Create a two-page discussion:

Read Britton, N. R. (1999). Whither the emergency manager.
NRB, December 1999, 1-10.

 

create a two-page discussion:•Outlining the major concepts in the reading•Analyzing the implications for emergency management

NRBDec’99 1

WHITHER THE EMERGENCY MANAGER? 1

Neil R Britton, PhD
Ministry of Emergency Management & Civil Defence

Wellington, NEW ZEALAND2

Introduction

The invitation to comment on Thomas E Drabek’s Human System Responses to
Disaster: An Inventory of Sociological Findings provides an opportunity to reflect on
the practice of emergency management and the evolving role of the emergency manager.
This focus is timely. The past decade has brought disaster into sharp relief for many;
several large-scale impacts have occurred; and disaster costs (in lives and property
damage) have escalated. The links between community growth, land-use management
practices and vulnerability have become more apparent. These issues have taken place at a
time when the clarion call is for smaller government and more fiscal constraint. This
combination is prompting questions, particularly from central government, about the
function and value of emergency management arrangements.

It is also appropriate to re-think the emergency manager’s role in contemporary society.
Much has changed in 10 years, ranging from the burgeoning of relevant information to the
need to develop integrated management programs for responders. This is leading to a re-
definition of the task-set and a re-evaluation of the emergency manager’s job parameters.
College-level programs and other knowledge-based accreditation courses are rapidly
becoming a prerequisite. These developments are enhancing the image of emergency
management and helping it progress to being a distinctive professional sector.

This essay uses Drabek’s 1986 publication Human System Responses to Disasters as a
vehicle to reflect on major developments influencing emergency management practice. It
begins by locating Human System Responses to Disasters within the disaster sociology
literature, and argues that the book makes two major contributions to disaster study. From
here, the focus of the essay shifts from Drabek’s work to identifying elements that
characterized emergency management practice at the time when Drabek wrote his text.
The essay moves on to look at some current issues pertaining to emergency management,
and leads into a discussion of where the practice might be heading in the coming decade.
A brief return to Human System Responses to Disasters completes the discussion.

1 Paper requested by the Editor, The International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters.
Statements in this paper were first presented at a session of the International Research
Committee on Disasters (ISA Research Committee 39), at the 14th World Congress of
Sociology, Montreal (Quebec), Canada. 26 July – 1 August 1998. The session explored the
contribution of Thomas E Drabek’s textbook Human System Responses to Disaster: An
Inventory of Sociological Findings.
2 Neil Britton manages the Sector Development and Education unit in the Ministry of Emergency
Management & Civil Defence. The comments expressed in this paper are those of the author and
should not be taken to represent official views of the New Zealand Government or any sections
or persons associated with it. The author is grateful to Shirley Mattingly (USA), colleagues from
the Ministry of Emergency Management & Civil Defence, and the Royal New Zealand Police
College for clarifying some points in an earlier draft.

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The views expressed in this essay and the conclusions drawn are a personal perspective,
largely drawn from my own experience of almost 20 years in the disaster research and
practitioner business. Not all the statements are referenced. In reaching my decisions,
however, I have sometimes been able to find comfort in the writings of others, and these
have been acknowledged accordingly.

Putting Human System Responses to Disasters into Context

Every now and then, a sociological textbook on disaster research is produced that helps
build the foundation upon which the field moves forward. Twelve seminal works that
track the progress of disaster sociology over its 80-year existence are Prince’s
Catastrophe and Social Change (1920); Sorokin’s Man and Society in Calamity (1942);
Form and Nosow’s Community in Disaster (1958); Baker and Chapman’s edited book
Man and Society in Disaster (1962); Barton’s Communities in Disaster (1969); Dynes’
Organized Behavior in Disaster (1970); Quarantelli and colleagues Disasters: Theory
and Research (1978); Turner’s Man-Made Disasters (1978); Dynes’ edited collection
Sociology of Disasters (1987); Kreps’ volume Social Structure and Disaster (1989); and
more recently Quarantelli‘s edited text What Is a Disaster? (1998) and Mileti and others
Designing Future Disasters (1998).

Thomas E Drabek’s Human System Responses to Disaster: An Inventory of Sociological
Findings (1986) is also a disaster sociology milestone. Drabek produced a ‘codified
summary of key sociological findings regarding human response to disaster events’
(Drabek, 1986,p.6). In doing so, Drabek makes two major contributions to disaster
research. Going beyond the earlier social science compilation he produced with colleagues
Dennis Mileti and Gene Haas (1975), Human System Responses to Disaster is a
comprehensive assembly of disaster-relevant literature. Hence, the first major contribution
the text makes to the disaster studies field is the bringing together of conclusions from
1000 formally published studies that reported empirical results, and which span 65 years
(1920-1985) of sociological research .

