Wake-up calls in emergency management

The “wake-up call” in emergency management, while never guaranteed, may be a series of events and not just one. The point is that this sequence/event triggers new insights by the emergency managers and infrastructure operators that other things are going on by way of needed response.

We were told in our Pacific Northwest research that, generally speaking, ice storms, fires and floods had been predictable with respect to times of onsets as well as with wind force and precipitation estimates. A senior engineer in a major power transmission company noted, “I would say we lose 1, 2, 3, maybe 4 towers a year due to wind, ice, trees. . .We see lots of those [kinds of] events”. Emergency management planners could reasonably expect to provide public warnings beforehand and many emergency protocols to be in effect. Emergency responders can also reasonably expect their own buildings and facilities to remain intact with emergency power and some telecommunications during seasonal ice storms, flooding and wildfires.

But the frequency and combination of events started changing. “2020 was of course nothing like they’d seen before [when it came to wildfires],” said one state-level manager. A single 2017 winter event of freeze-thaw-freeze majorly affected Portland’s above- and below-ground infrastructure, roads and water. Two back-to-back floods in one day were reported for a Washington State city in 2019, affecting multiple infrastructures. An Oregon interviewee spoke of 2019 witnessing flooding, drought and snow “all in the same space”.

Then came “the wake-up call” on top of all this: the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. “We have wind events, we have fire events, we have power events, then the biggest event of all, COVID,” said a senior city public works official. No one predicted the pandemic’s very real impacts for the wide swath of local, state and federal emergency managers and infrastructure operators. “COVID had catastrophic effects on everybody, including critical infrastructures,” said a state emergency preparedness manager with long experience, adding the response was “unparalleled”.

The pandemic meant many emergency staff had to work virtually via internet from home during the 2020 Labor Day fires. A heat dome emergency required a treatment plant’s staff not to work outside, but in so doing created COVID-19 distancing issues inside. The intersection of lockdowns and winter ice storms increased restoration times of some electrical crews, reported a state director of emergency management for energy. A vaccination mandate on city staff added uncertainty over personnel available for line services. Who gets to work at home and who gets to work in the physical plant created issues. “We struggled with working with contractors and vendors” over the vaccine mandate, said a state emergency manager for roads.

But just what was the “wake-up call” with respect to? In the view of a very experienced emergency management expert, “the one thing that the pandemic is bringing out is a higher definition of how these things are interconnected and they’re not totally visible”. COVID-19 response made clearer that backbone infrastructures, especially electricity, are “extremely dated and fragile” in the view of experienced interviewees (e.g. in Oregon). The pandemic also put a brake on infrastructure and emergency management initiatives already in the pipeline (e.g., preventative maintenance), according to multiple respondents.

---

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.