Importantly, adaptive capacity [for emergency management] can be facilitated in part by planning and design processes that themselves create prior conditions, such as contacts among diversely skilled people in other infrastructures, robust communications systems and contingent resources in different locations, for restoration actions. In effect, there can be emergency planning process reliability even if the output reliability of subsequent emergency management cannot be predicted or guaranteed.
Paul Schulman, personal communication
I interpret the passage to mean that the mentioned design and planning interventions pass the ‘‘reliability matters’’ test. That is, robust contact lists, communication systems and distributed inventories, when implemented, are more likely to reduce the task volatility that emergency managers face, increase their options to respond more effectively, and/or enhance their maneuverability in responding to different, often unpredictable or uncontrollable, performance conditions. (In case it needs saying, not all design and planning pass the test!)
This notion that there can be reliability in processes to transform inputs into outputs, even if the input variability and output variability of emergency management are not predictable and stable, is incredibly important. Why? Because it shines a bright light on major but under-acknowledged temporal differences key for effective emergency planning and design.
It takes years to seismically retrofit a bridge from start to finish of its planning, funding and implementation. In contrast, a household becoming two-week ready (in terms of having supplies and provisions to last two weeks into the earthquake) is a matter of hours or days. This means the retrofitting of bridges and the implementation of the two-week ready program not only affect the success (or lack) of post-earthquake response. Their prior execution also helps date when planning and design processes started to produce those aforementioned conditions that alter the course (for good or bad) of the unfolding emergency widely visible only after the earthquake happens.
My point is that such mitigation development and implementation prior to the earthquake is measurable with respect to time: Is it in decades, years, months, days or hours? How do these different time horizons vary and congrue by type of mitigation? While no one can reliably predict when the earthquake will occur, it is not clear from our interviews that process reliability as just described is undertaken with an eye to identifying and better managing the different time horizons associated with different pre-disaster mitigations.
Not taking advantage of designing and planning inter-temporal mitigation processes that, together or singly, do increase options and reduce volatility in emergency management is not only a missed opportunity, it is also a correctible error.
Here’s a case in point. Calls by our interviewees for more administrative support to manage and coordinate local emergency preparedness may look like a routine complaint or a small-deal when compared to other city and county priorities. But from the perspective presented here, it is a very big deal in attempting to move the planning and mitigation agenda to identifying and managing latent inter-infrastructural interconnections and vulnerabilities before the earthquake happens.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 