It is not possible to answer the question, How much mitigation of infrastructures is needed before a disaster? “When is ‘resilient-enough’ enough?,” asked an interviewee. Maybe we don’t have to fix every road before the earthquake, another put it. While understandable sentiments, no amount of money or political-will beforehand would be enough to dislodge the central and strategic role of improvisation in the unfolding events of a major disaster like an M9 earthquake in the US Pacific Northwest.
Improvisational behavior is mentioned repeatedly in the emergency management literature. Our research findings add value by stressing the importance here of an extremely important subsample of inter-infrastructural improvisations. An impromptu berm is built around a substation or a fire break bulldozed around a communications tower, both of which are critical. Why? Because of the collocation of critical components that supported, in the case of the high-valued tower, state police, forest service and transportation. These inter-infrastructural improvisations on the spot end “saving the asset” (the term of one of our interviewees), which in our terminology was preventing failure in critical services interconnected through a shared substation or tower. Other examples of what we are calling joint improvisations during emergencies were also mentioned in our interviews, the point being in the words of one county emergency planner and emergency coordinator: “There’s a lot of improv that has to happen here”.
The crucial point of joint improvisions involving emergency responders and infrastructure operators is that they come in unpredictable forms contingent on then-specific demands and then-existing capabilities. One state coordinator involved in communications management during emergencies told us about convening an online group of competing companies and infrastructure providers:
During a winter storm we had a utility or provider say we’ve got fiber cuts in this area, we don’t have the fiber to replace it in that area, our resources are in this other area—that allowed us to look at the group and say now is the time for some teamwork: Can anyone else solve that problem and be a good team member? And we’ve seen a lot of that sort of problem-solving manifest among the agencies with very little input from us. Another example might be a cellular carrier who is a competitor of another carrier going “Hey, we’re going to fill our generator, can we top off your fuel tank while we’re up there?. . .But I don’t think [those kinds of cooperation] would occur if we didn’t coordinate it and get everybody on the same call and provide a platform for them to kind of air those sorts of things.
To characterize these one-off improvisations, like topping off a fuel tank, as incidental or side work or what mates just do for each other, is to miss entirely the point that they are essential for professionals undertaking effective emergency response. When it comes to immediate response under M9 conditions, there is no workaround for improvisation. At the point of its undertaking, the joint improvisation is the manifest interconnectivity between the infrastructures involved under conditions of otherwise failure.
Source: The above is a slightly edited extract from E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf). Research design, references and other particulars can be found there.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 