—Profession(s) of emergency management

—A different optic for recasting US emergency management: the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection (SRSP)

—Rethinking pre-disaster mitigations for critical infrastructures

–“Why aren’t you all running away like mad!“

—How the only thing between you and death is you

—“It’ll be unimaginably catastrophic” as a limitation of the interview genre

—Error avoidance is NOT risk management: an example from China

Profession(s) of emergency management

I

I think readers are already familiar with advocacy pieces that call for more adaptive, collaborative, comprehensive, integrated, holistic, and resilient approaches to hard issues, without however providing the details for that implementation.

It’s easy to dismiss these, but notice their positive implication for policy and management: Those who do know (some of) the details have much to say about their respective abstractions.

We know that real-time operators and managers of infrastructures coordinate, adapt, improvise, and redesign all the time in the face of system surprises and shocks, big and small. They also practice different types of resilience (i.e., adjusting to surprises in normal operations differs from restoring back to normal after a systemwide disruption). When it comes “comprehensive and holistic,” these professionals seek to maintain team situational awareness and a common operating picture of the system, again in real time.

Note two inter-related assumptions in the preceding. First, they are professionals, whether officially certified or not. Second, because they are professionals, their operational definitions of adaptation, resilience and coordination, among other abstractions, matter for and in practice.

II

Yet what do we hear n our interviews of emergency managers and infrastructure operations? Answer: the attempt of some to separate the goats from the sheep, namely, those who understand the centrality of the state and federal incident command systems to emergency management, and those who operate outside these structures when collaborating and improvising directly.

It’s accepted, of course, that at some point in some emergencies, horizontal and lateral micro-coordination may well be required. But those are exceptions and do not determine emergency management from the perspective of the incident command systems. That said, a magnitude 9.0 or greater earthquake in the Pacific Northwest will destroy infrastructures, including those for government emergency management, leaving behind the rest to self-organize and self-provision for the duration.

In our view, self-organization and self-provisioning have always been part and parcel of professional emergency management in major disasters.

There is no place in this view for the credentialed to see the uncredentialed as amateurs for want of something better. The reliability professionals we write about are not neanderthals, as one interviewee with engineering certification put it to us. Emergency management today is in the 21st century; it should have no time or place for the likes of 19th century canine veterinarians asserting their professionlism by deriding 18th century dog-doctors.

A different optic for recasting US emergency management: the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection (SRSP)

I

I’m about to finish my part of a study of state and federal emergency management efforts in two US states, Oregon and Washington, were a magnitude 9.0 earthquake to occur offshore as predicted. Suffice it to say, there is great worry that not enough is being done by way of preparing for, responding to, and recovery from such an event.

More formally, the counterfactual to get more resources is: Were infrastructures and governments there spending more on automatic shut-off valves, retrofitting bridges, mobile generators and telecommunication towers, 2-week readiness kits for individual households, etc etc, they would be in a better position for immediate emergency response and recovery.

No guarantees of course, but still fair enough. Yet the preceding is not the only counterfactual about what would or could happen instead.

II

If your world is the world, you will come across the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection that also addresses massive multiple shocks. But here you’d find almost an entirely different set of terms, namely, how social protection programs work with humanitarian response and disaster risk management for what is called here in the US emergency preparedness, immediate emergency response and initial service restoration.

III

A social protection program might focus on how to transfer and get cash into the hands of the victims asap; the emergency management efforts we looked at worried about how ATMs and cellphone transactions would work once the infrastructures failed.

Humanitarian programs readily admit the need for international assistance; we interviewed no one in Oregon and Washington State who described “humanitarian aid” as a key emergency response, let alone from anywhere outside the US.

For its part, disaster risk management, while close to what we mean by emergency management in the States, might also include insurance mechanisms (e.g., assisting in paying premiums before the disaster) and contingency credit programs not just for recovery but also during immediate response

IV

So what?

We are a rich country, we tell ourselves, that knows emergency management inside out. SRSP, if we were to get that literature, is for poor countries, from which we wouldn’t learn anyway. We have real infrastructures, they don’t. That western Oregon and Washington State won’t have them either after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake is what other literatures call collective denial.

Source

O’Brien, C., Scott, Z., Smith, G., Barca V., Kardan, A., Holmes, R., Watson, C. and Congrave, J. (2018), Shock-Responsive Social Protection Systems Research: Synthesis Report, Oxford Policy Management, Oxford, UK.

Rethinking pre-disaster mitigations for critical infrastructures

I

How do you choose which bridges to retrofit, when so many major ones could also fail in the next big earthquake?

That question is misformulated and its answers accordingly misleading.

II

Retrofitting a bridge pre-disaster isn’t a chancy wager on what might or might not happen to the bridge later. Retrofitting is managing latent interconnectivities between bridges and related infrastructures that become manifest during and immediately after the disaster. That inter-infrastructural connections will shift and these shifts will involve bridges is far more predictable than this or that bridge will fail, unless retrofitted.

