. We must differentiate structure from mentality or mind-set. It is vital that the former not be conditioned by outdated forms of the latter. Neither at home nor abroad should risk and emergencies be managed by excessive use of command and control, or excessively technocratic management systems, or of excessive economic management by monetarism (Butler and Doessel 1981; May and Burby 1996). New paradigms of global security should not be used as an excuse for reintroducing forms of exploitation under the guise of preventing terrorism or forcing the pace of development.

In future years there will be an increasing convergence in emergency management systems between rich and poor countries, as both will have to cope with the growing complexity of modern disasters and the international dimensions of their impacts. It is essential that the convergence be based, not on rigid crisis management systems, but on a management process that emphasises planning to foster flexibility, co-operation and co-ordination.


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