What is the single most important question to answer about emergency management processes?

Answer: Have known errors in emergency response and initial service restoration been corrected before the next emergency?

I

It seems odd to talk about known errors when uncertainties and surprises pervade and permeate 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.

II

In particular, our research 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.

Here, errors are not to be managed, more or less like risks, but rather managed categorically as: Yes or no, have they been avoided?

III

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 enabling dedicated support and staffing for such error correction, now and ahead.