Looking Backwards to See Forward

Posted on November 30, 2023 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Looking Backwards to See Forward

Many years ago, I attended an employee training session in which I was introduced to the concept that people could be roughly divided into four different communications styles or value orientations. While I believe that people are too complex and individualistic to be conveniently placed in distinct boxes, over the years I have found this concept a useful tool in interacting with others and one that has some important lessons for emergency managers.

In his 1980 book Training for the Cross-Cultural Mind: A Handbook for Cross-Cultural Trainers and Consultants, Professor Pierre Casse identified the four communications styles as:

1. Action – oriented towards objectives, results, and accomplishments
2. Process – oriented towards facts, procedures, and planning
3. People – oriented towards social processes, communication, and teamwork
4. Idea – oriented towards concepts, theories, and innovations

Casse’s key point is that a person’s style has a tremendous impact on how they communicate. This suggests that identifying a person's communications style and adapting to it can lead to more persuasive communication. For example, opening a conversation with a deep dive into facts and figures might appeal to a process-oriented person but might be an immediate turn off to a people-oriented person. Similarly, the type of small-talk introduction that makes a people-oriented person comfortable would make an action-oriented person impatient.

As useful as this concept is, however, what really struck me about the speaker’s presentation was her thoughts on idea-oriented people. Idea-oriented people tend to be interested in the big picture, seeing what things could be rather than what they are. In essence, they live in the future rather than the present. The point that had the most resonance for me was this: living in the future carries the inherent implication that you are dissatisfied with the status quo. This tends to make people who are invested in the status quo uncomfortable and in some cases, hostile. This can be exacerbated by the tendency for some idea-oriented people to be unrealistic and to take on more tasks than they can accomplish.

One of Casse’s fundamental concepts is that the four communications styles can be found in any individual. I believe that the best emergency managers, although we may consider ourselves action-oriented, lean strongly towards idea-orientation. Our work is based on the assessment of risk and risk is a future concept. We anticipate and plan for what may occur, even as we deal with what is occurring. We are never satisfied with the status quo because we know we are nowhere near where we should be. In many ways, we are like Cassandra, the tragic Greek prophetess, doomed to see the future but not able to convince anyone to heed our warnings. This does not tend to make us popular, particularly when we point out problems that have the potential to embarrass senior officials.

I remember once hearing that when on a journey, the indigenous people of the Artic while from time to time turn around and look back at the way they have come. This not so much to see how far they have come but to be able to recognize landmarks for the journey home. I have no idea is this is true or not, but I think the concept is important. I think it is critical for emergency managers to periodically pause and look back. You might see that you have come further than you thought. It may also help you gather strength for the journey that still lies ahead.

Do We Really Assist Everyone?

Posted on October 31, 2023 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Do We Really Assist Everyone?

It is widely held that emergency managers provide services to anyone affected by a crisis. This belief carries with it the expectation that emergency managers will put aside their personal biases and prejudices and provide necessary aid regardless of the status of the victims. However, reality often falls short of this laudable goal and research suggests that our current system is skewed against those most in need. In a time when equity and diversity are receiving increased attention a re-examination of how we provide services is long overdue.

The fault does not actually lie with emergency managers but has its roots in society at large. Stanford law professor Michele Landis Dauber has coined the phrase "moral blamelessness” to describe the bias that affects the provision of disaster relief. The concept of moral blamelessness suggests that victims must prove themselves worthy of relief before they can receive it. The corollary to this is that there are victims who are not worthy of relief.

The concept of moral blamelessness is evident almost since the beginning of government disaster relief services in the United States. In the early colonial days people who chose to settle on the frontier were considered unworthy of government compensation for damage from attacks by hostile tribes as they had chosen to put themselves at risk. Following the American Civil War, the use of the Freedman’s Bureau to provide famine relief to Southern States was strongly resisted in Congress because it was held that their act of rebellion disqualified them from any government assistance.

The situation has not changed. During the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, there was considerable discussion as to what to do with the large number of undocumented people who were affected by the disaster, particularly in the Watsonville area. Many of these victims were Hispanic migrant agricultural workers. The problem was twofold. Being undocumented, the victims were often unwilling to seek contact with any government agency, fearing deportation. Secondly, there were many in government who felt that people in the United States illegally should not be eligible for assistance. To its credit FEMA opted to provide the needed assistance.