However, Drabek goes further than providing a codified summary of key sociological
findings. He nests the codifications within a framework that disaggregates the complexity
of disaster and allows the reader to view the phenomenon from a combination of
temporal (disaster phases) and structural (social systems levels) dimensions. The second
major contribution of Human System Responses to Disasters, therefore, is its organizing
framework. The significance of this framework should not be under-estimated. By
separating research findings into eight phases of disaster time and by six different system
levels, the reader is able to gain a detailed understanding of the characteristics of disaster
from a social organizational perspective. The disaster time phases Drabek employs,
expanding on earlier work by Powell (1954), are: Preparedness – (i) planning, (ii) warning;
Response – (iii) pre-impact mobilization, (iv) post-impact emergency actions; Recovery –
(v) restoration 6 months or less post-impact, (vi) reconstruction 6 months or more post-
impact; Mitigation – (vii) hazard perceptions, and (viii) hazard adjustments. The six system
levels are: (i) individual, (ii) group, (iii) organizational, (iv) community, (v) society, and (vi)
international.

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Through Human System Responses to Disasters, the reader gains a significant insight into
what is known about how humans and their social systems function under different
circumstances. From this the reader can learn about how society organizes itself to deal
with large-scale uncertainty and risk, under what situations society’s resources may (and
may not) be available, and how they might be best used to develop risk reduction and
response measures.

This organizing framework and the information provided by Drabek’s codified summaries
is extremely beneficial to the emergency manager, since it is the emergency manager’s
job to coordinate community actions that will achieve greater resilience to disaster impact.
It is also the emergency manager’s task to understand the conditions that might produce
major disruptions for a given community; to know what resources are available and the
circumstances within which they may not be available; to develop appropriate organizing
frameworks that bring resources together to reduce the likelihood of disruption and limit
the effect of hazards; and to effectively coordinate the response and recovery efforts
following impact. These ‘position descriptors’ are all canvassed in the codified summaries
found in Human System Responses to Disasters.

Past Context: What is the Legacy?

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, around the time Drabek was commissioned to
produce his inventory, some serious questions about the practice of emergency
management were being raised. The USA’s National Governors’ Association (1979), for
instance, expressed concern about the lack of comprehensive management at both policy
and operational levels; about the lack of understanding of the relationship between
preparedness and response on the one hand and recovery and mitigation on the other;
about the limited talent pool available to manage all four phases; and about the narrow
focus on quick-onset natural hazards and the concomitant lack of planning for
technological hazards, energy and material shortages, and long-onset natural disasters.
Perry (1982) raised issues about the appropriateness of the ‘dual use’ policy connecting
civil defence and emergency management. Dynes (1983) queried the relevance of the
dominant ‘command and control’ practice model.

Other issues ranged from the narrow frame of reference within which hazards and
disasters were viewed (Hewitt, 1983); to emergency management’s tenuous links with
hazard management (Burton, Kates and White, 1978; White, 1974), and planning
practices (Kartez, 1984); and the relative lack of understanding within the emergency
management community of mental health issues in the disaster context (Parad, Resnick
and Parad, 1976; Raphael, 1986).

Attempts to bring practice into line produced the Comprehensive Emergency
Management (CEM) approach. CEM referred to the responsibility and capability of a
political unit (nation, state, local area) to manage all types of emergencies and disasters by
coordinating the actions of all the players involved. The ‘comprehensive’ aspect included
all four phases of an emergency activity: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.
Stemming from this came the Integrated Emergency Management System (IEMS), which
would help form partnerships between the different levels of resource owners, both
vertically (between levels of government) and horizontally (between different agencies

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and the public-private sector). CEM dominated emergency management practice for the
next two decades.

In this context, Human System Responses to Disasters would have been an ideal
classroom text. However, emergency management training was more attuned to hands-on
skills-based training for emergency response activities; and few college-level programs
were available in which Human System Responses to Disasters would naturally be used.

Present Context: What is Emergency Management?

The practice of emergency management is still evolving and growing. It has been at a
cross-road for several years and will continue to be for several more. There are a number
of closely-related initiatives showing the way ahead, indicating the sector is responsive to
change. On the other hand, there are still some out-moded practices holding it back.