This means attention is crucial to the track record in retrofitting bridges before and after disasters, here and elsewhere. Note the upshot: Retrofitting has to occur in order to have a track record to monitor and from which to learn.

Since there are material and cognitive limits on controlling inter-infrastructural connectivity at any point in time, doing more by way of managing the pre-disaster latency of interconnectivities is elemental. An interviewee with engineering and management experience told us their city water infrastructure was behind the electricity utility in the adoption of automatic shut-off valves. Bringing water systems up to power’s better practices is a way of managing latent interconnectivity in advance of disaster.

III

In other words, the question we should be asking is more akin to: “What have we learned, here or under like conditions elsewhere, that actually works in better managing latent interconnectivity for post-disaster response and recovery?”

“Why aren’t you all running away like mad!“

I

For reasons that become clear, no names are given in what follows. The numbers, though, remain roughly as identified.

Researchers estimated the annual probability of a major stretch of an island’s levees failing ranged between 4% to 24% due to a slope failure. (Slope instability in this scenario would be caused by flooding behind the levee as well as high water levels on its water side.)

Our estimates were considerably higher than the official one, in large part because the research project relied on methodologies validated against benchmark studies.

We presented the findings to the island’s management board. Their first and really only question was whether our estimates would be revealed to the island’s insurers.

II

We undertook a hotwash afterwards to figure out their–how to put it?–underwhelming response:

• Didn’t they understand the upper range, 24% per annum, implied a levee breach nigh inevitable with respect to our failure scenario? Or to put the question to our side, in what ways did the 24% per annum estimate fall short of being a failure probability of 1.0?

• But if as high as 24% per annum, why hadn’t there been a levee breach over the many decades since the last major one on the island?

• And what about the islands nearby? Assuming even a few of these had a similar upper range, why weren’t levee failures happening more often?

• The 4% – 24% range was with respect to annual levee failure due to slope instability only. If you add in all the levee failure modes possible (e.g., due to seepage rather than overtopping and flooding), the combined probability of levee failure would have to be higher. (But then again, what are the conditions under which the more ways there are to fail, the more likely failure is?)

• You could say one reason why levee failure there hadn’t happened–yet–was because it had been long enough. That is: a long enough period to observe levee breaches so as to form the distribution from which the 24% could be established empirically. But these levees had been in place for decades and decades. The burden of proof was on us, the team of levee experts, to explain why this wasn’t “long enough” or what that long-enough might actually look like.

• The levee stretch in question could be “failing to fail.” It might be that this stretch had not undergone events that loaded it to capacity and worse. (But then again: How much worse would the conditions have to be in our expert view? Just what is “a probability of failing to fail”?)

• To put all this differently, was this levee stretch on that island more diverse and more resilient (say, in the way biodiverse ecosystems are said to be more resilient) than current methods capture but which islanders better understood and perhaps even managed?

III

But our most significant point from the hotwash was the one none of us saw need to voice: How could we accuse the management board and islanders of being short-sighted or worse, with so much else going on challenging us, the team, to make sense of our own estimates for the purposes of island emergency preparedness and management?

After all, we’d be the first to say that these island levees are themselves a key infrastructure protecting other infrastructures, including river water supplies, island agriculture and adjacent wetlands.

How the only thing between you and death is you

I

Say you are residents of Oregon, a state facing a magnitude 9.0 earthquake just off its shoreline, in the Pacific Northwest. Aftershocks will likely be around magnitude 8.0 with a 60ft tsunami hitting the shore first thing.

Nothing has every happened like that to Oregon. People there began thinking seriously about this earthquake and its aftermath only about a decade or so ago. Thinking about the infrastructure interconnectivities within a regional focus has been even more recent. People talk about the recent spate of ice storms, fires, flooding and heat dome effects more as “eye-openers and wake-up calls” than as sources of lessons to be learned for the M9 events. According to interviewees, emergency management is itself a relatively new profession and organizational priority in the state.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that key resources, like electricity generation and regional transmission is on the eastern side of the state. But that too is at jeopardy if instead of a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake off the coast, we are talking about, say, a repeat of the massive geomagnetic storm like the Carrington Event of 1859. That too can happen and take out a much wider swathe of electric and telecom assets.

II

What to do in response to the prospect of the earthquake or worse? One thing is: “get out of Dodge.” But then do you know what’s in store when you arrive somewhere you’ve never resided? That the state’s infrastructure operators aren’t fleeing like mad indicates people’s preferences for known unknowns over unknown unknowns.

Known unknowns after all can be cast in the form of scenarios, and scenarios can be more or less detailed. Restoring water, electricity, telecoms and roads will be an immediate priority once saving lives is underway and plans are (being) made for this. That is, people imagine the known unknown called the unimaginable all the time.

In other words, the second we try to anticipate the unimaginable–that is, prepare for it–the preparedness scenarios become granularized as well. These scenarios are what separate you from unstudied/unstudiable conditions. “Humans can only really know that which they create,” as the older philosophical insight has it.