While decisions about undocumented victims is an obvious issue, moral blamelessness can be much more subtle. Research by Dr Junia Howell suggests that disasters do not just reveal wealth inequity but in fact create it and that government relief is skewed against low-income minorities who need it the most. One of the principal causes is the inequity in housing appraisal of similar homes in different neighborhoods. While the root causes of this inequity are historical, the result is that some neighborhoods are considered “less worthy” than others and the lower property value affects the amount of assistance provided to the victims. This creates a situation in which government assistance increases wealth inequity in the area affected by the disaster and fails to provide relief to lower income and minority communities.

In many ways an emergency manager’s hands are tied when addressing this problem of inequity in disaster relief. They seldom make policy but are instead responsible for implementing it. But this is cold comfort when community outrage is focused on us, or lawsuits are brought against our communities. This is no longer a problem that local emergency managers and government officials can ignore but rather one in which we must serve as a catalyst for change. We don’t make policy, but we can influence it if we engage our community’s political infrastructure, mobilize community support, and work through our professional organizations.

EM Qualifications: Who Needs a Degree?

Posted on September 29, 2023 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on EM Qualifications: Who Needs a Degree?

Want to start an argument among emergency managers? Just raise the question about whether an undergraduate degree should be one of the qualifications for the job and stand back and watch the sparks fly. The discussion usually degenerates into two categories. Those with degrees can’t see why it would be a problem and those without argue that they have had successful careers without ever needing one.

Get over it, people. It’s not about you, it’s about the future of emergency management. Stop thinking about yourself and your career experience and look at how things have changed and continue to change.

Last month I wrote about the problem of deciding what qualifies someone to be an emergency manager by focusing on the recent fires in Hawaii and the resignation of the local emergency manager following questions about his qualifications for his position. My point was that is hard to judge qualifications when you haven’t agreed on specific qualifications and have no way of measuring how well a candidate meets those them.

The problem with defining qualifications is that many current emergency managers take the view that imposing qualifications may affect their current jobs. Many of us came to our positions as a second career and offered considerable experience but limited knowledge of emergency management. We learned on the job and haven’t done too badly, all things considered. But times have changed.

One of the things I have noted over my long career has been the increasing complexity of our responsibilities as emergency managers. We came to our positions with skills that suited us extremely well for response planning and operations. But that skill set didn’t necessarily apply to the intricacies of mitigation and recovery planning that requires working with politicians and community groups with their own agendas rather than with hierarchical organizations like police and fire departments. We weren’t prepared for the new issues we’re now dealing with like diversity, equity in relief operations, and income inequality. We can handle local events, but are we prepared to deal with regional and national level crises such as climate change, political unrest, and immigration? Are we able to move beyond tactical operations to strategic thinking?

 One of the hallmarks of a profession is a specialized body of knowledge. For emergency managers, that is primarily the tremendous body of social science research that we’ve been accumulating since the 1950’s. The competitive advantage this offers is that instead of making assumptions about how people will act in crisis, we have research that indicates how they are most likely to act. Consider the many disaster myths that we encounter such as the assumption that looting will occur in a disaster versus the reality that crime actually decreases. Research also recognizes and highlights changing situations, for example the impact of social media on emergency warning.

If we accept that knowledge of emergency management research is an essential qualification for an emergency manager, then we must also accept that there must be some method for imparting that knowledge. While there is no question that this knowledge can be acquired without a formal education program, how do we determine if a candidate has met minimum requirements? Indeed, how do decide what that minimum requirement is? Do we require a standardized test or specific certifications such as the Certified Emergency Manager designation? A degree from an accredited emergency management program that teaches from a standardized curriculum would certainly simplify this process.

A degree program offers other opportunities besides just imparting knowledge; it can teach skills useful to an emergency manager. People are often surprised when they ask me what skills an emergency manager must master and I respond that they must be able to write effectively, speak persuasively, and facilitate a meeting. These skills are developed during most degree programs where students are expected to do research, write papers based on that research, and present the results in oral presentations. Yes, these skills can be acquired independently from a degree program, but a degree carries the inherent assumption that the student has mastered these skills by virtue of graduating from the program. This is our goal: to have an agreed upon indicator that a candidate has a minimum level of knowledge about the discipline of emergency management.

One argument I’ve encountered as I discuss professionalization is the charge that I’m limiting entry to our field. That’s precisely the point. Currently, one becomes an emergency manager simply by saying you are one. The result is that we have many examples of emergency managers who should never have been hired. The main purpose of any profession is to limit entry to the profession to those that have demonstrated that they meet the minimum requirements necessary for success in that field.

I’m not proposing that current emergency managers need to rush out and get a degree. What I am saying is that we need to establish minimum qualifications that ensure that emergency management candidates have the knowledge and skills to be successful in our discipline and that must include knowledge of emergency management research. This is best accomplished through a structured academic curriculum. This is not forcing current emergency managers to meet new standards; it’s about ensuring that the next generation of emergency managers are equipped for future challenges.

