Disaster Operations and Decision Making

By Roger C. Huder

The only book to combine emergency management principLEs with proven military concepts

Good disaster plans do not guarantee a good response. Any disaster plan rarely survives the first rain bands of a hurricane or the first tremors of an earthquake. While developing plans is essential, there must be systems in place to adapt these plans to the ever-changing operational environment of a disaster. Currently there is no set of standard disaster response principles to guide a community. The National Incident Management System (NIMS) and the Incident Command System (ICS) provide the framework to implement operational decisions, but they were never designed as operational concepts. The military has developed just such concepts and many of them can be adapted for civilian use.

Disaster Operations and Decision Making adapts those military concepts and combines them with disaster lessons learned to create a new opera-tional paradigm. Emphasizing team building, Emergency Operations Center operational systems, and situational awareness, the book details easily adopted methods. All of these methods are designed to be incorporated into the NIMS and ICS framework to enhance a community's response to any type of disaster.

Disaster Operations and Decision Making is an essential resource for emergency managers, fire chiefs, law enforcement officers, homeland security professionals, public health officials, and anyone else involved or interested in crisis management.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781118178522

Book preview

Preface

Political Decisions Have Operational Consequences, Operational Decisions Have Political Consequences

All disasters are political. And as political events they have all the complications that a political event creates. Everything you do and everything you are told to do will eventually be seen through the prism of self-interest by those inside and outside your organization. The press will emphasize what is going wrong and not what is going right. The strengths and weaknesses that exist in your community’s organization will be exposed and magnified by the stresses of the demands that will be made on them. Personnel in your organization will not be up to the challenges at hand. Some will freeze, while others will not show up, choosing to stay with family. There will be promotions on the spot based on personal actions as well as demotions and even firings. On top of all of that is the fact that you are in charge of nothing but responsible for how all the organizations in your community work together and will be judged by their performance. In other words, being an emergency manager during a disaster is one of the most difficult positions anyone can possibly imagine and one of the most important. How well you juggle all of these factors will determine the eventual impact an event has on your community. Because once a disaster occurs, it will continue to impact your community until you get it under control and begin to repair the damage.

How good a job you do will be determined long before a disaster strikes. It will be decided in meetings, offices, and the hallways of your community. It will depend on establishing yourself as a leader and having the ability to maneuver through a bureaucracy to accomplish what you need to do to prepare your community. This process can be a long one with few rewards. I watched appointed officials around me make the decisions they were appointed to make then fired for making them when the political climate changed. I watched as officials did what they were told by those who had appointed them and then, when a scapegoat was needed, not only were they fired but were blamed for their decisions. It is easy to lose sight of what it is you are trying to accomplish and why you are struggling through this maze. I had to develop a way to remind myself of whom I was fighting for in the midst of office battles over the years. I eventually came up with a rule that I tried to use as a guiding principle.

This book is written in the spirit of that principle that I came to call the the little old lady rule. I had come from the street as a hands-on first responder, where my decisions and their consequences were immediately apparent. I knew immediately if I had made the right decision. I needed something that grounded me in that same way in the conference rooms and offices.

The Little Old Lady Rule

Somewhere in my community there sits a little old lady who has paid her taxes for the last fifty years. She had never required more from my jurisdiction than to pick up her garbage, pave streets and sidewalks, and provide her with utilities, the simple services any community provides to everyone. Now in the midst of a disaster she will need more than the simple service, her home and even her life are in jeopardy. She has no retinue of lobbyists knocking on the doors of elected officials to make sure her interests are served. She is depending on me. So the rule is that what is best for the little old lady is best for the community. She is a reflection of all of those who trust us to be there to make the decisions that are best for her and all of those like her.

If you do what is right for that little old lady then you will be doing what is right for the community as a whole. All that you can do as an emergency manager is to make decisions that are best for the entire community no matter how difficult or politically unpopular they may be. The rule holds true in any jurisdiction no matter its size. It helped me make the decisions that I thought were best for the community as a whole, because she represented the people who depended on us the most. And the right decision for her was the right decision for the community.

The rule by no means made some of the decisions easier or even popular, but it provided me with a bottom line and a core belief. There were decisions based on this rule that I made long before any disaster threatened that were unpopular with everyone from the labor unions to the administration. The rule never made the decision-making easier or less controversial or politically less volatile, but if I was going to be fired I wanted to be fired for doing what I thought had been best for that little old lady and everyone she represented.

I did not always win those battles before, during, or after events, but the rule worked because I always felt that I had made the best decision I could for the community. In disaster response that is the best you can ever hope for. This book is written in the spirit of the little old lady rule. My hope is that it gives the reader some tools and approaches to the challenges any disaster presents. If it does that, then I will have been true to the rule.

