“I can’t say enough good things about planning and how important it is,” a state emergency manager in the US Pacific Northwest told us recently, “but you realize the gaps in plans when you’re dealing with such catastrophic events that we’ve dealt with in the past 18 months to two years…There’s a lot that needs to be decided on the fly because it hasn’t been planned for or it’s not going to work, the plan didn’t consider all the factors because every emergency is different”.
It is crucial to be very clear about what is being said in the above. It isn’t just the commonplace that no plan can anticipate all contingencies that arise in a disaster. It’s also that even longstanding emergency managers have not encountered some of the emergencies now underway. There are two parts to this encounter: the actual presence and type of major disaster and the career orientation of those involved.
With respect to responding to recent winter storms, a district emergency planner conceded, “We get them but we don’t get them often enough to be good at them”. “We haven’t had a really major emergency that cuts through all the lifeline [infrastructures] at the same time,” a city public works engineer with long experience told us. A water treatment plant operator, with years’ experience, hadn’t had “any [real] emergencies except for the last year with an ice storm that took out our power”.
At issue is also the career orientation and training of those doing the planning and responding. “If your specialty is putting out fires, then you’re not [equally as] good at long-range planning. . . It’s not their strength,” in the view of one interviewee . A county emergency planner and coordinator expanded: “We can’t rely on the civil defense era style of planning in which you had to have every possible scenario documented and then you end up with a thousand page plan no one reads through”. “Emergency management is an old game,” this informant added; “We still see a lot of the old guard in this. . .working against innovation even if it’s not intentional on their part”.
On the upside, change the career orientation can mean changing the presiding orientation to planning and response. “You can always tell who has had a first-responder experience” and, in that interviewee’s opinion, “the good fortune to be a first responder” was helpful. From our research perspective, those who have experience across the full cycle of infrastructure operations—from normal through disrupted and failed and into recovery and establishment of a new normal (if there is to be one)—are better positioned to assess the different interinfrastructural configurations, shifts and challenges to systemwide control variables (like electricity frequency or water-flow pressures) core to effective micro-coordination across the infrastructures during initial emergency response and service restoration as a disaster unfolds.
It is necessary to reiterate that, as shared improvisation is a core competency in immediate response and backbone service restoration, effective emergency coordination, as redefined here, requires not only the participation of emergency responders and others in the Incident Command System, but also, just as important, participation from those in the control rooms and the wraparound support staff in the backbone infrastructures—electricity, water, telecoms and roads. So too for the planning side and in changing the mix of professionals involved.
We were told by an operations planner at a major electricity transmission company that they now had a real-time engineer team working with dispatchers, undertaking real time analysis and study of outages likely to happen in the next day and even in consultation with outside utilities dependent on that supply. “Are our bottles lining up, so we’re seeing the same things?,” insisted the informant by way of avoiding unpleasant surprises.
Source: The above consolidates 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 