What Qualifies You to Be an Emergency Manager?

Posted on August 30, 2023 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on What Qualifies You to Be an Emergency Manager?

The recent fires in Maui, Hawaii, have highlighted a major problem with emergency management that we continue to ignore. It raises once again the basic question of what qualifies a person to be an emergency manager.

On the morning of August 8, a combination of high winds and downed power lines resulted in a series of fires on the islands of Maui and Hawaii, with the worst hitting the town of Lāhainā on Maui. Loss of power and the high rate of advance of the fires disrupted communications, making warning and evacuation extremely difficult. Before it was over the fires would claim over 115 lives, with 388 people confirmed missing as of this writing, making the third deadliest fire in US history.
One of the major controversies that have emerged from the disaster is the decision by the Maui emergency management administrator to not activate the island’s emergency warning sirens. His decision was based primarily on concerns that the sirens were used primarily for tsunami warnings and activation would cause people to move to higher ground, directly into the path of the fires. He also noted that sirens were primarily on the coast, and few were in the affected fire areas. His decision is being investigated by the state’s Attorney General and criticism over it contributed to his resignation citing health concerns.

Whether his decision not to activate the sirens was sound is not the issue, however. Instead, the question that has arisen is whether the administrator was qualified to make the decision. Note that the argument is not over his competence but about his qualifications. Prior to accepting the position, the administrator had never received any formal training in emergency management or held a position as an emergency manager. His position prior to appointment had been as the mayor’s chief of staff.
In response to this criticism, the administrator pointed out that he had been present for activations of the emergency operations center in his capacity as chief of staff, taken numerous online courses, and had been selected in a civil service process involving 40 other candidates, a civil service exam, and interviews by a panel of experts including seasoned emergency managers. At the time of the crisis, he had held his position as administrator since 2017.

So, was the Maui emergency management administrator qualified for the job or not?

I think the better question is by what standard are we qualified to judge him, given that we have never defined any qualifications for the position.For years now we have danced around the issue of a competency framework that defines the minimum qualifications for various positions in emergency management. We have developed academic curricula that may or not be adequate for our needs. We have a hodge podge of certifications, some respected, some not, but no single certification that can serve as a minimum qualification for employment. We have not developed entry level positions and career paths to develop future emergency managers. In short, we have not identified anything resembling a generally accepted set of minimum requirements for any emergency management position, let alone attempted to meet those needed to formally define what we do as a profession.

Traditionally, our focus has been on response and, indeed, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook continues to define the position of emergency management director solely in terms of response, ignoring the emphasis on comprehensive emergency management that dates to 1978. The problem is that competency in emergency response does not equate to competency in emergency management.

Emergency management has been growing more and more complex due to changes in our operating environment and evolving doctrine, placing more demands on emergency managers. Our role has shifted from the operational to the strategic, from being technicians to being managers. More and more the demand is for risk assessment and analysis and the anticipation of the unexpected. Our job is to build the framework for community resilience and that means having a working knowledge of the research that constitutes our specialized body of knowledge about how people and institutions react to disaster. It means understanding that response alone is not effective without mitigation, which defines our operational environment, and recovery which defines our desired end state. It means developing the ability to work with non-responders to develop long-term strategies.

The problem is that we are our own worst enemy. For example, although the Occupational Outlook Handbook suggests a typical entry level education requirement of a bachelor's degree for the position of emergency management director, but we have spent years arguing whether a degree should be required for certification. We have seen the emergence over the past fifty plus years of an academic discipline that has contributed immensely to our ability to deal with crisis, yet we continue to resist making an understanding of this specialized body of knowledge a requirement for entry to our field. Indeed, we have no mechanism for restricting someone from identifying themselves as an emergency manager because we have refused to take the steps to formal classify what we do as a profession.

Whether this resistance is the result of the attitude, “I couldn’t meet that requirement, so it’s a bad one,” or because of the need to preserve post-retirement jobs or for some other ill-defined reason is moot. The real issue is that so long as we do not define minimum qualifications for emergency management positions and do what is necessary to define ourselves as a profession that can restrict access to those who do not meet those qualifications, we will continue to see positions filled by people with little or no qualifications for the jobs they hold. And there will be absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Functional Annexes: The Backbone of Your Emergency Plan

Posted on July 25, 2023 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Functional Annexes: The Backbone of Your Emergency Plan

In my last two articles I briefly discussed the basic plan and hazard-specific annexes and problems I have encountered in helping to develop emergency plans. Each is important and an essential element of a good emergency operations plan. However, I would argue that they would be ineffective without the support provided by functional annexes.

