Three major methodological reasons for recasting emergency management with respect to risk, uncertainty and error

Reason 1. Errors need to be distinguished from an emergency’s risks and uncertainties

Reason 2. Averted losses from disasters avoided are the huge missing middle in emergency calculations

Reason 3. It is the professional’s duty of care that questions dominant methods for emergency risk management

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1. Errors need to be distinguished from an emergency’s risks and uncertainties.

That is to ask: Have known errors in emergency response and initial service restoration been corrected before the next emergency?

It seems odd to talk about known errors when uncertainties and risks are massive and widespread in terrorist attacks, earthquakes, river flooding, forest wildfires, and grid failures in electricity and water.

But there can be and often are an urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time or just-for-now emergency response. What needs to be done is evident to front-line infrastructure staff and emergency management professionals in ways not so for those in incident command centers or higher-level management or official positions. For experienced front-line staff, not doing what needs to be done in these circumstances constitute errors to be avoided in real-time. They are avoidable errors because they can be corrected beforehand.

In particular, research with Paul Schulman on interconnected critical infrastructures found:

–Under conditions of shifting or shifted 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 related fashion, it would be a management error in anticipation and planning not to provide robust and contingent interinfrastructure communication capabilities, including communication connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is also greatly facilitated by establishing lateral interinfrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies.

–Further, it would be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and recovery activities such as vehicles, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.

While these known errors are not the entire set, our interviews and prior research convince us that they are primary because they seriously degrade effective resilience in emergency prevention and responses. Here, errors are not to be managed, more or less like risks, but rather managed categorically as: Yes or no, have they been avoided?

A number of policy and management implications follow. One deserves underscoring here: It may well be some activities presently funded under state and federal “emergency risk management” aren’t as important as having dedicated support and staffing for such error correction, now and ahead. It is long past time to review the risk biases in conventional emergency management.

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2. Averted losses from disasters avoided are the huge missing middle in emergency calculations.

I

Last year, 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–so as to restore area wetlands and mudflats;

**Also required would be an estimated US$110 billion to locally 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 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 local requirements posed 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 foremost 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.

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3. It is the professional’s duty of care that questions dominant methods for emergency risk 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. It is our duty of care to follow up on the errors and induced risks associated with current ways in thinking about risk management for and during crises.