Six Positive Developments in Emergency Management
1. A more realistic context for emergency management: One of the most important

developments is the effort to locate emergency management within a wider frame of
reference. Rather than emergency management being regarded as an exclusive
preparedness and response-oriented resource, recent efforts have been made to
integrate emergency management into a wider policy framework. With it is a growing
acceptance that emergency management is an integral part of community decision-
making. Recent developments in New Zealand, for example, where Government is re-
establishing local-central government arrangements that nest emergency management
firmly within the context of environmental stewardship and community planning is an
example of this initiative

2. Knowledge-based education programs: Effective emergency management is reliant on

expertise through knowledge, augmented by expertise through skill and experience.
However, for decades conventional emergency management practice has turned these
prerequisites upside-down and focused almost exclusively on skills-based training.

3. Effective links between research and practice: The introduction of university-level

knowledge-based programs is encouraging a more systematic introduction and
treatment of risk, hazard, emergency and organizational management theory. It has
enabled research findings to directly aid practice. In some countries (the USA is the
prime example), this development has enabled emergency management to be taken as
a university/college-level subject in its own right. Many emergency management
agencies are also realizing that there are distinct advantages to link operational
effectiveness with empirical research. Moreover, many decision-makers are seeing the
benefit of recruiting people who are academically trained and familiar with the research
literature that underpins risk, hazard and emergency management.

4. Heightened interest in uncertainty: A fourth positive development is the increased

interest in risk management in many areas of the public and private sector. This interest
has helped legitimize emergency management and hazard management considerations.
It has also enabled emergency practitioners to access a greater range of relevant
information, to seek advice from wider quarters, and to expand their own perspectives.

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5. Systematization: There is a noticeable increase in the number and type of areas now

being systematically investigated and which are considered essential to the wider safety
of the community. Recent studies on business disaster preparedness and response, and
on inter-dependencies in lifeline management are examples. Environmental pollution
and ecological damage are other areas that have direct links to emergency
management. Developing linkages between areas is enabling the emergency manager
to gain a better understanding of community vulnerability, risk assessment practices,
and hazardscape management.

6. Multi-disciplinary orientation: Disaster research and its close companions (hazard

research and risk research), and their application in the emergency management
context is becoming more multi-disciplinary and multi-national. There is now a greater
likelihood that research and practice can better capture the reality of relevant issues,
and their particular social contexts. The field is gaining confidence that it can identify
relevant universals pertaining to disaster as a phenomenon, and with it, developing
more appropriate methods for managing them.

There are also, however, six counter-balancing issues still to be resolved.

Six Major Issues Still to be Resolved
1. Response orientation. Many practitioners still regard their business as only preparing

for and responding to crisis events. Moreover, many politicians, other policy- and
decision-makers, and the public-at-large still consider that response is the emergency
manager’s only business-at-hand.

2. Focused recruitment: In spite of the CEM approach, which includes hazard mitigation

and risk reduction, emergency management still draws heavily on the ‘can-do’ macho-
male. This is affecting the pick-up rate of non-response activities such as emergency
managers being directly involved in land-use management decisions, undertaking
vulnerability assessments and pursuing public risk management programs.

3. Open season on the all-hazards approach: Recent moves by some national

emergency management agencies to include terrorism within the ‘all-hazards’ approach
could perpetuate old problems. There is a need to carefully consider the message being
sent to practitioners. Introducing terrorism into the mandate of the emergency
management office could re-ignite old response-focused ‘command and control’
habits that CEM and public risk management approaches are weaning practitioners
from.

4. Information sensitivity: It is not uncommon for emergency managers to deny

researchers access to some hazard-threatened or disaster-impacted areas. While there
are often very good reasons for this, such as health and safety issues and a concern to
protect the rights of victims, some deliberate gatekeeping to ensure specific information
is not gathered is still practiced. This illustrates a failure on behalf of some managers to
appreciate the value of impact investigations, and can limit opportunities to learn from
disaster.

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5. Lack of accepted terms: People in emergency management have yet to find common
ground with respect to the language that is used to define and articulate the field. This
problem is holding back many inter-disciplinary developments, and it is a major cause
for confusion and distancing between the researcher and the practitioner. Not having
accepted terminology is also a problem for the practitioner when dealing with the
community-at-large.

6. Quality control: Systematic college-level education programs in most countries is a

recent development, and many have proceeded ahead of the establishment of a
governing body charged with developing and monitoring course standards and content
criteria. This has resulted in cases where curricula are piecemeal and superficial. The
universals being developed by the research community are slow to be incorporated.