“It’ll be unimaginably catastrophic” as a limitation of the interview genre

I

Our interviewees were insistent: A magnitude 9.0 Cascadia earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic. But the M9 earthquake isn’t totally incomprehensible, like unknown-unknowns, as we just saw. Scenarios of varying details are to be expected. Still, I think something else is also going on in these interviewee comments. It has to do with the interview as its own genre with its own limitations and their implications.

II

The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, recently summed up its limitations to one of her interviewers:

David, there are some questions that arise when one is being interviewed that would never otherwise have arisen. . .I focus so much on my work; then, when I’m asked to make some abstract comment, I kind of reach for a clue from the interviewer. I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything artificial about it, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, in a way, because I wouldn’t otherwise be saying it. . .Much of what I’m doing is, I’m backed into a corner and the way out is desperation. . .I don’t think about these things unless somebody asks me. . .There is an element of being put on the spot. . .It is actually quite a fascinating genre. It’s very American: “The interview.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/16/magazine/joyce-carol-oates-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20July%2019%2C%202023&utm_term=lithub_master_list

Elsewhere Oates adds about interviewees left “trying to think of reasonably plausible replies that are not untrue.” I suspect such remarks are familiar to many who have interviewed and been interviewed.

III

I believe our interviewee statements to the effect that “The M9 earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic” also reflect the interview genre within which this observation was and is made. The interviewees probably felt put on the spot sometimes while answering about other important work matters. They wanted to be just as plausible as in their earlier knowledgeable answers.

So what? “Anyway, this is not to say that there was anything wrong about my statement to you,” adds Oates. “It’s that there’s almost nothing I can say that isn’t simply an expression of a person trying desperately to say something”–this here being something taht is not untrue about a catastrophe desperate indeed.

Error avoidance is NOT risk management: an example from China

I

To talk about known errors and vulnerabilities to avoid seems incongruous in the context of the pervasive uncertainties found in the midst of major disasters. Real-time surprises and shocks are frequent in flooding, wildfires, earthquakes, and disease outbreaks, among other major disruptions and failures.

Also well-documented, however, is the urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time interventions in some cases. Despite surprises, sequences of action can be clear, urgent and known to front-line staff; and with them, certain errors to be avoided are also evident as well as the vulnerabilities posed if not avoided beforehand. This is especially true when it comes to known sequences with respect to restoring electricity, water, telecoms and roads after, say, an earthquake.

II

Vulnerabilities arise because the interconnectivities between and among infrastructures, when shifting from latent before an emergency to manifest during and afterwards, invalidate existing response planning and preparedness. The emergency changes or multiplies the range of contacts, communications and negotiations required to produce new and unforeseen options to respond. Where and when so, infrastructures are by definition under-prepared and under-resourced to match their capabilities to the now-dynamic demands.

More specifically with respect to known errors:

• Under conditions of such changed interconnectivity, it would be an error for infrastructure operators and emergency managers not to establish lateral communications with one another and undertake improvisational and shared restoration activities where needed, even if no official arrangement exists to do so in the time required.
• In addition to these front-line errors, there are also errors of anticipation and planning. In particular, it would be a management error not to provide robust and contingent inter-infrastructure communication capabilities, including phone connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is greatly facilitated by establishing lateral inter-infrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies
• It would also be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and initial recovery activities such as lorries, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations that would be made available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.

III

While there are other known errors, the above three bullets are sufficient to draw important implications with regard to inter-infrastructural vulnerabilities to be anticipated before, during and after a disaster:

1. Avoiding these known errors are not to be equated to “risk management.” Indeed, they should have their very own, different funding sources and programs.

2. That earmarked funding should be allocated to already existing units and organizations focused on interconnectivities between and among infrastructures. In our experience, this means focusing beyond the official emergency management structures at the local, regional and national levels. Instead, you are looking for existing initiatives that have already “seen the light” by focusing on interconnectivities in their own right and right from the start.

3. Typical discussions of infrastructure vulnerabilities focus on physical components, like corrosion in gas pipelines. The vulnerabilities of interest here, however, begin when the interconnected infrastructures fail to anticipate the need for these special capacities in those cases of shifting or shifted interconnectivities, like the need for lateral communications beyond official channels as a known error to avoid.

4. Without prior contacts, communication  channels and contingent resources already in place beforehand, the infrastructures will by necessity focus on their own intra-infrastructure priorities, tasks and responsibilities in the emergency. Where inter-infrastructural connectivities turn out to be a priority, real-time corrections are then hampered by lack of prior error avoidance and attention.

(My thanks to Paul Schulman in thinking through and formulating these points.)

IV

So what? Take China and its disaster management with respect to, say, its massive High Speed Rail (HSR) system. Against the above background, four follow-on questions, for which I don’t pretend to have any kind of answer, are:

–Do existing institutions facilitate lateral communications and horizontal micro-coordination even if (especially if) they occur outside official emergency management systems, be they in rural or urban areas?

–Are formal and informal communications systems robust even when baseline telecoms are down, be they in rural or urban areas?

–Are repositories of key infrastructure back-ups readily available, particularly where chokepoints of two or more infrastructures are co-located in urban or rural areas?

