Preliminaries
I
Let’s start with several commonplaces: Infrastructures are key to defining and structuring societies, economies and markets; their owners wield great power; and some of the major consequences have been significantly negative, not least of which are hyper-profits for the owners and wider inequalities in wealth, production and consumption.
I agree with the commonplaces–as far as they go. But they don’t go far enough to capture the complexities and caveats of really-existing infrastructures. When the latter are left out, the commonplaces aren’t empirical generalizations over the diversity of cases. The commonplaces that stop short end up as exaggerations in policy and management.
II
So to be clear from the outset. I believe major infrastructures do define and limit societies. I also believe their owners–including Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Agriculture and Big Pharma–are doing harm in furthering major crises, including but not limited to the Climate Emergency. I also believe that there are many significant cases, under-acknowledged if not unreported, where real-time operators of critical infrastructures have far less control than credited to them.
This stopping short of the wider complexities matters precisely because infrastructures are so essential to societies and economies. Since infrastructure power theories (direct, indirect and dispersed control) go only part of the way in determining real-time infrastructure operations and impacts, this blog entry seeks to push the matter further, namely: to an approach that identifies and describes what else is going on by way of real-time determination and their implications for policy and management.
III
An important test case for the latter approach is emergency management. Assume what we are told holds: Our current crises are caused by capitalism, racism, militarism, imperialism, nationalism, populism, consumerism, extractivism, settler colonialism along with financialization, urbanization, marketization, commodification, globalization, and more. This means, in aggregate, more calls for managing more emergencies arising within and from the crises.
If so, then also assume that those responses and emergencies unavoidably vary on the ground, and majorly so. Why? Because the factors that affect really-existing emergency management are many and heterogenous: societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, legal, geographic, governmental, and religious, among others. To quote Marx, people “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” There is no better example of that truth than emergency management, case by case.
IV
The particular problem with power theories, at least from the perspectives of our two assumptions about emergency management, is their notion of control. In natural language and in academics, to control and to manage have been and often still used interchangeably. But the field of infrastructure studies I work in sees a marked distinction. In this field, critical infrastructures are socio-technical systems that distinguish between real-time control and real-time management.
Think of the socio-technical system in terms of inputs, outputs, and the processes to convert those inputs into outputs. Control is when the variations in inputs, processes and outputs are rendered low and stable. Management is the case where input variance cannot be controlled. Here, process variance has to increase, if output variance is to remain low and stable (this reflecting the so-called law of requisite variety). Management is having about more and more diverse options and strategies so as to produce or maintain, e.g., electricity at the regulated frequency and voltage, water coming out of the tap, and a busy signal that actually indicates a line in use rather than a malfunction somewhere–even when an emergency is underway if possible.
The emergencies I have studied involve infrastructures that manage because they can’t control input variability and have to respond in a variety of different ways in order to maintain system wide reliability. In these cases, reliability is defined as the safe and continuous provision of the critical service, even during (especially during) turbulent times. Of course, it is easy for critics to dismiss this kind of reliability. Think reliable train service to the concentration camps. But that is a cheap shot in a world often more notable precisely because of the vast majorities who want but lack reliable and safe water, energy and communications.
Yes, of course, operating these infrastructures, reliably or otherwise, create inequalities. But wouldn’t you want to know before changing them the effects on systemwide reliability and safety of that change? Even low-cost, more sustainable socio-technical systems will be reliable only up to that unpredictable failure ahead they can’t prevent.
V
I shift now to what I see as the major under-acknowledged features of emergency management that derive from infrastructures lack of control and from the complexities under which this occurs. I address specific policy and/or management implications in each case. Several general implications are drawn by way of the Conclusion.
Eight features of emergency management often not recognized
–1. Because of the complexities, there are professions of emergency management
I
Readers are familiar with advocacy pieces that call for more adaptive, collaborative, comprehensive, integrated, holistic, and resilient approaches to crises, without however providing the details for that implementation.
It’s arguably too easy to make such calls, but notice their positive practical implication: Those who do know (some of) the details have much to say about their respective abstractions.
