Emergency Management in the Age of Destruction or the Consequences of Not Treating Politics as an Essential Part of Mitigation
For a number of years, I was a student of Sociology working on all the political hot button topics relevant to the current moment: white nationalism, white supremacy, cloaked websites (later becoming mis- and dis- information studies), and how pop culture contributed to the discourse of all of these.
When I left Sociology, I went to Information Science and Human-Computer Interaction where I wanted to spend my time talking about disaster, natural disasters, and events like riots, cyberattacks, and terrorism. I chose this space because it is one area within which you can see cultural millieu disappear and we can see this beautiful component of humanity made manifest.
The initial moments of a disaster, heart wrenching they may be, are moments wherein we can see the parts of humanity we need to fight for.
I’m now over 10 years into the study of disaster with the last 5 years being spent on the practice of emergency management with practicing emergency managers.
Recently, our new President has said something to the effect of, “FEMA is a disaster, it needs to go” along with, “the states should be responsible for disaster.” There’s a lot of problems with these sentiments but it’s a politician doing politician things. We live in the era of ever-accelerating political quotes that don’t seem to have a maximum ceiling.
But this is sort of the issue at the core of the quotes is the premise of this blog post:
All of Emergency Managment is vulnerable to politics because politics is literally the management of groups of people and emergency management is the management of people in the midst of a loss of stability.
As a result, one would presume that emergency management would be adept at the practice of politics; however, nothing could be further from the truth.
Talk to almost any emergency manager about politics and you’ll hear endless calls to being apolitical, that they care about the whole community, or that their work just isn’t political. While inclusion and other forms of diversity and equity have become partially illegal overnight, they have been rejected for years by emergency management under the auspices of the, “Whole Community” approach which has been little more than a way to handwave away criticism of someone’s gut feeling that they’ve prepared for response in a way that includes everyone in a municipality.
And yet, even if we include the above as being political by not being political, the use of disasters for votes is a regular part of life now. This is not something new. For example, the issues surrounding the Milton recovery being used to justify the disbanding of FEMA are unsurprising. And even in the early yaers of this country, we saw some very interesting engagement in the Portsmuth New Hampshire of 1803. This fire marked the first time the federal government passsed legislation to help the residents of an impacted area recover. Disaster and politics have almost always gone hand in hand.
Political careers can be made or broken in the aftermath of an event. The result has been an increasingly complicated landscape of disaster + politics where politicians use disaster to win votes and emergency managers scramble to figure out how to access the funds and coordination bodies those politicians create to get votes. It is increasingly difficult to find these funds and the complexity is so onerous that it is an essential component of the potential of AI to be used in emergency management.
The report, “Streamlining Emergency Management: Issues, Impacts, and Options for Improvement” notes that:
To support the U.S. emergency management system, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other entities have created constructs — programs, grants, assessments, doctrine, and coordination bodies — at different times and in response to various events and needs. The overall number of constructs has grown, and the poor integration among them can worsen emergency management services and disaster outcomes.
The result, the consequence is this specific moment. Emergency management doesn’t have enough structure to create a force of pressure that can result in any sort of defense to the current political climate. Like any hazard event, we knew it would happen eventually but also like any hazard event we know is coming, we do little to prepare.
You may read all this and think or say, “well, this political leader is leading by whimsy!” And that may be true. Unfortunately, this does little more than highlight the vulnerablity of emergency management as a profession. That it has been like this since it was created in the Kennedy administration and given federal and national responsibilities during the Carter presidency only highlights the amount of time we haven’t done enough to finish its professionalization.
To date, States endlessly vary in what they consider to be essential qualifications and responsibilities. Towns and city charters still use terminology from the cold war-driven civil defense era with emergency services (FD, PD, EMS) personnel often pulling double duty as the emergency manager. In those spaces where the Emergency Operations Center exists, there is often observable tension between the services and management chiefs as they struggle to survive within the ignorance created by the lack of national testing, national certification, or even required educational components for emergency managers. This is often juxtaposed against those tests required to practice firefighting, policing, or medical services.
Even in those spaces devoted to the education of emergency management, this tension is even more frustrating.
Emergency management programs in higher ed will often hire police or fire professionals as leaders rather than emergency management. Much like city officials, administrators in higher ed misunderstand what the management part of emergency management entails or how it differs from the services a city offers for routine incidents. As a result, Higher ed often exacerbates the tension by not taking part in the act of establishing professional qualifications or even particular flavors with the recent rise of majors in Homeland Security being a new way that this issue continues.
In nearly every way, the lack of a professional standard not only actively hinders the profession from stabilizing, but the lack of political training for those in emergency management increases the likelihood that their entire set of responsibilities will be taken from them and given to professions leaders can understand (Firefighters, Police Officers, paramedics).
As a result, this moment of crisis in the profession of emergency management is like that of a hurricane, earthquake, riot, or cyberattack, very much our own fault.