Disinformation and Disasters: A Deadly Combination

Posted on November 27, 2024 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Disinformation and Disasters: A Deadly Combination

A FEMA supervisor was fired recently for instructing disaster relief workers responding to Hurricane Milton to avoid canvassing homes displaying Trump signs. The FEMA administrator called the supervisor’s actions “reprehensible” and “a clear violation of FEMA’s core values and principles.” While there is no disagreement that emergency managers have a mandate to deliver relief services equally to all victims, regardless of political affiliation, one must wonder if there is more to the story.

The supervisor argues that her teams had been verbally and physically threatened by victims displaying Trump signs, indicating a community trend that created a hostile environment and danger to her workers. She maintains that her actions were taken in accordance with FEMA protocols that stressed avoidance of high-risk environments and that she is being scapegoated to save the agency’s reputation. More importantly, she claims that the problem is widespread and not limited to her area of operations or her team.

Without knowing more detail than has been given in the media, it is difficult to determine the truth of the matter. However, I believe that there is a larger issue here. The root cause was not the hostile response by some disaster victims but rather the actions that created that hostility.

With a close Presidential election less than month away, the Republican campaign had a vested interest in seeing disaster relief operations in Hurricanes Helene and Milton fail or at least appear to fail. Communications guru Art Botterell’s Fourth Law of Emergency Management states, “Perception is reality” and Republicans took full advantage of social media to create the perception that the response was a failure. This included misinformation such as:

• FEMA had run out of money because the Disaster Relief Fund had been diverted to provide housing for illegal immigrants. The truth is that funding to support immigration was a separate allocation provided by Congress for that purpose and the Disaster Relief Fund was adequate to deal with the disaster.
• FEMA was only providing $7000 to each victim so the agency and no more assistance would be forthcoming. In fact, the $7000 was an initial payment for immediate needs and additional funding would be allocated based on need.
• The Biden administration had not reached out to governors of the affected states to offer federal assistance. This was debunked by the Republican governors and mayors of the affected jurisdictions.

The result of this misinformation was predictable. Many victims refused assistance, and first responders and disaster workers were demoralized and threatened. Even meteorologists received death threats. As the rumors spread and were repeated by the Republican campaign, they in turn spawned outlandish conspiracy theories among its supporters such as that the weather was being manipulated to target Republican areas or that FEMA was blocking donations and confiscating and hoarding goods. Elected officials and government workers had to use valuable resources and time to dispel rumors and misinformation, but the sad fact is that truth travels slower than lies. A 2018 MIT study found that a false news story was 70% more likely to be reposted on social media than a true one. Despite a good effort at rumor control by FEMA and the active support of Republican governors and mayors, the efforts of the Republican campaign and its supporters were able to successfully cast doubt on the effectiveness of disaster relief operations.

I’m not naïve enough to believe that politicians have never used disasters to further political agendas. A study of Presidential declarations of disaster for the years 1989-1999 showed that the number of electoral votes in a state and whether it was considered competitive had a great deal of bearing on whether a declaration was granted. According to the findings, a non-competitive state with three electoral votes was 50% less likely to receive a declaration than a competitive state with 20 electoral votes. Even my personal hero, the Marquis de Pombal, used the 1755 Lisbon earthquake to break the power of the Catholic Church in Portugal and to eliminate his adversaries.

What we see here, however, is a blatant disregard for the well-being of disaster victims to further political ambition. Even more egregious is that many of these victims were and still are supporters of the Republican party. This disregard goes against everything to which we in emergency management have dedicated ourselves. More importantly, it destroys trust in a system that relies on the support of the public. As Edward Conley, a veteran of thirty years with FEMA and author of Promote the Dog Sitter: And Other Principles for Leading during Disasters writes, “The more people trust, believe in, and work with our nation’s emergency management system, the better the system works.”

Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle, and we are likely to see similar disinformation operations in future disasters. This means we now, more than ever, must understand and apply the principles of crisis management information. The age when public information officers put out periodic press releases and gave occasional interviews has been gone for some time, overtaken by the 24-hour news cycle. The old conventional wisdom of ignoring ridiculous rumors to avoid giving them creditability is no longer valid in the day of social media. We need the ability to be proactive with our information and nimble enough to react quickly to disinformation. It’s time to rethink the Joint Information Center and our use of social media and to bring them into the 21st century. I’m afraid that disinformation is the way of the future and poses a major threat to those we serve, and we need to be able to counter it. We won’t win, but we need to do better.

Is It Time to Rethink Disaster Legislation?

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Is It Time to Rethink Disaster Legislation?

In a recent opinion piece for The Hill titled Why America needs disaster reform Now former FEMA Administrator Brock Long makes the case that our emergency management system in the United States has become bogged down in bureaucracy and that there is an urgent need for reform. Brock notes that we have close to 90 recovery programs administered by thirty federal agencies, requiring the submission of multiple applications for assistance. The consequence is a confusing bureaucratic maze that creates confusion and duplication and causes delays in the provision of relief funding.

This is not surprising when one considers the haphazard way in which the system developed. Significant change to disaster relief has always been reactive, the result of legislative action in response to focusing events, disasters with high national impact. This reactive approach means that there has never really been a unified emergency management policy or supporting strategy. Indeed, it wasn’t until passage of the Stafford act in 1974 that preparedness and disaster relief were combined in a single piece of legislation and responsibility for disaster relief wasn’t placed under a single agency until the creation of FEMA in 1979.