Developing an emergency management curricula is perhaps the most pressing current
issue, since the future role of the emergency manager will be defined by this. This issue is
being addressed. At the annual Natural Hazards Workshop, in Boulder, Colorado, held in
August 1998 for instance, participants attending a session on the professionalization of
emergency management listened to panel session presenters agree that the attributes
needed by the contemporary emergency manager were more diverse than has hitherto
been commonly assumed. Similarly, another workshop, also in August 1998, sponsored
by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s teaching arm, the Emergency
Management Institute, in Emmitsburg, Maryland, academics interested in teaching
emergency management courses were asked by a participant, ‘What is an emergency
manager?’ He answered his own question by stating: ‘An emergency manager is a person
who is trained in classical management and who focuses this body of knowledge on to the
disaster-relevant context’.

These two examples indicate a feeling, that has been evident for some time, that the
practice of emergency management would be better served if skills-based emergency
response training was incorporated into a wider set of knowledge-based programs to
provide emergency managers with a range of understandings canvassing areas such as (i)
management and organization studies; (ii) public policy and administration, (iii) hazard
profiling, assessment and analysis; (iv) community profiling; (v) land-use planning and
management (vi) risk assessment and risk management; (vii) emergency response and
EOC management; (viii) disaster psychology and stress management, (ix) project
management; and (x) disaster impact field investigation techniques and research methods.

Future Context: Where is Emergency Management Heading?

External to the hazard and emergency management field, a major influence has
dominated international scientific thinking since the late 1980s. A United Nations report
(World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), examined the critical
social and economic problems facing the Earth and formulated proposals to solve them in
ways that ensured sustained human progress without depleting the resources of future
generations. This report, subsequently referred to as the Bruntland Report, introduced the
term ‘sustainable development’ which it defined as ‘meeting the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

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The goal of sustainable development, according to the Commission, is to create a new era
of economic growth as a way of eliminating poverty and extending to all people the
opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for a better life. In the 1990s, the concept of
sustainable development started to exert itself on emergency management, and it will
undoubtedly be a major influence for the foreseeable future.

Among other things, a focus on sustainable development issues prompted some policy
makers and researchers to realize that the application of CEM is, by itself, not providing
sufficient community protection from natural or technological hazard. In the context of
emergency management, the concept of sustainable hazard mitigation (Mileti et. al., 1998)
refers to creating places that are less vulnerable to natural and technological hazards and
which are resilient to those events. Sustainable hazard mitigation has five elements:
environmental quality; quality of life; disaster resilience; economic vitality; and inter- and
intra-generational equity. In this context, reducing the risk from hazards, reducing losses
from disasters and working toward sustainable communities go hand-in-hand and
requires an open-system orientation, which is characterized by a public risk management3

process. Against this backdrop CEM is perceived as having too narrow frame of
reference.

By incorporating sustainable hazard mitigation and public risk management into the
theory-in-use of the emergency manager, the likelihood of achieving community
resilience and effectiveness in overcoming the problems presented by disaster impact is
greater. Amongst other attributes, sustainability recognizes a time dimension to the
management of hazards. In like manner, public risk management enables emergency
management to be contextualized into a wider arena of relevant actions and activities.
Both time and context dimensions are important, because an effective emergency
management approach needs to be problem-focused as well as process-oriented. It also
has to be inter-disciplinary and inter-governmental, as well as allowing private and public
sector input, and be flexible enough for members of the wider community to have input.
And, at the same time, solutions need to be applied for the present as well as the future.

These factors, point a direction to where emergency management should be heading.
There are six inter-linking areas of future activity that emergency managers should assume
responsibility for:

1. Emergency managers should assist in the creation and management of community
resilience, development and growth by being able to recognize resources and risks, and
help communities choose a level of risk appropriate to their circumstances.

2. Emergency managers should help manage communities as sustainable entities, with

the understanding that reducing losses from disasters alone is too narrow a goal.

3 Public risk management is a process that is used to decide what to do where a risk has been
determined to exist. It involves identifying the level of tolerance the community has for a specific
risk or set of risks and determines what risk assessment options are acceptable within a social,
economic, cultural and political context. To achieve this, the process must be open since it has
to factor in benefits, costs of control and any statutory or socially approved requirements needed
to manage the risk. Hence, it requires communicating and consulting with the public-at-large,
either directly or through appropriate representation as well as with specialists.

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3. Emergency managers should link emergency management concepts and practices with

sustainability through long-term hazard and loss reduction and through employing risk
management processes.

4. Emergency managers should not only help reduce community losses but they will also

assist in the process of enhancing the long-term equilibrium between human and
natural environmental interactions.

5. Emergency managers should help ensure appropriate emergency management

mechanisms are in place, are operable, and are capable of responding to the overall risk
environment.