ROGER C. HUDER

Introduction

Disasters are stressful to any organization and to the personnel who populate them. Some participants will be up to the task and others will not. There will be promotions, demotions, and even firings in the midst of the response. The only way to provide the best possible response to a disaster is to create a structure for information gathering, deciphering, and prioritizing in the midst of such stress. Only then can good decisions be made and implemented.

In the four phases of emergency management, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, much emphasis has been placed on the first two. This book is about the first critical hours and days of a disaster response. It is about how decisions are made and how to train and build the teams you need to respond to any event. It is also about putting into place the systems needed to support that disaster-response team.

The tenets in this book are based on over 30 years of experience in emergency response and emergency management. I have adapted some relevant military operational procedures. All of this is accomplished within the framework of the Incident Command System (ICS) and the National Incident Management System (NIMS).

DISASTER OPERATIONS

Disaster plans are based on assumptions. Those assumptions are static snapshots of a community and its resources at the time the plan is written. Much can change in the time between the writing of a plan and the implementation of that plan during a disaster. No plan, no matter how well written, can ever completely prepare a community for a disaster; the best way for a community to prepare is to have a well-trained disaster-response team.

When a disaster strikes, it is like dropping a pebble in a pond. The impact ripples through the community just as the pebble created ripples across the surface of the pond. The longer it takes for a community to manage the disaster, the greater the disaster’s impact on the community. There are many more problems needing attention than there are resources to apply to these problems. It is vital that local authorities be organized and capable of applying available resources as efficiently as possible to the most critical problems. It is vital that local officials be as efficient as they can possibly be during the first 72 hours after a disaster because it will take that long for serious outside resources to reach them. The emergency-management community needs to get better at what the military calls the operational art.

THE OPERATIONAL ART

The military has an old saying, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. To properly implement their plans, the military talks about the art of operations. It recognized that fighting a war is not merely the simple execution of a well-designed plan; instead it was a process of adapting the plan to an ever-changing environment once the battle had begun. The military set about to train their commanders to have a suppleness of thinking that produced the needed flexibility. This philosophy of adaptation to a changing environment mimics the challenges faced during a disaster.

Prior to the first Gulf War in Iraq in 1991 the United States had not engaged in a conventional military conflict of similar proportions since World War II. Yet commanders were able to perform as if they had been fighting similar wars for the preceding 50 years. This occurred because the military recognized that during their training commanders would draw up a detailed plan for an operation but could not implement the plan. The first contact with an actual thinking enemy frequently defeated the best plans.

Emergency management is in exactly the same position today. Thousands of human hours each year are devoted to the development of detailed response plans to hurricanes, floods, tornados, and terrorist attacks, yet implementing those plans falls far short of the effort put into them. There are many reasons for this, but the primary reason is that there is no set of basic emergency-response principles that shapes a community’s response to a disaster. Principles that can take the plans that were developed, adapt them to the incident, and save lives and property. ICS and NIMS both are powerful tools to carry out operational decisions, but they are not, nor were they ever intended to be, operational templates. They are a structure a community can use to build a response organization to fit a disaster, but they do not do the job by themselves.

Until this century military commanders might fight one war during their career. Yet they had to have the skills to get it right the very first time. It was a career maker or breaker. The same is true in emergency management. Emergency managers may have only one chance to implement a career’s worth of planning and training. The consequences of their actions for their career and community are just as dire as for the military commanders.

THE MILITARY LEARN FROM US

The military wanted to improve their ability to train their officers for command. To do this they knew they needed to provide training that was focused on the skills they needed to make command decisions in combat. This training had to provide their commanders with experiences that would translate to the battlefield. To determine the types of training and simulations needed to develop these skills, they first had to determine how people under the stress of time and disaster made decisions.

The United States Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences decided that the group of individuals who most closely resembled military commanders were firefighter officers and incident commanders.

The study determined that individuals under the pressures of time and the responsibility for people’s lives made decisions in a very different way they than had been expected. The military then used this discovery to shape not only their training but to build a whole new approach to fighting wars called maneuver warfare. We in emergency management should do the same. We need to recognize how decisions are made, then create an operational structure and infrastructure to carry out those decisions. ICS and NIMS provide the structure, but we need an operational infrastructure.

Currently we plan well and perform poorly. This book is about the implementation of operations in the context of a disaster. After a disaster the media is obsessed with whether there was a plan for a specific type of event. There are endless questions about whether a plan took this or that into consideration. We in the industry fall into the trap of trying to produce plans with every possible contingency and permutation planned for. Yet the realities of war and disaster response have repeatedly shown that the old military adage remains true.

NO PLAN SURVIVES FIRST CONTACT WITH THE ENEMY

I would argue that we have seen exactly the same type of situation emerge time after time. From Hurricane Andrew, when Metro Dade’s emergency manager Kate Hale asked, where’s the cavalry? to Hurricane Katrina, where thousands of victims were left stranded while the nation watched on television to the BP oil spill—all demonstrate the adage.