The creation of FEMA created numerous problems that are in many ways reflective of what we’re dealing with today. Programs, budget, and staff were transferred to FEMA to form the new agency. However, those budgets were paid through separate funding streams and required reporting to multiple congressional oversight committees. The FEMA Director lacked authority to adjust staffing or budgets, and it was years before this issue was resolved.

The reactive approach of creating new programs in response to focusing events continues. In an article titled A Call for Unified Reform in U.S. Disaster Management Legislation: Answering Brock Long’s Vision in the Emergency Management Network, my colleague Todd Devoe identifies ten separate pieces of legislation currently before Congress:

1. Disaster Assistance Simplification Act – Aims to streamline the disaster assistance process.
2. Disaster Survivors Fairness Act – Focuses on improving the fairness of aid distribution.
3. Disaster Relief Fund Replenishment Act – Proposes automatic funding replenishment post-disaster.
4. Reforming Disaster Recovery Act (H.R. 5940) – Targets improvements in disaster recovery processes.
5. Resilient AMERICA Act (H.R. 5689) – Encourages pre-disaster mitigation and resilience-building.
6. Expediting Disaster Recovery Act (H.R. 5774) – Seeks to accelerate recovery timelines.
7. National Climate Adaptation and Resiliency Strategy Act (H.R. 6461/S. 3531) – Addresses climate adaptation strategies.
8. Champion Local Efforts to Advance Resiliency (CLEAR) Act (H.R. 7178) – Supports local resilience initiatives.
9. Natural Disaster Recovery Program Act (H.R. 9750) – Establishes programs to improve natural disaster recovery.
10. Flood Insurance Program Reform – Focuses on reforming the national flood insurance system.

As Brock points out, the problem goes further than just a complicated bureaucracy. Over the past 20 years, almost 75% of FEMA’s funding has been provided through supplemental allocations to the Disaster Relief Fund, not the annual budget. The result has been that FEMA is limited planning for immediate response and for sustained programs. The need for a reliable and predictable funding stream is critical if FEMA is to be able to prepare and immediately respond to the unexpected.

Perhaps the most urgent need is a strategic one. Brock notes the increasing reliance of local governments on disaster relief funding for the repair of uninsured public infrastructure. The reluctance of local governments to support mitigation efforts and to leverage insurance suggests the need to rethink how such assistance is provided. Brock suggests adjusting cost share rates to reward those governments who support mitigation efforts to increase resilience. He also suggests making use of alternative government funding sources by providing technical assistance to affected jurisdictions to help access programs such as those available under the American Rescue Plan Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act.

These are big ticket items that deal with national policy and strategy. What can a local emergency manager do? Devoe suggests five things you can do and, not surprisingly, they’re already in your job description:

1. Raise Awareness
2. Engage with Lawmakers
3. Collaborate Across Sectors
4. Participate in Professional Networks
5. Promote Public and Private Partnerships

I’ve written before of how you can get involved in the political process by leveraging your jurisdiction’s procedure for taking official positions on current or proposed legislation. This is particularly true if you’re from a large jurisdiction that maintains political lobbyists in your state or the national legislatures. If nothing else, consider joining the International Association of Emergency Managers. IAEM has a very effective lobbying team that has been responsible for some significant legislative accomplishments in our best interests.

Developing a comprehensive bill to address multiple programs under multiple agencies may sound like an impossible task and it well may be. There would be tremendous pushback and turf battles but to continue as we are will ultimately lead to failure. FEMA is stretched thin, managing more than 100 disaster recovery efforts, not counting support to other agencies. If ever there was a time to reform emergency management, this is it.

Effective Presentations: Insider Tips for Improving Your Skills

Posted on September 30, 2024 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Effective Presentations: Insider Tips for Improving Your Skills

We’ve all been there. You spend money to attend a conference, select a session from a long list of competing topics, and walk into the room only to walk out several minutes later because the speaker is so boring that even she is falling asleep. Sound familiar?

As both an attendee and a frequent speaker at conferences, I’m amazed at how universally bad some presentations can be. It doesn’t have to be that way. Preparing a good presentation can be easier than developing a bad one.

What’s Your Story?

A presentation is essentially a story. To make sense, it must have a beginning, middle and an end and the flow through these parts must be logical and smooth. You begin developing your story by identifying what you expect to accomplish with your presentation. To be effective, your presentation must do more than just provide an information dump – it must demonstrate the value of that information and challenge the listener to do something with it.

This is where most presentations fail. Many speakers fail to grasp that the point of a presentation is to provoke a change in the audience’s condition. This can be done by providing a deeper insight into the subject, encouraging a change of attitude or raising awareness. Just providing data without some sort of analysis and call to action makes for an extremely boring presentation.

So, what’s your story? You should be able to sum up what you want to accomplish in your presentation in a single sentence or two. I’m not talking about the things you plan to do in the presentation but rather the central theme that will bind your presentation together, the single idea that you want the audience to take away. Once you have that theme, the rest of your presentation will flow from it.

To develop the theme, begin with an outline of your key points. These key points should support your theme and be organized in a logical sequence, e.g. general to specific, chronological, increasing importance, etc.  There should not be too many of them – I’ve seen presentations collapse under the weight of too much material.

Once you have the framework of key points, you can begin to really build the presentation. Under each of the key points, identify two to three items that will illustrate the point. These supporting items could be a personal story, a case study, or historical examples.

This is where you generate interest and hold the attention of the audience. People love to be told stories and to be entertained. You can really reach them if you take the time to select examples that are particularly relevant to the audience.

Recently, I was asked to give a standard preparedness presentation at the annual conference of the Textile Rental Services Association. My contact was kind enough to grant me access to their newsletter archives and to arrange a tour of a local facility and interview with the managers there. By incorporating examples of how laundry services had performed in several disasters, I was able to make what could have been a stock presentation extremely interesting and relevant to the audience.