We know that real-time operators and managers of infrastructures coordinate, adapt, improvise, and redesign all the time in the face of system surprises and shocks, big and small. They also practice different types of resilience (i.e., adjusting to surprises in normal operations differs from restoring infrastructure operations back to normal after a systemwide disruption). When it comes “comprehensive and holistic,” these professionals seek to maintain team situational awareness and a common operating picture of the system, again in real time.
Two inter-related assumptions are important to recognize in the preceding. First, these operators and managers are professionals, whether officially certified or not. Second, because they are professionals, their operationalized definitions of adaptation, resilience and coordination, in particular, matter for and in practice.
II
Yet what do we hear in our interviews of formal emergency managers? Answer: the attempt to separate the goats from the sheep by some, namely, those who understand the centrality of the state and federal incident command systems to emergency management, and those who operate outside these structures when collaborating and improvising directly.
It’s accepted, of course, that at some point in some emergencies, horizontal and lateral micro-coordination may well be required. It’s accepted that boundaries between professional/nonprofessional, formal/informal and organized/unorganized are blurred in major disasters. But those are exceptions and do not determine emergency management from the perspective of the incident command systems.
That said, major disasters are on the increase and, most certainly, a magnitude 9.0 or greater earthquake in the Pacific Northwest will destroy infrastructures, including those for government emergency management, leaving behind the rest to self-organize and self-provision for the duration. In our view, self-organization and self-provisioning have always been part and parcel of professional emergency management in major disasters.
There is no place in this view for the credentialed to see the uncredentialed as amateurs for want of something better. The reliability professionals we write about are not neanderthals, as one interviewee with engineering certification put it to us once. As one reader with a background in emergency management also put it: “Ordinary people can be on site in acute disasters and start search and rescue operations, and often continue being part of the response also after formal first responders arrive. Existing organizational structures can be repurposed to meet unmet needs in the recovery phase.”
Emergency management today, in this version of the 21st century; should have no time or place for the likes of 19th century canine veterinarians asserting their professionalism by deriding 18th century dog-doctors.
(My thanks to Stian Antonsen for the quote and his insight about blurred boundaries.)
–2. Because of the complexities, there are always other optics with which to recast emergency management.
I
Suffice it to say, there is great worry that not enough is being done by way of preparing for, responding to, and recovery from a magnitude 9.0 earthquake to occur as predicted off-shore of Oregon and Washington State.
More formally, the counterfactual to get more resources for emergency management is: Were infrastructures and governments there spending more on automatic shut-off valves, retrofitting bridges, mobile generators and telecommunication towers, 2-week readiness kits for individual households, etc etc, they would be in a better position for immediate emergency response, initial service restoration and intermediate recovery.
No guarantees, of course, but still a fair enough proposition. Yet the preceding is not the only counterfactual about what would or could happen instead.
II
If your world is the world, you will come across the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection (SRSP) that also addresses massive multiple shocks. But here you’d find a very different set of terms, namely, how social protection programs work with humanitarian response and disaster risk management for what is called in the US emergency preparedness, immediate emergency response and initial service restoration.
III
A social protection program might focus on how to transfer and get cash into the hands of the victims asap; the emergency management efforts we looked at worried about how ATMs and cellphone transactions would work once the infrastructures failed.
Humanitarian programs readily admit the need for international assistance; we interviewed no one so far in Oregon and Washington State who described “humanitarian aid” as a key emergency response, let alone from anywhere outside the US.
For its part, Global South disaster risk management, while close to what we mean by emergency management in the States, might also include insurance mechanisms (e.g., assisting in paying premiums before the disaster) and contingency credit programs not just for recovery but also during immediate response
IV
So what?
We are a rich country, we tell ourselves, that knows the ins and outs of emergency management better. SRSP, if we were to get that literature, is for poor countries. We have sophisticated infrastructures, they don’t. That western Oregon and Washington State won’t have them either after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake is what other literatures call collective denial.
Source. O’Brien, C., Scott, Z., Smith, G., Barca V., Kardan, A., Holmes, R., Watson, C. and Congrave, J. (2018), Shock-Responsive Social Protection Systems Research: Synthesis Report, Oxford Policy Management, Oxford, UK.