–Are existing initiatives focused on vulnerabilities of interconnected infrastructures in the face of urban or rural disasters supported not only by funds and staff, but also by new information and findings?

Note, in case it needs saying, that in none of this am I suggesting the answers start, let alone end, with the HSR system.

—Profession(s) of emergency management (newly added)

—A different optic for recasting US emergency management: the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection (SRSP)

—Rethinking pre-disaster mitigations for critical infrastructures

—Improvisation as interconnectivity

–“Why aren’t you all running away like mad!“

—How the only thing between you and death is you

—“It’ll be unimaginably catastrophic” as a limitation of the interview genre

—Error avoidance is NOT risk management: an example from China

—Realities I, II and III in emergency management (newly added)

Profession(s) of emergency management

I

I think we’re all familiar with advocacy pieces that call for more adaptive, collaborative, comprehensive, integrated, holistic, and resilient approaches to hard issues, without however providing the details for that implementation.

It’s easy to dismiss these, but notice their positive implication for policy and management: Those who do know (some of) the details have much to say about their respective abstractions.

We know that real-time operators and managers of infrastructures coordinate, adapt, improvise, and redesign all the time in the face of system surprises and shocks, big and small. They also practice different types of resilience (i.e., adjusting to surprises in normal operations differs from restoring back to normal after a systemwide disruption). When it comes “comprehensive and holistic,” these professionals seek to maintain team situational awareness and a common operating picture of the system, again in real time.

Note two inter-related assumptions in the preceding. First, they are professionals, whether officially certified or not. Second, because they are professionals, their operational definitions of adaptation, resilience and coordination, among other abstractions, matter for and in practice.

II

Yet what do we hear n our interviews of emergency managers and infrastructure operations? Answer: the attempt of some to separate the goats from the sheep, namely, those who understand the centrality of the state and federal incident command systems to emergency management, and those who operate outside these structures when collaborating and improvising directly.

It’s accepted, of course, that at some point in some emergencies, horizontal and lateral micro-coordination may well be required. But those are exceptions and do not determine emergency management from the perspective of the incident command systems. That said, a magnitude 9.0 or greater earthquake in the Pacific Northwest will destroy infrastructures, including those for government emergency management, leaving behind the rest to self-organize and self-provision for the duration.

In our view, self-organization and self-provisioning have always been part and parcel of professional emergency management in major disasters

There is no place in this view for the credentialed to see the uncredentialed as amateurs for want of something better. The reliability professionals we write about are not neanderthals, as one interviewee with engineering certification put it to us. Emergency management today is in the 21st century; it should have no time or place for the likes of 19th century canine veterinarians asserting their professionlism by deriding 18th century dog-doctors.

A different optic for recasting US emergency management: the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection (SRSP)

I

I’m about to finish my part of a study of state and federal emergency management efforts in two US states, Oregon and Washington, were a magnitude 9.0 earthquake to occur offshore as predicted. Suffice it to say, there is great worry that not enough is being done by way of preparing for, responding to, and recovery from such an event.

More formally, the counterfactual to get more resources is: Were infrastructures and governments there spending more on automatic shut-off valves, retrofitting bridges, mobile generators and telecommunication towers, 2-week readiness kits for individual households, etc etc, they would be in a better position for immediate emergency response and recovery.

No guarantees of course, but still fair enough. Yet the preceding is not the only counterfactual about what would or could happen instead.

II

If your world is the world, you will come across the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection that also addresses massive multiple shocks. But here you’d find almost an entirely different set of terms, namely, how social protection programs work with humanitarian response and disaster risk management for what is called here in the US emergency preparedness, immediate emergency response and initial service restoration.

III

A social protection program might focus on how to transfer and get cash into the hands of the victims asap; the emergency management efforts we looked at worried about how ATMs and cellphone transactions would work once the infrastructures failed.

Humanitarian programs readily admit the need for international assistance; we interviewed no one in Oregon and Washington State who described “humanitarian aid” as a key emergency response, let alone from anywhere outside the US.

For its part, disaster risk management, while close to what we mean by emergency management in the States, might also include insurance mechanisms (e.g., assisting in paying premiums before the disaster) and contingency credit programs not just for recovery but also during immediate response

IV

So what?

We are a rich country that knows emergency management inside out. SRSP, if we were to get that literature, is for poor countries, from which we wouldn’t learn anyway. We have real infrastructures, they don’t. That western Oregon and Washington State won’t have them either after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake is what other literatures call collective denial.

Source

O’Brien, C., Scott, Z., Smith, G., Barca V., Kardan, A., Holmes, R., Watson, C. and Congrave, J. (2018), Shock-Responsive Social Protection Systems Research: Synthesis Report, Oxford Policy Management, Oxford, UK.

Rethinking pre-disaster mitigations for critical infrastructures

I

How do you choose which bridges to retrofit, when so many major ones could also fail in the next big earthquake?

That question is misformulated and its answers accordingly misleading.