Fitting the Pieces Together

With the theme, key points, and illustrations you’ve got most of your presentation done. However, the two most critical points of any presentation are the opening and the closing.

The opening is important because this is where you grab the attention of the audience. Fail to do so and you may never get it back. Don’t waste time with jokes that are irrelevant to the presentation. Instead, use a startling fact, an historical example or a story to lead them into the presentation.

I opened the TRSA presentation mentioned above by telling a story about the experiences of a laundry company in the 1993 Midwest Floods. The audience was hooked from that point on because the story was relevant to them and to the presentation that followed.

Our standard method of closing is to ask for questions, then let the audience drift out. This diffuses the impact of your presentation.  The audience leaves thinking about the last question (or lack of questions!) rather than your central theme.

A more effective approach used by management consultant Alan Weiss is to pause for questions and let the audience know that you will have some final concluding remarks. You can then use your final remarks to emphasize your theme and issue your call to action.

The call to action is another thing that is frequently missing from presentations. You’ve just spent 45 minutes or more of my time providing me with information. What do you want me to do with it? The answer to this question should be uppermost in the mind of your audience as they leave the room.

Now that you’ve got the pieces identified, tie them together by rehearsing. I personally tend to rehearse different pieces over time, and then do a full run through at least once to make sure I’ve got my timing down.

One of the most important pieces of advice I’ve ever received came from Alan Weiss. Don’t memorize your speech, internalize it. If you memorize your speech, it sounds canned, and an unforeseen event can throw you off track. If you internalize it, that is, understand what you want to say and how you want to say it, you have a great deal of flexibility. You can lengthen or shorten your speech to accommodate time issues, you can have additional stories and examples on hand if needed, and you can modify your presentation based on audience reaction. Note that this is not the same as “winging it”.

Death by PowerPoint

You’ll notice that so far, I haven’t said a word about PowerPoint. That’s because preparing a PowerPoint presentation is irrelevant to building your presentation. If you have outlined your presentation with key points and supporting examples and if you have internalized your presentation, you really don’t need PowerPoint. You should be able to give your presentation without using a single slide.

The single biggest problem that I have found in presentations is a misuse of PowerPoint. Unfortunately, it has evolved into a crutch for speakers, an electronic substitute for notes.

So, what do speakers usually do wrong? One word: TEXT. We feel the need to use the outline function and put lots of words on the screen.  There are two things wrong with this:

1. If they’re reading your slide, they’re not listening to you.
2. If they can get all the information they need from the slide, why do they need you in the first place?

So how do you use PowerPoint? Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, suggests the use of pictures and quotes or meaningful graphs. This both conveys information more clearly and keeps the focus on you, the speaker.

Let’s look at a couple of examples. The following slide was intended to describe how local emergency managers evolved.

This rather boring slide can be replaced with a single quote, with the detail contained not on the slide but in the speaker’s notes.

Notice that the second slide sums up the importance of the emergency manager’s role rather than just serving as a set of notes to keep you on track. Which works better for your audience?

Let’s look at another example. Consider the following table of information which is intended to show enormous scope of the Great Flood of 1927. It’s interesting but it doesn’t provoke a reaction.

Now look at the following graphic developed from the same information.

Notice how the scope of the 1927 flood is immediately apparent to the audience? The slide makes this point without you having to say a single word.

Ideally, your slide presentation should be meaningless to anyone that gets a copy after your presentation. After all, if they could get the key points of your presentation from your slide show, why bother going to your presentation?

This brings us to the point of handouts. All too often, we create incredibly complex slides that are unreadable, and then apologize to the audience. Edward Tufte, an expert on information design, says that PowerPoint is the worst way to provide complex information and suggests the use of handouts instead.

Unfortunately, we usually limit our handouts to copies of the slide presentation. If, as I mentioned above, your PowerPoint is meaningless, this is a very poor take away except for those few who used it for note taking.

Instead, consider something that provides useful information. My personal preference is a one- or two-page handout that includes an outline of my presentation, a list of references that I used in developing the presentation, and my contact information. This handout provides the audience with a summary of my key points and resources for obtaining more information without burdening them with 10 pages of tiny, unreadable slides.

Why Not Go First Class?

Preparing a presentation in the manner I’ve suggested does require a change in how we currently do presentations. You won’t have the comfort of the outline showing on the screen and you may have to memorize data or refer to your notes. But on the other hand, identifying your theme and key points makes it easier to put a presentation together. Internalizing your presentation allows you to stay better focused and you can still use the photos and quotes as cues for what you want to discuss.

So, stop boring your audience and yourself. It really doesn’t take all that much more effort to do a first-class presentation.

The Emergency Manager as Mediator

Posted on August 31, 2024 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on The Emergency Manager as Mediator

One of the main functions of an emergency manager is to help stakeholders with competing agendas agree to a common goal and the best approach to achieving that goal. The problem is that often those competing agendas and organizational biases can lead to conflict. Consequently, emergency managers may find themselves serving as mediators for the opposing groups.

Here are just a few examples of the types of conflicts that can create the need for mediation between opposing demands:

• Two city departments who have traditionally battled for dominance, distrust each other’s motivations, and compete for resources must now agree on how best to spend federal grant funds. The underlying cause of the conflict is that each wants an equal share of the funds regardless of overall operational needs.
• A homeless advocacy group and the city social services department who distrust each other need to help craft a plan for dealing with victims displace by residential hotel fires. The advocates want more benefits and services than the victims had available before the fire while social services department has budget and policy limitations on what they can provide.
• A shelter working group does not want a police presence in emergency shelters, despite a clear need for some measure of security. The lack trust in the police department’s ability to deal with a population largely consisting of homeless people and foreign nationals.