Why are functional annexes so essential? Where the basic plan contains the overall strategy and concept of operations of how the organization will respond to a crisis, functional annexes describe how that strategy will be implemented. The basic plan describes the “what” while the functional annexes provide the “how”. Where the hazard-specific annexes address agent generated needs, functional annexes form the basis of all-hazards planning by detailing how the organization will deal with the response generated needs common to most disasters.

Unfortunately, functional annexes are often overlooked. It’s been my experience that limited funding for emergency planning is more often applied to “updating” the basic plan than to refining functional annexes. While basic plans should be regularly reviewed and updated as needed, the rarely require substantial changes and an update usually results in some minor changes and reformatting. The money spent on going through the entire planning process and developing a “new and improved” basic plan would, in many cases, be better spent on developing a process to update functional annexes.

Part of the reason for this neglect is that each annex requires a major planning effort with input from multiple agencies and organizations. Since this planning is usually the responsibility of the lead agency, the level of effort and quality of output is dependent on the commitment of that lead agency. Further, functional annexes are dependent on the existence of departmental plans, standard operating procedures (SOP), and field operations guides to implement the tasks specified in the annex, something that also requires commitment on the part of the lead agency.

In preparing a functional annex, try to keep two things in mind. The first is that the annex is not a SOP. It does not provide the user a high level of detail but instead should incorporate by reference existing SOPs and operational guidelines. Consider, for example, a functional annex for something as complex as resource management. Including the process for ordering and distributing urgently needed supplies would expand the annex to the point where the EOP becomes a multi-volume set. Further this process may change in response to new procedures or changes in technology. The same could be said of tracking financial data such as overtime and equipment costs.
The second thing to keep in mind is the needs of the user. Write for the user, not the reviewer. Commonly used topics like scope and purpose may serve to satisfy a reviewer who is not familiar with the plan or the planning process, but they are meaningless to a user in a time of crisis. They will skip over this stuff to get to the information they need. Indeed, an early study by Thomas Drabek suggested that users rarely refer to plans in a time of crisis. Keep it simple and focus on essential information.

Your functional annexes should, at a minimum, answer the following questions:

• What are the main tasks I must accomplish? What do I need to do and why is this important? Who is dependent on my accomplishing my assigned tasks? You should distinguish between high priority and immediate tasks and those for which the user has responsibility but are not of immediate urgency.
• Who’s in charge? The basic plan identified a lead agency for this annex, but the user needs to know specifically who from that agency will be the principal coordinator.
  What authority do I have? Who can make decisions to commit resources? Is it the representative at the emergency operations center, the lead at the department operations center, or the department head? Certain functions, particularly those related to financial obligations, often require specific delegations of authority. Who has these or how to obtain them are critical to the user’s ability to perform their tasks.
• What resources do I have? The basic plan usually includes a list of support agencies but normally does not specify why they are in support. The annex should include this information and specific points of contact for the resource. Resources are not limited to just supporting agencies. Our EOC in San Francisco included a computer with specific software requested by the city attorney, two dispatch consoles to support police and fire departments, and a specialized radio system allowing communications with aerial assets provided through the sheriff’s department. Also be aware of resources that might be sensitive and not included in the annex. For example, on client I worked with maintained kidnap and ransom insurance that included provisions for a trained hostage negotiator. We need not include this in our kidnap annex for security reasons but did include it in training for coordinators assigned to implement the annex.
• On whom do I depend? This question is often overlooked. We do not operate in a vacuum and there are inherent expectations that everything will go as planned. This is often a forlorn hope in a disaster so it is critical that dependencies that can affect assigned tasks are known up front.

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that any component of the emergency plan is more important than the others. They are intended to work together and address the needs of a crisis. The basic plan provides the overall concept of operations, the functional annexes address the response generated needs likely to be encountered in most disasters, and the hazard-specific annexes fine tune the methodologies of the functional annexes to address the agent generated needs of a particular hazard. What I do suggest, however, is that we expend a lot of effort focusing on the basic plan but often neglect the other annexes. The result is that we can easily fall prey to what Dr Erik auf der Heide refers to as the “paper plan syndrome”, the belief that just because we have a good basic plan, we are ready for crisis.