–3. Because of the complexities, retrofitting a bridge, by way of example, isn’t just about the bridge.
I
Retrofitting a bridge pre-disaster isn’t a chancy wager on what might or might not happen to the bridge in a later disaster. Retrofitting is managing latent interconnectivities between bridges and related infrastructures that become manifest during and because of the disaster. That inter-infrastructural connections will shift and these shifts will involve bridges is far more predictable than this or that bridge will fail, unless retrofitted.
This means attention is crucial to the track record in retrofitting bridges before and after disasters, a comparison involving here and elsewhere. Note the upshot: Retrofitting has to occur in order to have a track record to monitor and from which to learn.
Since there are material and cognitive limits on controlling inter-infrastructural connectivity at any point in time, doing more by way of managing the pre-disaster latency of interconnectivities is required. An interviewee with engineering and management experience told us their city water infrastructure was behind the electricity utility in the adoption of automatic shut-off valves. Bringing water systems up to power’s better practices is a way of managing latent interconnectivity in advance of disaster.
II
This means that the question we should be asking is more akin to: “What have we learned, here or under like conditions elsewhere, that actually works in better managing latent interconnectivity for better response, restoration and recovery, post-disaster?”
–4. Because of the complexities, the first duty as a professional is to question what are taken to be today’s overarching approaches to emergency management.
I
We researchers estimated the annual probability of a major stretch of an island’s levees failing ranged between 4% to 24% due to a slope failure. (Slope instability in this scenario would be caused by flooding behind the levee as well as high water levels on its water side.)
Our estimates were considerably higher than the official one, in large part because the research project relied on methodologies validated against benchmark studies.
We presented the findings to the island’s management board. Their first and really only question was whether our estimates would be revealed to the island’s insurers.
II
We undertook a hotwash afterwards to figure out their–how to put it?–underwhelming response:
Didn’t they understand the upper range, 24% per annum, implied a levee breach nigh inevitable with respect to our failure scenario? Or to put the question to our side, in what ways did the 24% per annum estimate fall short of being a failure probability of 1.0?
But if as high as 24% per annum, why hadn’t there been a levee breach over the many decades since the last major one on the island?
And what about the islands nearby? Assuming even a few of these had a similar upper range, why weren’t levee failures happening more often?
The 4% – 24% range was with respect to annual levee failure due to slope instability only. If you add in all the levee failure modes possible (e.g., due to seepage rather than overtopping and flooding), the combined probability of levee failure would have to be higher. (But then again, what are the conditions under which the more ways there are to fail, the more likely failure is?)
You could say one reason why levee failure there hadn’t happened–yet–was because it had been long enough. That is: a long enough period to observe levee breaches so as to form the distribution from which the 24% could be established or corrected empirically. But, methodologically, the burden of proof was on us, the team of levee experts, to explain why the decades and decades of levee use wasn’t “long enough” or what that long-enough might actually look like.
Also, the levee stretch in question could be “failing to fail.” It might be that this stretch had not undergone events that loaded it to capacity or worse. (But then again: How much worse would the conditions have to be in our expert view? Just what is “a probability of failing to fail”?)
To put all this differently, was this levee stretch on that island more diverse and more resilient (say, in the way biodiverse ecosystems are said to be more resilient) than current methods capture but which islanders better understood and perhaps even managed?
III
But the most significant point from the hotwash was the one none of us saw need to voice: How could we accuse the management board and islanders of being short-sighted, with so much else going on challenging us, the team, to make sense of our own estimates for the purposes of island emergency preparedness and management?
After all, we’d be the first to insist that these island levees are themselves a key infrastructure protecting other infrastructures, including river-water supplies, island agriculture and adjacent wetlands.
–5. Because of the complexities, those interested in emergencies must be sensitive to the interview as a means for their information gathering.
I
Our Pacific Northwest interviewees were insistent: A magnitude 9.0 earthquake off-shore will be unimaginably catastrophic. But the M9 earthquake isn’t totally incomprehensible, like unknown-unknowns. Scenarios of varying detail and granularity continue to be made and are to be expected. Still, I think something else is also going on in these particular interviewee comments. It has to do with the interview as its own genre with its own limitations and their implications.