II

Retrofitting a bridge pre-disaster isn’t a chancy wager on what might or might not happen to the bridge later. Retrofitting is managing latent interconnectivities between bridges and related infrastructures that become manifest during and immediately after the disaster. That inter-infrastructural connections will shift and these shifts will involve bridges is far more predictable than this or that bridge will fail, unless retrofitted.

This means attention is crucial to the track record in retrofitting bridges before and after disasters, here and elsewhere. Note the upshot: Retrofitting has to occur in order to have a track record to monitor and from which to learn.

Since there are material and cognitive limits on controlling inter-infrastructural connectivity at any point in time, doing more by way of managing the pre-disaster latency of interconnectivities is elemental. An interviewee with engineering and management experience told us their city water infrastructure was behind the electricity utility in the adoption of automatic shut-off valves. Bringing water systems up to power’s better practices is a way of managing latent interconnectivity in advance of disaster.

III

In other words, the question we should be asking is more akin to: “What have we learned, here or under like conditions elsewhere, that actually works in better managing latent interconnectivity for post-disaster response and recovery?”

Improvisation as interconnectivity

I

“I can’t say enough good things about planning and how important it is,” a state emergency manager in the Pacific Northwest told us:

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.

The preceding will seem obvious to many, but the implications aren’t as readily recognized.

For one thing, it implies that there is not a “life cycle” of a critical infrastructure, if by that is meant one stage follows another until it–the single now-mature infrastructure–is superseded by something better. In open-systems theory, infrastructures are like other complex organizations in that they shift in response to changes in their wider task environments. That they shift in and out of stability again implies the centrality of improvisation, not steady evolution.

II

“What does success look like?” a senior state emergency manager asked rhetorically, 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.”

Success, in other words, is when pre-existing interconnectivity does not altogether disappear, however reconfigured. Indeed, interconnectivity can be improvised in trying to match just-now demands with just-now capabilities. Stability takes many shapes, and so too the courses followed by infrastructures.

“Why aren’t you all running away like mad!“

I

For reasons that become clear, no names are given in what follows. The numbers, though, remain roughly as identified.

Researchers estimated the annual probability of a major stretch of an island’s levees failing ranged between 4% to 24% due to a slope failure. (Slope instability in this scenario would be caused by flooding behind the levee as well as high water levels on its water side.)

Our estimates were considerably higher than the official one, in large part because the research project relied on methodologies validated against benchmark studies.

We presented the findings to the island’s management board. Their first and really only question was whether our estimates would be revealed to the island’s insurers.

II

We undertook a hotwash afterwards to figure out their–how to put it?–lukewarm response:

• Didn’t they understand the upper range, 24% per annum, implied a levee breach nigh inevitable with respect to our failure scenario? Or to put the question to our side, in what ways did the 24% per annum estimate fall short of being a failure probability of 1.0?

• But if as high as 24% per annum, why hadn’t there been a levee breach over the many decades since the last major one on the island?

• And what about the islands nearby? Assuming even a few of these had a similar upper range, why weren’t levee failures happening more often?

• The 4% – 24% range was with respect to annual levee failure due to slope instability only. If you add in all the levee failure modes possible (e.g., due to seepage rather than overtopping and flooding), the combined probability of levee failure would have to be higher. (But then again, what are the conditions under which the more ways there are to fail, the more likely failure is?)

• You could say one reason why levee failure there hadn’t happened–yet–was because it had been long enough. That is: a long enough period to observe levee breaches so as to form the distribution from which the 24% could be established empirically. But these levees had been in place for decades and decades. The burden of proof was on us, the team of levee experts, to explain why this wasn’t “long enough” or what that long-enough might actually look like.

• The levee stretch in question could be “failing to fail.” It might be that this stretch had not undergone events that loaded it to capacity and worse. (But then again: How much worse would the conditions have to be in our expert view? Just what is “a probability of failing to fail”?)

• To put all this differently, was this levee stretch on that island more diverse and more resilient (say, in the way biodiverse ecosystems are said to be more resilient) than current methods capture but which islanders better understood and perhaps even managed?

III

But our most significant point from the hotwash was the one none of us saw need to voice: How could we accuse the management board and islanders of being short-sighted or worse, with so much else going on challenging us, the team, to make sense of our own estimates for the purposes of island emergency preparedness and management?

How the only thing between you and death is you

I

Say you are residents of Oregon, a US state facing a magnitude 9.0 earthquake just off its shoreline, in the Pacific Northwest. Aftershocks will likely be around magnitude 8.0 with a 60’ft tsunami hitting the shore first thing.

Nothing has every happened like that to Oregon. People there began thinking seriously about this earthquake and its aftermath only about a decade or so ago. Thinking about the infrastructure interconnectivities within a regional focus has been even more recent. People talk about the recent spate of ice storms, fires, flooding and heat dome effects more as “eye-openers and wake-up calls” than as sources of lessons to be learned for the M9 events. According to interviewees, emergency management is itself a relatively new profession and organizational priority in the state.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that key resources, like electricity generation and regional transmission is on the eastern side of the state. But that too is at jeopardy if instead of a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake off the coast, we are talking about, say, a repeat of the massive geomagnetic storm like the Carrington Event of 1859. That too can happen and take out a much wider swathe of electric and telecom assets.