GOOD PLANS DO NOT EQUAL A GOOD RESPONSE

We must go beyond critiquing our response to disasters by looking at our plans to determine whether a community was ready and able to respond. We must begin to understand that response is a product of planning and the development of a functioning operational infrastructure within a community. One without the other guarantees a slow and poor response. To build such an infrastructure, you must understand how decisions are made in a crisis, then build the infrastructure, policies, and procedures to support that decision-making paradigm.

HOW TO USE THE BOOK

The author strongly suggests that time be spent in understanding crisis decision making. The basic understanding of how people make decisions in a crisis is the basis for the rest of the chapters. The processes and suggested policies all evolve out of the decision-making process. If an emergency manger has that understanding and has placed the needed operational infrastructure in place, then he or she can expect to have built the kind of organization needed to respond to any crisis. This book is meant to be a reference, resource and hopefully a starting point for a new discussion about the operational side of disaster response.

CHAPTER 1

The Emergency Manager: Leading in a Crisis

Leading during a disaster is not easy. How you perform will matter in profound ways across your community. Many will measure their lives in terms of what they were like before and after the event. Perform badly and people will suffer physically and economically; perform well and it will lessen the impact of the disaster on their lives.

Emergency managers rarely speak from a position of power. Instead they are typically layers down from the seats of power in the jurisdiction. Yet when a disaster occurs, it will be their job to step to the forefront and lead a group of people who are not used to working together, who are under tremendous pressures to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of restoring normality as quickly as possible. This is all done under the scrutiny of the press, outside agencies, and the public.

If operations go well and the community returns to normality in a timely fashion, the elected officials will garner all the credit. If operations do not go well, the emergency manager will be blamed and set up as the scapegoat. Yet being an emergency manager in just such a situation can be one of the most challenging and gratifying jobs around. Knowing that you have led your community back from devastation to recovery provides a profound sense of accomplishment. But the kind of leadership needed to accomplish this does not come with a job title. It must be earned over time.

How effective a leader an emergency manager is during a crisis is not determined when the disaster occurs. It is determined long before a disaster strikes by the relationships the emergency manager establishes within the community. An emergency manager holds a unique position within the bureaucracy. He or she is responsible for the response of the entire community to a disaster. Yet he owns no single resource needed to accomplish this goal. He must influence departments, agencies, and people across organizational lines of authority if he is to accomplish his job. The ability to develop this kind of cooperation among a volatile mix of organizations and people under stress does not suddenly emerge. The stage is set long before a disaster threatens.

It involves a lengthy process to lay a groundwork of expertise, trust, policies, and procedures. Through this preparation an emergency manager will be able to overcome the chaos that follows a disaster. The process requires patience, courage, expertise, and a stubbornness to overcome the organizational resistance that is natural in any bureaucracy. It is absolutely essential if an emergency manager is to lead the community’s efforts.

Disasters require an unprecedented and completely unique level of coordination both within the community as well as with outside agencies. Not only are everyday lines of authority broken into entirely new organizational structures, but also the organizations themselves and the individuals who run them must work together to accomplish a completely new set of tasks under the added pressure of time and public scrutiny.

This is a new organizational paradigm that calls for a new type of leadership role. A role where the emergency manager has no official power over these various organizations, yet his leadership is accepted and recommendations are followed. This new leadership style requires that the emergency manger make recommendations to officials who are their superiors. They must speak truth to power, a skill that comes from trust and is developed over time.

Leonard J. Marcus and Barry C. Dorn of Harvard University, with Joseph M. Henderson of the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, discuss this leadership style at length in their groundbreaking 2005 paper Meta-Leadership and National Emergency Preparedness. The key points of the paper are distilled into an executive summary, National Preparedness and the Five Dimensions of Meta-Leadership of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, a 2007 Joint Program paper by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. There are five major points emphasized in this leadership style.

Meta-Leadership

1. A meta-leader has the ability to instill confidence in other leaders within his community through his expertise or frame of reference. He is able to present the correct choice points so the best decisions for the organization and community are made.

2. A meta-leader has situational awareness; with often incomplete information he creates a broad frame of reference for the team as a whole, thereby presenting the team with the proper choices at the proper point in time. The leader is able to chart and present the progress of those decisions so a continuous situational awareness is retained even in a fast-moving and confusing environment.

3. Meta-leaders lead their silo—they develop subordinates into similar leadership roles within their spheres of responsibility so they have a team of people who foster the same types of relationships with their counterparts.

4. Meta-leaders lead up—they guide their bosses. Not by political manipulation or bureaucratic maneuvering but by becoming a fair witness by speaking the truth to power from a point of accepted expertise and not self-interest. If a leader trusts a subordinate to give recommendations that are in the community’s best interest, then he will follow those recommendations. During a disaster what is best for the community as a whole is best for the any elected or appointed official.