Mediation is not just a case of just holding a meeting and working through issues. This is the normal approach, and we are very effective at it. Mediation comes into play when there is a deadlock that requires intervention to help the parties in conflict reach an agreeable compromise. It is frequently exacerbated by a mutual distrust among the parties involved. Success in mediation really depends on doing your homework beforehand and being adequately prepared. Here are some suggestions you might want to consider:

• Position yourself as a neutral party. Your success as a mediator depends heavily on the trust of the parties you are mediating. This is not something you can develop quickly and must be built over time. If you cannot be perceived as neutral, get someone else to mediate and support them as necessary.
• Understand context. You’ll need to do some research on what created the problem you’re trying to mediate. By this I mean understanding a bit of history on why there is a conflict and what biases might have a bearing on the problem. For example, in the early days of the Incident Command System there was resistance to adapting it to other departments because it was viewed as a “fire program”. Understanding context can help you avoid pitfalls that can cast doubt on your neutrality.
• Make sure you have the right participants. While it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get department heads, the participants should have sufficient authority to speak for their organization and commit the organization to a course of action, pending ratification by their superiors. This is important or you’ll find yourself holding multiple meetings, each ending with, “I’ll have to get back to you on that after I talk to my boss.”
• Consider meeting with each participant separately prior to a joint mediation session. Depending on your relationships with the participants, you may want to meet with them one-on-one as part of your research before the mediation session. This can give you insight into the causes of the conflict and the positions each is likely to take on the issues at the later meeting. This understanding can make you sensitive to each participant’s issues and help you develop more effective approaches to resolving conflict.
• Be clear about the expected outcome. By this I don’t mind a specific outcome that you force the participants towards but rather the overall end results you’re trying to achieve. The specifics will be determined during mediation, but you need to be able to articulate a clear goal to keep participants on track. Having this agreed to by the participants prior to any session will avoid the need argue about goals instead of issues.
• Use a formal meeting facilitation process. Particularly in the case where there is animosity or distrust, you’ll need all the tools at your disposal to keep the meeting on track and stop it from being sidetracked. An agreed upon agenda, accepted decision-making process, issue parking – all these are extremely important tools in helping participants maintain their focus.
• Focus on agreements. I have found it effective to open a mediation session by developing a quick list of those things that the participants can agree on or have already agreed on. These are easy wins that demonstrate that agreement is possible and there are only a few things that are really problems.
• Don’t try to fix everything at once. Unless you’re doing something like an all-day or multi-day retreat (a whole different approach), keep your sessions short and focused on a single issue. This can prevent participants from getting tired and combative and allows for cooling off periods between meetings.
• Document results. This is part of the meeting facilitation process, but it is absolutely essential to mediation. There will be a lot of people who will be interested in the outcome, and you’ll want a record of decisions made and actions agreed to by the participants. I prefer to share a draft with each participant to make sure my meeting memorandum is accurate.
• You’re not always going to be successful. While it’s rare, there are times when you won’t be able to resolve an issue. In this case, the question for participants is, “At what level would you like this resolved?” The best you can do is to document the results of the meeting and escalate the issue. This is most effective if you can summarize the issue and offer several options for resolution based on the information you have collected in the mediation process. Having clear options makes it much easier for senior managers to render a quick decision instead of asking them to formulate a solution to a problem.

Mediation is not often necessary, but when it is, it is the result of a major conflict between two or more participants. In this case, it’s best approached outside a larger planning group and by focusing on the specific issues causing the conflict. Focus on the problem, resolve it, and move on.

How Do You Plan for Everything?

Posted on July 30, 2024 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on How Do You Plan for Everything?

Anyone who has spent time in emergency management understands that the public’s attention to risk is often either non-existent or fleeting. It takes disaster on a large scale to gain attention and that attention is usually accompanied by demands for swift corrective action in the immediate aftermath which is in turn followed by apathy as the disaster fades into history. This is particularly true of disasters that have a low frequency of occurrence but a high potential impact.

Consider, for example, the Y2K crisis of distance memory. Also referred to as the millennium bug, the problem was caused by computer coding that failed to account for changing the first two digits in a date from 19 to 20 at the turn of the century. The problem was known well in advance and there were numerous missed opportunities to correct it. However, it wasn’t until a year or so before the event that the problem became a widespread crisis, with predictions of catastrophic failures of computer systems leading to the apocalypse. A lot of effort went into last minute planning by emergency managers to help allay public concern. However, within a matter of months all the lessons learned about system interdependencies, critical points of failure, and the need for parallel systems were forgotten.

This tendency of the public to create what is sometimes called the disaster “flavor of the month” poses considerable problems for emergency managers. On the one hand, the nature of the disaster is usually real, albeit often exaggerated to epic proportions and there is a responsibility to respond to a concerned public. On the other hand, with limited resources and competing priorities, emergency managers cannot afford to focus all their resources on a single threat. But how then do you balance these two challenges?

To answer that question, consider the latest flavor of the month, the recent CrowdStrike debacle. The cybersecurity upgrade that created what is most likely the biggest IT failure in history has raised the issue of cybersecurity with the public to extremely high levels and it’s likely that we will see a demand for action on the part of emergency planners. The question is, “How much of this problem do emergency managers own?”