II

What to do in response to the prospect of the earthquake or worse? One thing is: “get out of Dodge.” But then do you know what’s in store when you arrive somewhere you’ve never resided? That the state’s infrastructure operators aren’t fleeing like mad indicates people’s preferences for known unknowns over unknown unknowns.

Known unknowns after all can be cast in the form of scenarios, and scenarios can be more or less detailed. Restoring water, electricity, telecoms and roads will be an immediate priority once saving lives is underway and plans are (being) made for this. That is, people imagine the known unknown called the unimaginable all the time.

In other words, the second we try to anticipate the unimaginable–that is, prepare for it–the preparedness scenarios become more or less granularized as well. These scenarios are what separate you from unstudied/unstudiable conditions. “Humans can only really know that which they create,” as the older philosophical insight has it.

“It’ll be unimaginably catastrophic” as a limitation of the interview genre

I

Our interviewees were insistent: A magnitude 9.0 Cascadia earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic. But the M9 earthquake isn’t totally incomprehensible, like unknown-unknowns, as we just saw. Scenarios of varying details are to be expected. Still, I think something else is also going on in these interviewee comments. It has to do with the interview as its own genre with its own limitations and their implications.

II

The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, recently summed up its limitations to one of her interviewers:

David, there are some questions that arise when one is being interviewed that would never otherwise have arisen. . .I focus so much on my work; then, when I’m asked to make some abstract comment, I kind of reach for a clue from the interviewer. I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything artificial about it, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, in a way, because I wouldn’t otherwise be saying it. . .Much of what I’m doing is, I’m backed into a corner and the way out is desperation. . .I don’t think about these things unless somebody asks me. . .There is an element of being put on the spot. . .It is actually quite a fascinating genre. It’s very American: “The interview.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/16/magazine/joyce-carol-oates-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20July%2019%2C%202023&utm_term=lithub_master_list

Elsewhere Oates adds about interviewees left “trying to think of reasonably plausible replies that are not untrue.” I suspect such remarks are familiar to many who have interviewed and been interviewed.

III

I believe our interviewee statements to the effect that “The M9 earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic” also reflect the interview genre within which this observation was and is made. The interviewees probably felt put on the spot sometimes while answering about other important work matters. They wanted to be just as plausible as in their earlier knowledgeable answers.

So what? “Anyway, this is not to say that there was anything wrong about my statement to you,” adds Oates. “It’s that there’s almost nothing I can say that isn’t simply an expression of a person trying desperately to say something”–this here being something taht is not untrue about a catastrophe desperate indeed.

Error avoidance is NOT risk management: an example from China

I

To talk about known errors and vulnerabilities to avoid seems incongruous in the context of the pervasive uncertainties found in the midst of major disasters. Real-time surprises and shocks are frequent in flooding, wildfires, earthquakes, and disease outbreaks, among other major disruptions and failures.

Also well-documented, however, is the urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time interventions in some cases. Despite surprises, sequences of action can be clear, urgent and known to front-line staff; and with them, certain errors to be avoided are also evident as well as the vulnerabilities posed if not avoided beforehand. This is especially true when it comes to known sequences with respect to restoring electricity, water, telecoms and roads after, say, an earthquake.

II

Vulnerabilities arise because the interconnectivities between and among infrastructures, when shifting from latent before an emergency to manifest during and afterwards, invalidate existing response planning and preparedness. The emergency changes or multiplies the range of contacts, communications and negotiations required to produce new and unforeseen options to respond. Where and when so, infrastructures are by definition under-prepared and under-resourced to match their capabilities to the now-dynamic demands.

More specifically with respect to known errors:

• Under conditions of such changed interconnectivity, it would be an error for infrastructure operators and emergency managers not to establish lateral communications with one another and undertake improvisational and shared restoration activities where needed, even if no official arrangement exists to do so in the time required.
• In addition to these front-line errors, there are also errors of anticipation and planning. In particular, it would be a management error not to provide robust and contingent inter-infrastructure communication capabilities, including phone connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is greatly facilitated by establishing lateral inter-infrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies
• It would also be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and initial recovery activities such as lorries, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations that would be made available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.

III

While there are other known errors, the above three bullets are sufficient to draw important implications with regard to inter-infrastructural vulnerabilities to be anticipated before, during and after a disaster:

1. Avoiding these known errors are not to be equated to “risk management.” Indeed, they should have their very own, different funding sources and programs.

2. That earmarked funding should be allocated to already existing units and organizations focused on interconnectivities between and among infrastructures. In our experience, this means focusing beyond the official emergency management structures at the local, regional and national levels. Instead, you are looking for existing initiatives that have already “seen the light” by focusing on interconnectivities in their own right and right from the start.