5. A meta-leader leads cross-agency connectivity. Long before a disaster strikes, a meta-leader establishes relationships of mutual respect with other departments, bureaus, and agencies by respecting the expertise of these individuals and the need for that expertise during a disaster. The emergency manager clarifies their roles and establishes relationships that will function during a disaster.

These five tenets are the guiding principles for emergency managers if they are to become effective leaders during a disaster.

HOW TO BECOME A CRISIS LEADER

This roadmap for an emergency manager to create a place in the community had not been articulated when I began my career in emergency management. Prior to the landmark disasters that came to define emergency management—Hurricane Hugo, Hurricane Andrew, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina—emergency management was a sleepy backwater in a busy bureaucracy. Resources were scarce or nonexistent; little attention and just plain indifference surrounded the job. Despite my jurisdiction being located in Florida, it had been over 30 years since a hurricane directly struck our community, and the intuitional memory of its effects had been lost. The city was unprepared and complacent about any disaster, much less a hurricane.

Yet it became my job to prepare my city for such eventualities. With no models to follow I approached the job using strategies that seemed to make common sense. Without knowing it I used meta-leadership tenets as defined by Marcus, Dorn, and Henderson in their groundbreaking paper to crave out a respected leadership role in disasters and disaster preparedness.

The meta-leadership definition distills years of my own lessons learned. This style of leadership is not one that will be bestowed on the emergency manager upon his appointment; rather it is one that will be earned by creating such a role in an existing organization. It will require time, effort, and patience. It is not an organizational style that will necessarily be rewarded. The value of the role will only become apparent when a disaster or crisis threatens.

Ideally an emergency manager would report directly to the most senior elected official of a community. More typically the office of emergency management is buried in another department. In my case it was the fire department. Fire departments are one of the more common departments for emergency management at the local level, but it can be located in almost any department. At the writing of this book the Florida Division of Emergency Management is under the Department of Community Affairs. The placement of most offices of emergency management under another department and not in direct control of the jurisdiction’s response resources is the reason the meta-leadership model works so well for any emergency manager.

The fire chief had the official title of emergency manager for the city, and he reported to the mayor. I worked directly for him, and it was with his voice that I spoke when I went to meetings or coordinated with other departments. To be able to represent an appointed official, you must develop a good working rapport. When the chief appointed me as the emergency manager, he added it to two other jobs I already performed for him.

There is no set model across the county; it will vary from state to state. In Florida counties are required to have an emergency manager. Cities are not required to do so, but depending on their size some feel the need to have one. Unless they are required to have one, most communities do not have the money to fund a full-time emergency manager. So, as in my case, it is given to someone as a second responsibility.

Once he appointed me I was able to spend enough time discussing emergency management with him to develop an approach that we both felt comfortable with. That did not mean we spent a large amount of time on the subject; he expected me to spend the time needed to accomplish the tasks, then brief him on the progress. Planning and developing relationships with other departments was up to me. He literally had other fires to put out as well as budgets, the union, and the administration all competing for his time. No matter what department an emergency manager works for, it is critical that he develop a working trust with the head of that department. It also must be known that the manager represents the department head on the subject. It provides him with the cachet needed to begin developing the needed relationships.

While being a designee was important, it was only the first step. It did not give me the respect as a leader with other departments that would be needed during a crisis. That level of respect was going to have to be earned over the next months and even years. This lack of respect is not out of pettiness; instead it came from a realization that should a disaster strike, the careers of these officials would be on the line. Until I proved myself as a trusted advisor, they would be reluctant to take recommendations from someone when their performance and their department’s performance would be so closely scrutinized. That respect would have to be earned.

BECOME THE EXPERT

Part of the answer to becoming a crisis leader in your community is to become the authority on disasters and how to respond to them. If you are appointed, you must have credentials, but that does not necessarily make you an expert in the eyes of others in your community. You become an expert in the eyes of others by continuing to learn, by striving for more certifications and education. The continued pursuit of additional education and training creates the image of someone truly interested in their subject matter.

But simply accumulating more training, education credits, and degrees is not enough. You must go above and beyond what may be considered normal qualifications. One way is to read as much about the histories of disasters as you can lay your hands on. (See the reading list in this book for some good titles to start with.) History is context. Look for detailed histories filled with firsthand accounts that are rich in detail. The kind of detail that can be translated into specific impacts a similar event would have on your community. These details will become recognizable issues for your community that you will be able to use to plan and emphasize during training. These historical details will make the training more compelling and relevant.

A couple of excellent examples that should be on every emergency manager’s reading list are The Great Influenza by John M. Barry and City on Fire by Bill Minutaglio. The Great Influenza is a richly detailed account of the