To begin, we need to consider that various issues raised by the crisis, much of which are still being learned. There is the immediate response which is requiring a significant effort on the part of IT departments to manually remove a corrupted file from thousands of individual computers. This clearly in the purview of the IT department. But many organizations also responded by switching to manual systems. Others had never invested in the training and materials needed to do so. One can argue that identifying the need for such systems and encouraging their development is clearly something with which emergency managers could assist, even if the actual development and testing of such systems are the responsibility of the affected organization.

This is the first lesson in “planning for everything”: Recognize who owns the problem. Emergency managers don’t have to do it all but can provide guidance and resources. We can point out problems and suggest solutions. We can assist in the formation of workgroups or taskforces. We can also hold people accountable through workplans and operating agreements.

The CrowdStrike failure highlighted the interdependence of critical infrastructure. This is exacerbated by the fact that something like 85% of the critical infrastructure in the United States is privately owned, making the transfer of information difficult. This means we may not always recognize this interdependence until a crisis occurs. This points to another lesson for planning: think strategically. It is easy to view threats from a purely local level but recognizing interdependencies can allow you to prepare for crisis and provide early warning before a problem arises. Remember that disasters have ripple effects and that events in occurring in locations far removed from your organization can have profound impacts. Consider, for example, the far reaching effects on local economies caused by the terrorist attacks on September 11^th.

More importantly, however, is the recognition that emergency managers do not deal in specific hazards but rather in the consequences of those hazards in relation to an organization's vulnerabilities. For example, had the CrowdStrike failure affected a municipal water supply’s SCADA system, the result would clearly be an emergency management issue. But a cybersecurity attack, a terrorist attack, or an earthquake could produce the same issue. We plan for consequences, not hazards. This is your third lesson in planning for everything: focus on consequences. This is emergency management 101: all hazard planning means planning for response generated needs that remain relatively constant in all disasters. In other words, plan for consequences. Planning for agent generated needs that vary with the specific disaster is more strategic in nature and more like contingency planning.

We really can’t plan for everything, but we can plan for the things that are common to all disasters. To do that, we need to share the load by making use of the broader planning community and recognizing that emergency management is not a discrete process but a distributed one that should involve all members of an organization.

Building Your Professional Library

Posted on June 28, 2024 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Building Your Professional Library

Back in the day when rocks were soft and dinosaurs roamed the earth, people like me came to emergency management as a second profession. We brought with us a considerable amount of experience in our previous jobs but had very little real knowledge of emergency management. This was not a particular drawback as our focus was largely on the development of emergency plans.

Then came the great awakening. I remember reading a paper by Dr Enrico Quarantelli and thinking, “This guy has finally got it! About time someday figured this out.” I then looked at the date on the paper; it was written the year I was born. It was my introduction to a whole range of books, research papers, and articles on emergency management that I didn’t know existed.

This became more and more important as emergency management evolved from an operational to a strategic emphasis and sought recognition as a profession. One of the principal requirements of a profession is a specialized body of knowledge yet it is only recently that we have begun to recognize this and seen the emergence of academic disciplines designed to provide embryonic emergency managers with access to this body of knowledge.

This is incredibly important. The past is an indicator of what has occurred and may reoccur. Coupled with social science research, it shows how others have solved problems in the past and how people are likely to behave in a crisis. For too long we have been basing emergency plans on disaster mythology and how we assume people will react rather that what history and research teach us are more realistic and likely reactions.

In addition, there is evidence that increasing your knowledge base can improve your ability to make decisions in a crisis. In his book, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, Dr Gary Klein argues that crisis decision making is based on pattern recognition. He notes that the patterns available in a decision maker’s knowledge base can be increased not only through experience but through simulation exercises, reading, and viewing videos.

Since the type of information of use to emergency managers is not always easy to find and may be drawn from numerous disciplines, I have found it useful to develop a personal reference library. The content of your library is your choice. There are numerous suggested reading lists floating around but the best reading list if the one you develop for yourself. For example, if you’re just getting started in emergency management, you might start with books and papers that form the foundation of modern emergency management theory. If you’re looking to improve your ability to deal with disaster, you might choice to look at books and studies related to historical disasters. However, the one thing to avoid is limiting your reading to just emergency management. There is a wealth of information available in other disciplines that have direct bearing on emergency management such as readings in politics, law, political economics, climatology, and so forth.

The obvious starting point in building your library is, of course, to buy books. But many of the books that we find useful are based on academic research and have a limited market and, therefore, a high price. Fortunately, there are opportunities to purchase books second hand and you will often be surprised at the relevancy of some of the older books you find. Never pay full price for a book if you can avoid it. Online and second-hand bookstores are your friends.

Don’t neglect your local library either. Many libraries make books available in electronic format as well as hard copies, making them easy to access when traveling or doing late night research. You can also access materials not in the local library’s collection through inter-library loans. If you are an alumnus or alumna of a nearby university, you can generally gain access to the university library and its resources. This may allow you to access academic journals that would otherwise be too costly to access. Another way is to access academic journals is to volunteer to serve on their editorial board.

Depending on your work environment, you may be able to help your organization build a small reference library for you team. I was successful in this for several organizations with whom I was associated. The plus was that my team had access to the materials, and it was something that could be useful to my successors.

Fortunately, some of the best material is readily available online for free. The University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center houses the E.L. Quarantelli Resource Collection consisting of hundreds of documents. The Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado also offers access to disaster research papers. FEMA’s Higher Education Program used to have a considerable amount of papers and textbooks available for download but their webpage is under development at this writing and a selection of materials can be found at the National Emergency Training Center (NETC) Library. Aside from sites such as these, even a basic search will turn up many resources, including primary resources, after-action reports, and academic papers.