3. Typical discussions of infrastructure vulnerabilities focus on physical components, like corrosion in gas pipelines. The vulnerabilities of interest here, however, begin when the interconnected infrastructures fail to anticipate the need for these special capacities in those cases of shifting or shifted interconnectivities, like the need for lateral communications beyond official channels as a known error to avoid.

4. Without prior contacts, communication  channels and contingent resources already in place beforehand, the infrastructures will by necessity focus on their own intra-infrastructure priorities, tasks and responsibilities in the emergency. Where inter-infrastructural connectivities turn out to be a priority, real-time corrections are then hampered by lack of prior error avoidance and attention.

(My thanks to Paul Schulman in thinking through and formulating these points.)

IV

So what? Take China and its disaster management with respect to, say, its massive High Speed Rail (HSR) system. Against the above background, four follow-on questions, for which I don’t pretend to have any kind of answer, are:

–Do existing institutions facilitate lateral communications and horizontal micro-coordination even if (especially if) they occur outside official emergency management systems, be they in rural or urban areas?

–Are formal and informal communications systems robust even when baseline telecoms are down, be they in rural or urban areas?

–Are repositories of key infrastructure back-ups readily available, particularly where chokepoints of two or more infrastructures are co-located in urban or rural areas?

–Are existing initiatives focused on vulnerabilities of interconnected infrastructures in the face of urban or rural disasters supported not only by funds and staff, but also by new information and findings?

Note, in case it needs saying, that in none of this am I suggesting the answers start, let alone end, with the HSR system.

Realities I, II and III in emergency management

You are on one of the upper floors of a huge skyscraper, looking out on the morning. That is Reality I: You are the observing subject looking out at reality. After a point, you realize that dot in the distance is actually a plane headed toward you, this morning in the World Trade Center. That is Reality II: You become the object of reality, in that grip of the real, and no longer just observer.

There is, however, Reality III. This is of the air traffic controllers during 9/11. Neither the observer of the first reality nor the object of second, the professionals achieved the unprecedented without incident that day. They were instructed to land all commercial and general aviation aircraft in the United States—some 4,500 aircraft—and did so.

Without overdrawing the point, so too do we still demand that professionals land those water, electricity, transportation, telecommunications, and many more critical services every day without major incident.

—Latest blog entries include

“Profession(s) of emergency management” and “When surprise is a policy optic”

—Special announcement

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene has been published at

https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008

—Those interested in extensions of the Guide, please see:

**”Sourcing other ideas for policy analysts, practitioners, and scholar-activists: history, humanities, fine arts, and alternative media” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2023/08/18/sourcing-other-ideas-for-policy-analysts-practitioners-and-scholar-activists-history-humanities-fine-arts-and-alternative-media/

**”Policy optics as prompts and probes for answering: So what? (10 new examples)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2023/10/20/policy-optics-as-prompts-and-probes-for-answering-so-what-resent-9-short-updated-examples/

**”Counternarratives that are emerging in the published literature for major policy and management issues” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2023/05/07/16-examples-of-complex-counternarratives-in-the-making/

**”Why actionable granularity is important for policy and management of poverty, regulation and inequality: a short argument in five steps with one upshot” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2023/10/30/why-actionable-granularity-is-important-for-policy-and-management-of-poverty-regulation-and-inequality-a-shortened-argument-in-five-steps/

**”How different genres structure and change public policy: 15 cases (with new examples)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/21/how-different-genres-structure-and-change-public-policy-15-cases-with-new-examples/

**”Instead of ‘differentiated by gender, race and class,’ why not ‘differentiated by more heterogeneity and complexity’? https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/18/instead-of-differentiated-by-gender-race-and-class-why-not-differentiated-more-by-heterogeneity-and-complexity/

I

I think we’re all familiar with advocacy pieces that call for more adaptive, collaborative, comprehensive, integrated, holistic, and resilient approaches to hard issues, without however providing the details for that implementation.

It’s easy to dismiss these, but notice their positive implication for policy and management: Those who do know (some of) the details have much to say about their respective abstractions.

We know that real-time operators and managers of infrastructures coordinate, adapt, improvise, and redesign all the time in the face of system surprises and shocks, big and small. They also practice different types of resilience (i.e., adjusting to surprises in normal operations differs from restoring back to normal after a systemwide disruption). When it comes “comprehensive and holistic,” these professionals seek to maintain team situational awareness and a common operating picture of the system, again in real time.

Note two inter-related assumptions in the preceding. First, they are professionals, whether officially certified or not. Second, because they are professionals, their operational definitions of adaptation, resilience and coordination, among other abstractions, matter for and in practice.

II

Yet what do we hear n our interviews of emergency managers and infrastructure operations? Answer: the attempt of some to separate the goats from the sheep, namely, those who understand the centrality of the state and federal incident command systems to emergency management, and those who operate outside these structures when collaborating and improvising directly.

It’s accepted, of course, that at some point in some emergencies, horizontal and lateral micro-coordination may well be required. But those are exceptions and do not determine emergency management from the perspective of the incident command systems. That said, a magnitude 9.0 or greater earthquake in the Pacific Northwest will destroy infrastructures, including those for government emergency management, leaving behind the rest to self-organize and self-provision for the duration.