II
The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, summed up its limitations to one of her interviewers:
David, there are some questions that arise when one is being interviewed that would never otherwise have arisen. . .I focus so much on my work; then, when I’m asked to make some abstract comment, I kind of reach for a clue from the interviewer. I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything artificial about it, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, in a way, because I wouldn’t otherwise be saying it. . .Much of what I’m doing is, I’m backed into a corner and the way out is desperation. . .I don’t think about these things unless somebody asks me. . .There is an element of being put on the spot. . .It is actually quite a fascinating genre. It’s very American: “The interview.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/16/magazine/joyce-carol-oates-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20July%2019%2C%202023&utm_term=lithub_master_list
Elsewhere Oates adds about interviewees left “trying to think of reasonably plausible replies that are not untrue.” I suspect Oates’ remarks are familiar to many who have interviewed and been interviewed.
III
I believe our interviewee statements to the effect that “The M9 earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic” also reflect the interview genre within which this observation was and is made. The interviewees may well have felt put on the spot while answering other questions about important work matters. They wanted to be just as plausible as in their earlier knowledgeable answers.
So what? “Anyway, this is not to say that there was anything wrong about my statement to you,” cautions Oates. “It’s that there’s almost nothing I can say that isn’t simply an expression of a person trying desperately to say something”–this here being something that is also not untrue about a M9 catastrophe desperate indeed. Thus, it should not be surprising that “not-untrue statements” are by definition of insufficient granularity for managing in desperate situations.
–6. Because of the complexities, risk management and error avoidance in emergency management are not the same activity.
I
To talk about known management errors and vulnerabilities to avoid seems incongruous in the context of the pervasive uncertainties found in the midst of major disasters. Real-time surprises and the unexpected are frequent in flooding, wildfires, earthquakes, and disease outbreaks, among other major disruptions and failures.
Also well-documented, however, is the urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time interventions in some of these cases. Despite the shocks, sequences of action can be clear, urgent and known to front-line staff; and with them, certain errors to be avoided are also evident as well as the vulnerabilities posed if not avoided beforehand. This is especially true when it comes to known sequences with respect to restoring electricity, water, telecoms and roads after, say, an earthquake here.
II
Vulnerabilities arise because the interconnectivities between and among infrastructures, when and where shifting from latent before an emergency to manifest during and afterwards, invalidate existing response planning and preparedness. The emergency changes or multiplies the range of contacts, communications and negotiations required to produce new and unforeseen options to respond. Where and when so, infrastructures are under-prepared and under-resourced to match their capabilities to the now-dynamic demands.
More specifically with respect to known errors:
- Under conditions of such changed interconnectivity, it would be an error for infrastructure operators and emergency managers not to establish lateral communications with one another and undertake improvisational and shared restoration activities where needed, even if no official arrangement exists to do so in the time required.
- In addition to these front-line errors, there are also errors of anticipation and planning. In particular, it would be a management error not to provide robust and contingent inter-infrastructure communication capabilities, including phone connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is greatly facilitated by establishing lateral inter-infrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies
- It would also be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and initial recovery activities such as lorries, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations that would be made available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.
III
While there are other known errors, the bulleted three are sufficient to draw important implications with regard to inter-infrastructural vulnerabilities to be anticipated before, during and after a disaster:
1. Avoiding these known errors are not to be equated to “risk management.” Indeed, they should have their very own, different funding sources and programs. Risk is to be managed, more or less; errors are to be avoided categorically, yes or no.
2. That earmarked funding should be allocated to already existing units and organizations focused on interconnectivities between and among infrastructures. This means focusing beyond the official emergency management structures at the local, regional and national levels here. Instead, you are looking for existing initiatives that have already “seen the light” by focusing on interconnectivities in their own right and right from the start.
3. Typical discussions of infrastructure vulnerabilities focus on physical components, like corrosion in natural gas pipelines. The vulnerabilities of interest here, however, begin when the interconnected infrastructures fail to anticipate the need for these special capacities in those cases of shifting or shifted interconnectivities, like the need for lateral communications beyond official channels as its own known error to avoid.
