Which “gaps in communication” during emergency management?

Much has been written in the literature on the importance of communication in emergency management, and our interviewees, like others, report communication gaps in their after-action reports.

The value-added in our Pacific Northwest research on a Magnitude 9 earthquake there is to underscore how gaps in communications arise because the interinfrastructural connectivity shift spatially and temporally as disaster events unfold. In these cases, the forms and flows of communications follow from the interconnectivities and shifts when those configurations change. Here it isn’t only that communications between and among emergency responders and infrastructure operations establish a follow-on interconnectivity; as their prior interconnectivities change and shift, so do communications change in form and content. This has an important implication for the diversity of communication means, as we shall see.

Start with an interinfrastructural example up to failure and immediate emergency response:

·           Vessels come into a port and shipments are off-loaded there onto truck and rail for onward transport (sequential interconnectivity with serial dependencies);

·           If there is a major service disruption, the port may take a more active role in coordinating which vessels have priority, how shipments are off-loaded and stored temporarily, and the modes of transporting onward (mediated interconnectivity by the port as a focal infrastructure);

·           If the disaster is more extensive, the vessels may have to coordinate from ship pilot to ship pilot, without the assistance of port authorities or others (reciprocal interdependence); and

·           The Incident Command System set up immediately after the disaster may make coordinating the waterways for emergency uses as one of its first priorities (pooled interconnectivity centered around the focal ICS or a vessel traffic control unit).

Although a critical infrastructure in normal operations differs dramatically when in failure, sequential or serial interconnectivity at the infrastructure systemwide level doesn’t disappear, nor would it the M9 events. Interconnectivity configurations, however, would most assuredly change (including those for reciprocal, mediated and pooled).

For example, restoration of the electric transmission grid would start sequentially with the 500kV lines, then the 230kV, then the 115kV. An emergency manager for an electric utility said that M9 outages would initially be treated like any other outage, following a multi-step process to bringing back the system. We were also told by a statewide emergency manager that response to a major ice storm consisted of first closing the affected state roads, followed by power companies coming in to move the downed lines, and then crews coming in to remove the fallen trees.

In other words, the shifts in configurations and their elements have a major impact on the pace and composition of emergency management activities. This includes interinfrastructural communications. That is why diversity (more formally, requisite variety) in mechanisms for communications under dynamic conditions—land lines, cellphones, satellite phones, CB radio, Starlink and more–is so important at these times.

Official cellphone capabilities dropped in one area as a result of an ice storm event, while personal internet hotspots remained available for key personnel during the same event. As interconnectivities shifted, so did the mechanisms for joint communication. The need for such requisite variety explains why interoperability among communications systems, as important as it is, cannot substitute for that needed diversity in disaster communication.

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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.