The advantage of internet resources is that many of them can be downloaded without the storage requirements of hard copies. The secret is to have a system that allows you to be able to retrieve a specific document. You don’t want to know how many times I’ve had to search for and retrieve a document because I couldn’t remember if or where I’d stored it.

Not everyone is a reader and not all books and papers are easy to read. But expanding your knowledge base increases your ability to deal with crisis. Remember, emergency managers are generalists, not specialists. We are expected to know a bit about a broad range of topics in way that allows us to engage in strategic thinking. The broader our knowledge base, the more effective we are.

What Makes an Emergency Manager Unique?

Posted on May 23, 2024 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on What Makes an Emergency Manager Unique?

In last month’s featured article, First Responders as Emergency Managers, my colleague Tim Riecker wrote about the difficulties many first responders have in transitioning to emergency management. Tim makes the point that first responders and emergency managers are from different fields that require different skill sets that don’t often overlap. Hence, having a first responder background should not be prerequisite for an emergency management position nor is it an automatic guarantee that the candidate will be a successful emergency manager.

My experience mirrors Tim’s and I’d like to expand on this theme a bit as to why I think emergency managers are unique.

When I first came to emergency management, there was no definition as to who emergency managers were or what we did. Indeed, there was no real definition for emergency management. Instead, emergency management was defined by the tasks it was expected to accomplish, as codified in a list of basic preparedness functions. These included tasks such as the mobilization of resources, public warning, caring for victims, damage assessment, and so forth. Emergency managers were defined by the skills needed to perform these tasks.

However, if we look closely at these tasks, it becomes obvious that emergency managers do not perform these tasks. Instead, they ensure that they are performed. Consider, for example, the establishment of emergency shelters. Most emergency plans have a table of some sort designating primary and supporting agencies for emergency functions such as sheltering. I submit that, with a few extremely rare exceptions, none of those tables have the emergency management office as the lead agency for sheltering. Instead, sheltering is usually performed by a team comprised of experts in the various aspects of sheltering, such as shelter management and congregate care. The same can be said of almost all the tasks considered basic preparedness functions.

If emergency managers don’t perform basic preparedness functions, what is it that we contribute to the communities we serve? To explain this, let’s consider an example from the medical profession. Medical professionals can be roughly divided into two very broad categories: generalists and specialists. A general practitioner requires a very broad range of knowledge that allows them to diagnose a patient’s condition. If the patient’s problem is within the physician’s area of practice, they provide treatment. But since their knowledge base is broad but not necessarily deep in some areas, the general practitioner may recognize the need for a referral to a specialist with a deeper understanding of the patient’s condition.

Here's an example of how this works. A patient discusses concerns about the signs of potential heart disease. The general practitioner examines the patient, runs a few tests, and determines that there may be issues with the patient’s heart. The general practitioner refers the patient to a physician specializing in heart disease who confirms a serious problem and refers the patient to a surgeon who specializes in heart operations. During the operation through recovery, the surgeon is supported by a team of other specialists, such as endocrinologist, anesthesiologists, surgical nurses, etc.

Now apply this same concept to emergency managers. We are expected to have a broad range of knowledge that encompasses emergency theory and practices, disaster legislation, historical examples, available resources, and more. More importantly, we need to be able to see the big picture, to think strategically, and to be able to integrate the work of the many specialists with whom we work. Above all, we must be generalists and not let ourselves be distracted by trying to do the tasks that can be better done by a specialist.

Understanding that we are generalists changes the dynamic. Where the old paradigm focused on the what (the basic preparedness functions), being a generalist focuses us instead on the why, which in turn leads to the how and the who. It also shifts us away from the need for just technical competence to include managerial competence and the perception of adding to public value. This in turn demands we develop the competencies that Tim discussed in his article: the personality and people skills needed to support coordination, constantly seeking additional knowledge and training, going beyond a single focus on response, and administrative competency.

There is research to back up this unique view of emergency management. More importantly, we now have an accepted definition of emergency management that focuses on this more proactive role:  

Emergency management is the managerial function charged with creating the framework within which communities reduce vulnerability to threats/hazards and cope with disasters.

Note the emphasis on management and on the development of community capacity rather than just on tasks. Being a generalist is more challenging and demanding than being a specialist in many ways. I believe that it is what makes us unique among the many organizations with whom we work.

But That Plan Is Just for Disasters!

Posted on April 25, 2024 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on But That Plan Is Just for Disasters!

Shortly before the recent eclipse, I saw a brief article about several small jurisdictions in Texas who were activating their emergency operations centers during the event. No, this was not in response to the numerous doomsday conspiracy theories that were making the rounds prior to the eclipse. Rather, it was in response to a well-reasoned risk assessment. The jurisdictions were in the path of the eclipse and realized they would be inundated by sightseers who generate a potential for traffic congestion, shortages of food, fuel, and lodging, increased medical emergencies and so forth. In short, while it would not necessarily rise to the level of a disaster, it would provide a risk to the community that could be best handled through a coordinated interagency response.

We sometimes think that emergency management is limited to disasters and that our plans are intended specifically for that purpose. Even if we don’t, this is often the perception that others have. During the after-action review of a major residential hotel fire that displaced just over a hundred residents, I asked why we had not used the shelter plan laid out in the city’s Emergency Operations Plan. The reply I received was that the plan was only for disasters. It took several years and a lot of work to reverse that attitude. Following that painful process, we ended up with a much-improved shelter plan that could be used in both emergencies and disasters.

