1. If the disaster is going to be that devastating, why even plan?
Here is what one emergency manager said of what many of our interviewees treated as an inevitable Magnitude 9 earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the shores of the US Pacific Northwest:
A lot of my contemporaries and planners on the emergency side have all said that the devastation is going to be so great that the ability to get resources in to help out survivors is going to be so limited that this thing is going to be so protracted that there is not going to be enough preparation in the homes of people—the individual communities are not prepared enough to last long enough and there’s going to be a lot of subsequent deaths after day-7 of the event. There’s not going to be enough response ability to come in because infrastructure is so broken. There’s no roads, no bridges, no airports, no shipping ports, no communication, no electricity, no freshwater, all that stuff. It’s going to be one of those biblical proportions kinds of disaster.
(A federal emergency manager working in the two states.)
This is not hyperbole to interviewees. An M9 Cascadia earthquake (when combined with magnitude 8.0 aftershocks and massive tsunami impacts) will be unimaginably catastrophic precisely in light of prior experience and training with lesser emergencies such as wildfires, winter storms and flooding.
Given these many uncertainties, isn’t anyone’s guess as good as the next? “Why are we even planning? It’s going to be that bad,” one interviewee reported county officials asking. It can feel like an avalanche you’re just not going to get ahead of, reflected a state senior emergency management official.
Given so much uncertainty that comes with the M9 earthquake, it is no surprise emergency managers rely on their pre-disaster plans and processes as a starting point. The importance of activating the federal an state Incident Command System (ICS) was repeatedly mentioned. This means that instead of concluding you can’t really be prepared for something as unimaginable as the unfolding M9 events, what concerns most of the emergency managers we interviewed is the lack of further preparedness in respect to what can still be prevented regardless.
Some fires are clearly preventable, e.g., through prior vegetation management. So too if pre-disaster efforts such as mitigations, two-week ready supply programs of essential materials including food and water for households, and other preparedness planning can help reduce the pressure for immediate response. Or reduce the recovery period after events through the reduction of damage that would have otherwise been incurred in the absence of such measures, these too should not be neglected.
The insight here is that, for those interviewed, the real-time unpredictability and unexpected contingencies ahead in the M9 events carry their own information about interconnected infrastructure systems in failure and that information can be useful for managing or coping ahead. This is especially true for those real-time professionals whose core competencies revolve around systemwide failures: They are likely to know beforehand something about how the system in failure will affect other interconnected infrastructures.
Interviewees stressed the need to focus on infrastructure components and facilities they know will fail in the M9 events, whether or not the knowledge has been formalized into an agency’s risk register and risk assessments. That there are no guarantees pre-disaster efforts will actually mitigate is beside the point for experienced emergency managers who have witnessed or been directly involved in disasters elsewhere.
They have seen how better pre-disaster efforts would have made a difference there. That is their job. One core competency of emergency managers is to identify pre-disaster opportunities—including new options and strategies for increased requisite variety to improve real-time disaster response, and not just in their own infrastructures. Seismically strengthening a water infrastructure, as one interviewee confirmed, would better inform emergency planning and projects for the road and wastewater infrastructures adjacent to the water lines.
2. What does success even look like in a disaster?
“What does success look like?” a senior state emergency manager asked, and answered from his experience: “Success in every disaster is that you didn’t have to get improvisational immediately. You can rely on prior relationships and set up a framework for improvisation and creativity.” Why? Because contingencies that can’t be planned for require improvisation. “I was lucky,” reported a statewide emergency manager involved in an ice storm that happened during the Covid-19 lockdown as “my neighborhood was only out of power for six hours. . .”
Contingency—happenstance, accident, chance, coincidence—will matter even more for the Magnitude 9 earthquake in the US Pacific Northwest: “What side of the river will I be on?” replied an infrastructure operator to our question of what would be a performance standard in the M9 events. Being at work, holding water in the main reservoirs, and getting some of the wells up and running would be a success, the interviewee added. Opening a road from point A to point B, that’s a success, to paraphrase a state emergency manager for highways. “Doing the best with what we have” was the frequent response. “Being here and do as best as we can, would be considered a win,” put one infrastructure operator. But how can we know that the “best” was done? The best with respect to what?
“Doing their best” has very specific meaning by way of being a performance standard for immediate response and initial service restoration: It is when responders find or create a match between task environment demands and response capabilities. More formally: Effective performance can be understood as the contingent correspondence of task environment demands and the response capabilities (resources, skills, options, strategies) to meet those demands in real time. The term, “contingent,” conveys the sense that the conjunction of capabilities and demands can be fortuitous and is by no means assured through pre-disaster mitigations, formal preparedness plans, and other agency arrangements, like mutual aid agreements.
Seeking requisite variety in matching unpredictable/uncontrollable task demands with highly contingent resource capabilities is, we argue, a strategy and performance standard appropriate for both immediate emergency response and initial service restoration. This is because skills in assembling options under highly volatile conditions remain central to enabling joint improvisations across the interconnected critical infrastructures. When assembled, these are accomplishments in real time, and measures of success (or not) later on should reflect that.
All easier said than done, of course. The fact that there can be no guarantee the shared infrastructural improvisations—these impromptu but major interconnections between and among infrastructures—will be effective means there is a premium placed on people already skilled in improvisation. This is why newer infrastructure employees and emergency staff may well not (yet) have those skills. It also accounts for those much-remarked-upon people, outside the emergency management infrastructure, who step forward during a disaster and do the needful because they already have life skills in working with what is at hand.
An emergency planner and coordinator remarked, “I think what makes a good emergency manager is you feel uncomfortable being off-balance. . .That’s one of the reasons I was drawn to the field. When nobody has the answer that’s when I feel most capable in my job”. Activation of the Incident Command System (ICS) helps provide some structure to trying to meet the challenge. What achieving requisite variety provides is time-, duration- and site-specific organization that can add up to some semblance of stability. As one state coordinator put it: “My responsibility on the response side leading into recovery is stabilization, [which means] this is not going to get any worse. We’ve restored a foundational level of service, whether that is permanent or temporary. . .”
3. How much pre-disaster mitigation is needed?
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 are slightly edited extracts 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 
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