4. Without prior contacts, communication channels and contingent resources already in place beforehand, the infrastructures will by necessity focus on their own intra-infrastructure priorities, tasks and responsibilities in the emergency. Where inter-infrastructural connectivities turn out to be a priority, their real-time corrections and adjustments are then hampered by lack of prior error avoidance and attention.
(My thanks to Paul Schulman in thinking through and formulating these points. Any shortfalls in interpretation, however, are mine alone.)
–7. Because of the complexities, the realities for emergency management are necessarily multiple, which means radical action to prevent the emergencies are necessarily multiple as well.
I
You are on one of the upper floors of a huge skyscraper, looking out on the morning. That is Reality I: You are the observing subject looking out at reality. After a point, you realize that dot in the distance is actually a plane headed toward you, this morning in the World Trade Center. That is Reality II: You become the object of reality, in that grip of the real, and no longer just observer.
There is, however, Reality III. This is of the air traffic controllers during 9/11. Neither the observer of the first reality nor the object of second, the professionals achieved the unprecedented without incident that day. They were instructed to land all commercial and general aviation aircraft in the United States—some 4,500 aircraft—and did so.
Without overdrawing the point, so too do we still demand that professionals land those water, electricity, transportation, telecommunications, and many more critical services every day without major incident.
II
As emergencies have different realities, so too must radical actions to prevent them be really multiple. This is easily illustrated by the actually-existing Climate Emergency, when the radical action to be undertaken is orthogonal to what ideologically-inspired activists on the extreme left or right want.
It’s one thing to call for radical resistance against the major polluting nations. It’s another thing to lay out how the next wave of environmental activism includes cadres of digital hackers ready to take on, say, Xi Jinping and the CCP. China is responsible for an estimated one-quarter of annual global GHG emissions, largely due to its massive fleet of coal-fired power stations. Where is the hacktivism ready and able to disable these plants? Or disable the real-time operations of, say, the “Big 3” credit rating agencies (S&P Global, Moody’s and Fitch) for their insanely positive ratings of the economies fueling climate change?
In what world is unprecedented but recommended global governance of the consumption and production of nearly 8 billion people easier than, say, mobilizing the Chinese proletariat of some 220 million or disrupting the operations of the Big 3 CRAs, both for the planet’s survival? Answers, I believe, are part of what we should expect to find but are not talked about—except perhaps inside the respective departments of defense and global asset managers.
–8. Because of the complexities, the massive sums typically said to be needed for emergency preparedness, management and recovery require major rethinking.
I
Recently, I attended a conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, now and projected into the near decades. Among other things, I was told that:
- The Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–to restore area wetlands and mudflats;
- Also required would be an estimated US$110 billion dollars locally to adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and
- We should expect much more sea level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap melting in Antarctica and Greenland.
Millions of cubic yards equivalent to over 420 Salesforce Tower high-rises? Some $110 billion which has no possibility whatsoever of being funded, locally let alone regionally? And those massive new requirements posed even locally by the melting ice caps? How are these unprecedented high climate-related losses to be compensated for?
It’s not surprising that the individual interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work challenges posed by the bulleted challenges.
What to do? How to respond?
II
You respond first and formost by critically rethinking the direct or underlying estimates of losses (economic, physical, lives, and more) incurred if we don’t take action now. It’s been my experience that none of these estimated losses take into account the losses already prevented from occurring by infrastructure operators and emergency managers who avoid systemwide and regional system failures from that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment.
Why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae?
Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for climate restoration and recovery.
Conclusion
Nothing stops the critic from ascribing the above issues and problems to capitalism, or any of the other -isms and -izations. I confess, however, I find tracing back to any such root causes difficult in the case of these eight features.
Of course critics are right to shout out how levees, electricity grids, and shoreline infrastructures have socio-economic functions and reflect the powers-that-be. But so many of these criticisms, in my view, are removed from the level of granularity at which really-existing emergency management proceeds, including with respect to the other big “earthquake” issues of the day. In these more detailed scenarios, those fine but abstract binaries of costs and benefits, pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, along with long term and short term, become justifiably and productively more complicated.
Source. Earlier, different examples of thinking infrastructurally can be found in http://When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
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