Closely associated with this attitude is a narrowness of vision. We tend to think that the hazards we deal with are the big-ticket items, things like earthquakes, fires, floods, terrorist attacks, and chemical spills. Yet experience teaches us that disasters, while common in the aggregate, are relatively rare in any given jurisdiction. However, that same jurisdiction daily faces a high risk of an emergency that requires a coordinated inter-agency response. We need to broaden our vision to include any hazard that places those we serve at risk.

Changing your perspective from a focus on disasters to one based on risk can have a positive impact on your relationship with senior officials and their staff. Early in my time at San Francisco, we were faced with a major garbage strike. Since it wasn’t a “disaster,” my office wasn’t privy to the planning being done by the mayor’s staff. At the last minute, I was asked to help by providing maps of the city and, when it was learned I was a native, some advice on potential collection points. As I was about to leave the meeting, there was a discussion on how the city could perform all the necessary inspections of the collection points and identify what city resources would be needed to support them. After eavesdropping for a bit, I suggested that what was needed was an inter-agency team, which was something my office did routinely. My staff wasn’t too happy about this “non-disaster” work but in a matter of hours we had identified and staged the teams using elements of our EOP.

The result of this brief participation in the garbage strike was that my office was acknowledged as a productive member of the mayor’s staff and that we had skills and resources that could be used to support a variety projects. In essence, we were part of the team and not just “plan checkers.” We began to get requests to help support other initiatives. For example, we worked closely with the Mayor’s Office on Homelessness on emergency winter sheltering planning and with the police department on developing a response to child abduction. Our EOC was frequently activated in anticipation of potential civil disturbances, demonstrations, or large civic events. We were the lead for the response to the power emergencies, an event that didn’t pose a great risk but generated a tremendous amount of public concern. Our approach was that if it potentially affected the well-being of our citizens, we were involved, even if only peripherally.

We were not unique in this. One of my colleagues became concerned about rumors of an impending financial crisis and after performing a risk assessment, started developing plans to deal with the potential impact in his jurisdiction. Before it became generally accepted, another colleague began pushing for development of a recovery plan for his jurisdiction. Both met with resistance, both from their own staff and plan stakeholders.

The resistance is understandable. Emergency managers are most comfortable dealing with operational issues and hierarchical organizations. Moving beyond the operational means developing a more strategic viewpoint. It requires developing new skills in uncomfortable areas such a politics and finance. It involves learning to work with a whole range of new stakeholders, many of whom are not used to the hierarchical approach with which we tend to work. Our work on the shelter plan, for example, required working with many small community organizations, many of whom were mistrustful of government.

How do you take on all this additional work with limited resources? You do it by recognizing that this is not in addition to your work but part of your work. Every project you take on is an opportunity to test and improve components of your plan. Every new plan you develop is an opportunity work with new stakeholders and to develop relationships that will be essential in a disaster. Every time you activate an EOC is an opportunity test systems and train first-time attendees.

However, the most important benefit is the visibility these opportunities provide. Ultimately, your goal is to be recognized as something beyond just a type of fire extinguisher that is only used in a disaster. Instead, you need to be able to influence events rather than being controlled by them. You need to be viewed as a key staff member and trusted advisor. Demonstrating you are part of the team of decision makers and advisors is critical to your success.

Do You Really Want a Robot to Write Your Emergency Plan?

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Do You Really Want a Robot to Write Your Emergency Plan?

In one of the discussion groups I follow, someone asked about the possibility of using artificial intelligence to write emergency plans. After my initial reaction of, “Are you serious?” I realized it is a reasonable question to ask, given all the hype surrounding AI. Emergency managers are always seeking ways to improve and are quick to embrace new technologies. So, are we missing a bet here?

Let me raise two caveats. The first is that I am by no means an expert in artificial intelligence. My thoughts on the matter are more philosophical than technical. The second caveat is that the field is incredibly dynamic and changing almost daily, both in terms of technology and in terms of legal and economic factors. Whatever I write today could be out of date by the time you read this article.

Part of the problem with AI is the name itself. Despite conjuring science fiction images of the end of society at the hands of intelligent robots, AI is not intelligent, it is imitative. It can acquire vast amounts of data very quickly, recognize patterns and predict associations based on those patterns. This adapts well to things like speech recognition and language translation. However, I get a bit skeptical when its proponents claim AI is capable of decision-making. There is a big difference between the decision-making capacity required for sorting boxes in a warehouse and that for deciding the assignment of resources in a crisis. Since those decisions are based on the input data, I am reminded of the old programmer’s warning, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Part of this skepticism is based on the overwhelming hype surrounding the use of AI to essentially replicate things that are already in use. Both Google and Bing have incorporated AI into their search functions, with sometime hilarious results. Unfortunately, some of the results have also included potentially serious results, such as incorrect medical advice. AI recognizes patterns; it does not analyze or understand context.

Which brings us to its use in emergency planning. Over the years, I have conducted the review of numerous plans at multiple levels of government and private sector organizations. After a while, they all begin to look much the same. The reason for this is that we have pushed hard to standardize our emergency plans through the development of doctrinal documents such as Comprehensive Preparedness Guide (CPG) 101 Developing and Maintaining Emergency Operations Plans. This is not a bad thing in itself. Standardization allows for a common approach to operations and the integration of supporting elements. However, we have pushed beyond standardizing concepts to developing way too much minutia in initiatives such as the national qualification system. The end result is that many plans are now written to conform to doctrine rather than for the convenience of the user.

However, between all this doctrinal information and the hundreds of existing plans, there is a large pool of material that would probably be sufficient for Chat GPT or one of the other AI systems to develop an emergency plan for a given jurisdiction that would conform to all existing requirements. The question is, “Why would you want to?”