6. Emergency managers should link emergency management concepts and practices with

wider community management practices and processes.

A Final Word on Human System Responses to Disasters

All these initiatives have to be incorporated into a knowledge-base that understands the
reality of mass emergencies and disaster. This is where Human System Responses to
Disasters is useful. The information it contains provides a link between where we are now
and where we want to go. When used carefully as Drabek advises, Human System
Responses to Disasters, provides a significant understanding of the context within which
emergency managers can build their CEM links to the new sustainability and public risk
management frameworks. In effect, Drabek’s work helps to set the context within which a
risk management approach to emergency management can be pursued. To my mind at
least, when combined with other relevant teaching texts (Burby et. al., 1998; Drabek,
1990; Drabek and Hoetmer, 1991; Lindell and Perry 1991, Mileti et al. 1998), Human
System Responses to Disaster remains one the most significant reading sources for the
practicing emergency manager.

References Cited

Baker, G.W. and D.W. Chapman. 1962. Man and Society in Disaster. New York. Basic
Books

Barton, A.H. 1969. Communities in Disaster: A Sociological Analysis of Collective
Stress. New York. Doubleday and Company.

Burby R.J. (1998). (ed.). Cooperating with Nature: Confronting Natural Hazards with
Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Communities. Washington DC. Joseph Henry Press.

Burton, I, R.W.Kates, and G.F.White. 1978. The Environment as Hazard. New York.
Oxford University Press.

Drabek, T.E. 1986. Human System Responses to Disaster: An Inventory of Sociological
Findings. New York. Springer-Verlag.

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Drabek, T.E. 1990. Emergency Management: Strategies for Maintaining
Organizational Integrity. New York. Springer-Verlag.

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

Dynes, R.R. 1970. Organized Behavior in Disaster. Lexington, Mass. D.C. Heath and
Company.

Dynes, R.R. 1983. Problems in emergency planning. Energy, 8(8-9); pp.653-660

Dynes, R.R., B. De Marchi, and C Pelanda. 1987. (eds.). Sociology of Disasters:
Contribution of Sociology to Disaster Research. Milan, Italy. Franco Angeli.

Form, W.H. and S Nosow. 1958. Community in Disaster. New York. Harper and
Brothers.

Hewitt, K. 1983. (ed.). Interpretations of Calamity. Boston. Allen and Unwin.

Kartez, J.D. 1984. Crisis Response Planning: Toward a Contingency Analysis. Journal of
the American Planning Association, 50(1);pp.9-21.

Kreps, G.A. 1989. (ed.) Social Structure and Disaster. Newark. University of Delaware
Press.

Lindell, M.K. and R.W.Perry. 1992. Behavioral Foundations of Community Emergency
Planning. Washington. Hemisphere Publishing Corporation.

Mileti, D.S., T.E.Drabek, and J.E.Haas. 1975. Human Systems in Extreme Environments:
A Sociological Perspective. Program on Technology, Environment and Man. Boulder,
Colorado. Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado.

Mileti, D.S. and colleagues. 1998. Designing Future Disasters: A Sustainable Approach
to Hazards Research and Applications in the United States. Washington DC. Joseph
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National Governors’ Association. 1979. Comprehensive Emergency Management: A
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Parad, H.J., H.L.P.Resnick, and L.P.Parad. 1976. (eds.). Emergency and Disaster
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Perry, R.W. 1982. The Social Psychology of Civil Defense. Lexington, Mass. D.C. Heath
and Company.

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Powell, J.W. 1954. An Introduction to the Natural History of Disaster. Maryland.
University of Maryland. Disaster Research Project.

Prince, S.H. 1920. Catastrophe and Social Change. New York. Columbia University
Press.

Quarantelli, E.L. 1978. (ed.). Disasters: Theory and Research. Beverly Hills, California.
Sage.

Quarantelli, E.L. 1998. (ed.). What is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question. London.
Routledge.

Raphael, B. 1986. When Disaster Strikes: A Handbook for the Caring Professions.
London. Hutchinson Press.

Sorokin, P. A. 1942. Man and Society in Calamity. New York. Dutton.

Turner, B.A. 1978. Man-Made Disasters. London. Wykeham Publications.

White, G.F. 1974. Natural Hazards: Local, National, Global. New York. Oxford
University Press.

White, G.F., W. Calef, J. Hudson, H. Mayer, J. Sheaffer, and D. Volk. 1958. Changes in
Urban Occupancy of Flood Plains in the United States. Department of Geography
Research Paper #57. Chicago, Illinois. University of Chicago Press.

World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. New
York. Oxford University Press.