Hazard Specific Annexes: A Misunderstood Tool

Posted on June 27, 2023 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Hazard Specific Annexes: A Misunderstood Tool

In my recent article on planning (Who’s Going to Use Your Plan?), I wrote how many planners misunderstand how to use hazard specific annexes to address the agent generated needs of specific disasters. This confusion stems from failing to understand that “all-hazards planning” does not mean “plan for everything” but rather to develop plans and strategies that can be adapted to unexpected circumstances. At the same time, it does not mean we cannot make use of what information we have about specific hazards to begin adapting our all-hazards plan to the unique demands of those hazards prior to their occurrence.

Basic emergency management theory recognizes that there needs generated by disasters that tend to remain relatively constant from disaster to disaster and for which we can therefore plan. These are, to an extent, independent of the hazard that generated them. For example, while we may need to adjust plans slightly to adapt to specific circumstances, we generally conduct feeding and sheltering operations in the same manner. These disaster-generated needs form the bulk of our detailed planning and are summarized in the basic plan and developed more fully in functional annexes.

In addition to disaster generated needs, there are agent generated needs that are specific to the hazard causing the disaster that may force us to make major modifications to our plans. The hazard specific annex is an attempt to identify those required modifications as much as possible and develop strategies for addressing them before a disaster occurs.

I wrote in my previous article that the hazard specific annex is, in essence, a contingency plan. While this is true in the generic sense, I think it gives a false impression of what the hazard specific annex is and may be the reason so many are poorly written. The hazard specific annex is not a plan that directs operations but rather a strategy that provides a starting point for dealing with a specific crisis. That strategy builds on previous planning and organizational structure and cannot be implemented separately from those elements.

For example, the functional annex may identify specific shelter locations and the priority for opening them. However, if some are in an area of expected flooding, the hazard-specific annex for flooding might negate the use those shelters, identify alternatives, or alter the priority. A key point is this: the annex identifies a potential problem and offers possible solutions but the decision of what will be done rests with the crisis management team based on their assessment of the situation. The hazard specific annex is a tool, not a directive.

 Unfortunately, many planners approach the hazard specific annex as a plan and feel the need to include information found elsewhere in the operations plan. For example, many of the annexes I have reviewed spend a great deal of time describing the specific hazard, many times just copying data from the hazard analysis section found in the basic plan. The implication is that the annex is to be read separately rather than build on the rest of the plan. I submit that anyone turning to a hazard specific annex in a crisis will have no interest in this information but instead is seeking guidance on what they should do.

So, what should be in a hazard specific annex? The starting point for a useful annex is not any of the generic nonsense you usually find in them such as scope, concept of operations, etc. Nor is it a summary of the history of the hazard and technical data related to the potential impact. Remember who is using this annex and why. The starting point of the annex is the assumptions you are making about the impact of the hazard. For example, we have a lot of information on potential road closures in the San Francisco Bay Area after an earthquake. This will impact our ability to move resources in or evacuate people out of the affected area. Locally it might hinder our ability to open shelters or deploy emergency equipment. Our major assumption is therefore that we will be isolated and unable to access mutual aid and that this isolation may extend to individual neighborhoods.

Once the assumptions on the potential impact of the disaster are identified, the question becomes, “how do these assumptions affect my existing plans?” For example, do they affect my ability to provide public warning because widespread power outages are expected? Do they affect the ability of departments to perform tasks as expected under the operational plan because of the loss of key facilities? What key facilities will be isolated or unavailable due to flooding? Once you can identify what needs to be modified in your current plans, you are able to suggest alternate strategies to modify them.

If this process sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same planning process we use all the time. The point I’m trying to make is that this planning is all done behind the scenes and should be transparent to the person reading the hazard specific annex. The assumptions tell the reader what problems they may encounter. If an assumption is not valid (e.g., a key transportation route was not affected as expected), thats good. If it is valid, they have suggested strategies to consider. Either way, they are cued to consider a potential problem that might have been overlooked.

The disaster specific annex is not a stand-alone document. Reference can be made to other annexes in the operations plan, to contingency plans, or to departmental plans. The important thing is to keep the annex short and focused on the issue: what do I need to do differently in this situation? If you can maintain this focus on the needs of the user, your hazard specific annex becomes an extremely useful tool in a crisis rather than a useless appendage to your plan.

Who’s Going to Use Your Plan?

Posted on May 30, 2023 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Who’s Going to Use Your Plan?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rethinking the Emergency Operations Center: Five Points to Consider

Posted on April 30, 2023 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Rethinking the Emergency Operations Center: Five Points to Consider

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics and the Emergency Manager – Part 2

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Politics and the Emergency Manager – Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics and the Emergency Manager

Posted on February 27, 2023 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Politics and the Emergency Manager

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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