Several years ago, I was part of a team helping a major city with its evacuation planning. My job was to review their evacuation plan. It was a thing of beauty: the concept was solid, all the elements needed were addressed, and all supporting elements were integrated into the plan. However, it didn’t take much digging to find out that the plan had been written in week by a single individual and that nothing in the plan had ever been coordinated with the supporting agencies or with the host jurisdictions receiving the evacuees. The plan was useless.

Similarly, I once unsuccessfully bid on a multi-jurisdictional project to assist with their emergency plan development. The budget was tight, so I was careful to propose only the minimum process necessary to formulate the plans. When I asked for suggestions on how to improve future proposals, I was told that it looked like I wanted them to do a lot of work. Apparently, they were looking for a fiction writer and not a planning consultant.

My point here is that it is not the writing of the document that is important but the process of developing the plan, something that any emergency manager worth his or her salt understands. I’m not sure that AI offers much beyond the many templates or plan writing programs already available online or the many samples your colleagues are willing to share for free.  If AI floats your boat, give it try. Just don’t expect it make decisions for you and don’t expect your plan to be user-friendly. I suspect that the time you save in writing will be eaten up in proof reading and correcting contextual issues. Never forget that the process of planning is important, not the end result.

Who Writes This Stuff Anyway? How Federal Guidance Gets Developed

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment on Who Writes This Stuff Anyway? How Federal Guidance Gets Developed

In a recent article titled Gaps in ICS Doctrine and Documents my colleague Tim Riecker points out the lack of cohesive doctrine in the Incident Management System. He writes that while we have some basic guidance in documents such as the National Incident Management System document and the National Qualification System, there is a lack of definition of key concepts, inclusion of contemporary practices, and continuity from doctrine into supporting documents and training.

As is usually the case, I agree with Tim completely on his assessment. Further, his article sparked some ideas about why this is the case. I suggest that it comes down to three factors: the use of consultants to develop much of our guidance documents, the project managers who oversee their work and our own lack of involvement in the process.

Before you think I’m going to hammer on consultants, let me remind you that I have been a consultant for over twenty years and have been fortunate to work with exceptional individual consultants and with several reputable firms. The issue is not necessarily the consultants but the government’s system of breaking initiatives into multiple projects. This means that frequently consultants are called on to build on work done by a previous consulting team, whether they agree with the previous approach or not. Often you find yourself working on a project that might affect or be affected by one handled by another consulting team without knowing that project exists. There is also the problem with changes to the project management team where the new project manager may want to take things in a different direction or chooses not to accept your advice on how best to achieve the project goals.

As a consultant I usually perform one of two roles. I may be part of a team as a subject matter expert because of my knowledge of an issue or possession of a specific technical skill. As a solo consultant, I am what is known as a process consultant. I guide clients through the development of policies and procedures to achieve their desired goals. Understanding this will help you understand why we are weak in the development of ICS doctrine.

As I’ve pointed out in the past, we can define three very broad categories when dealing with disaster response planning: strategic, operational, and tactical. Strategy provides the overall context in which other plans function. The operational level translates strategy into action by coordinating the resources needed to achieve goals and objectives. The tactical level is where the actual provision of services takes place. In terms of emergency response, the tactical level is the on-scene response, the operational the emergency operations center, and the strategic the Multiagency Coordination Group or policy group. Problems arise when you mix up the roles of the various levels in plans or guidance documents.

If we look at documents such as the National Response Framework, these are strategic documents. They establish the operational context that will drive the development of supporting plans and documents. They deal with concepts rather than specifics. For a process consultant, this is the type of project we love. While it can be complex and challenging depending on the stakeholders involved, the methodology and end product are similar to previous projects.

Jumping ahead to the purely tactical, we have an excellent example in the National Qualification System. This type of project is also one that consultants enjoy because a lot of the work is repetitive and can be done by entry-level consultants or clerical staff with work laid out and verified by subject matter experts. Like strategic projects, the work can be complex and sometimes tedious but is well within the capabilities of consulting teams and plays to their strengths.

The operational becomes more problematic, however. A strategic document is by nature a “one size fits all” document. The same can be said of a tactical document like the NQS where the intent is to standardize the requirements for anyone filling a specific position. An operational document does not share this “one size fits all” trait. It must be generic enough to provide for the standardization called for in NIMS yet flexible enough to allow modifications to adapt to local circumstances. Developing these documents usually involves significant input from subject matter experts, which increases the cost and complexity of the project. It is no wonder then that we see a gap within operational guidance.

Given these limitations on consultants, the role of the program managers overseeing their work becomes extremely important. However, one cannot assume that these program managers always have sufficient knowledge and experience to guide these complex programs. Practical field experience in emergency management is not a qualification a position in FEMA. There are exceptions, of course, and this is not intended to denigrate the hard work done of these projects by agency staff who are forced to learn on the job. It is instead an acknowledgement of problems in the system.

How do we correct this? Actually, the approach that FEMA uses is a good one – ask those who will use the product. FEMA releases draft documents for public comments.  However, my experience is that many emergency managers are not signed up to receive notifications and those that do are frequently too busy to take the time to read and comment on drafts. We need to do better at pushing back on proposed guidance or doctrine that do not tally with our practical experience.

More importantly, we need to recognize that much of what we assume is doctrine is, in fact, guidance. Many existing documents provide principles rather specific direction and provide a degree of flexibility in following those principles. Slavishly conforming to a guidance document to the detriment of your ability to adequately respond to a crisis does no one any good.