In our view, self-organization and self-provisioning have always been part and parcel of professional emergency management in major disasters

There is no place in this view for the credentialed to see the uncredentialed as amateurs for want of something better. The reliability professionals we write about are not neanderthals, as one interviewee with engineering certification put it to us. Emergency management today is in the 21st century; it should have no time or place for the likes of 19th century canine veterinarians asserting their professionlism by deriding 18th century dog-doctors.

I

Below in full and without edit is a letter to the editor of the TLS:

Sir, – Unless a substantial proportion of the world’s scientists are deluded and are (innocently) deluding us, articles that blithely project a long-term future extrapolated from a continuing present need to be challenged (see “The last mortals” by Regina Rini, May 17). Or rather the publishing of them. To make predictions based on the present could be an act of climate catastrophe denial, an act that recursively makes the catastrophe more likely. This article is particularly odd in that it posits the exact opposite problem to the one we (almost certainly) face. It’s not how we cope with watching the next generation sail off into immortality, but how we cope with leaving them to face the conclusion of our civilization. Even the most sophisticated actuarial programs would struggle to tell me my grandchildren’s life expectancy, but I’d bet it’s shrinking by the day. A more useful challenge for philosophers would be to ask why environmental and social collapse are increasingly inevitable now, why we don’t care, and perhaps why we seem not to care that we don’t care. Are we incapable of seeing the world as real? Better to deal with these sorts of questions than to go floating off into Elfland.

MARK STEINHARDT
Bedford.

II

I wonder if Mr Steinhardt and like-minded people fully appreciate the equally strident policy implication that follows directly from their argument that, since the climate emergency is so catastrophic, thinking about anything else is irresponsible?

Namely: Such persons should be publicly shamed and humiliated, if it turns out that, of course, the climate emergency is going on and yes, it is disastrous, but that does not excuse humanity from thinking about other existential disasters.

For a long time, we’ve had posed to us the binary choices of civilization or barbarism and socialism or barbarism. Later choices included progress or barbarism, capitalism or barbarism, liberalism or barbarism. More recent ones embrace: degrowth or barbarism, anti-Zionism or barbarism, anti-racist feminism or barbarism, climate justice or barbarism, and digital socialism or digital barbarism.

What an odd way to keep alive the notion that civilization persists through changing.

Economics assumes a theory of substitutability, where goods and services have alternatives in the marketplace; infrastructure reliability assumes practices for ensuring nonfungibility, where nothing can substitute for the high reliability of critical infrastructures without which there would be no markets for goods and services, right now when selecting among those alternative goods and services. There is a point at which high reliability and trade-offs are immiscible, like trying to mix oil and water.

One way of thinking about the nonfungibility of infrastructure reliability is that it’s irrecuperable economically in real time; it cannot be cashed out in dollars and cents in the here-and-now without it becoming different from high reliability. Real time, from this perspective, is an impassable obstacle to monetizing tasks by infrastructure control room operators, then and there, when undertaking the managing.

Which is to say, if you were to enter the market and arbitrage a price for high reliability of critical infrastructures, the markets transactions would be such you’d never be sure you’re getting what you thought you were buying.

. . . at the very center of analysis. The idea that current capitalist pathologies arise because the capitalism of markets and productivity has disappeared. The idea that Amazon should be broken up because of its monopoly power and anti-competitive practices, as professed by a think tank whose goal is nothing like a competitive market society. The idea of Eurocommunist parties that the working class isn’t to be praised but contested by, among others, middle class workers.

Time after time, making human behaviour more predictable for the client of prediction (the manager, the police officer) often means making life and work more unpredictable for the target of prediction (the employee, the urban citizen).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231171053

Meanwhile I’ll be plotting to outwrite it; I want to be the first human being to imitate ChatGPT perfectly.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/20/m-john-harrison-i-want-to-be-the-first-human-to-imitate-chatgpt-wish-i-was-here?utm_term=6469c17386bac9427580944744a8948a&utm_campaign=Bookmarks&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=bookmarks_email

Large proportions of the Chinese collection are perhaps copies in the eyes of those collectors and dealers, who believe that authentic African art has become largely extinct due to diminishing numbers of active traditional carvers and ritual practices. However, the ideological structure and colonial history of authenticity loses its effects and meanings in China, where anything produced and brought back from Africa is deemed to be “authentically African”.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089

E.M. Forster in Howards End: “The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful life is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.” This is as far away as you get from a perfect reliability as the fault-free fluency of classical ballet.

I keep being told infrastructures are complex technologies, even though they’re manifestly socio-technical and not just because the technologies have to be managed (i.e., this is more than “risk is socially constructed”).

We’re to believe regular operations are routine operations, but if routine means invariant, there is nothing invariant about normal infrastructure operations.

System reliability is probabilistic in the view of engineers, even though control room operators act deterministically, i.e., there’s a point at which system reliability cannot be traded off against other factors or else people would die.

I was assured that for reasons of tractability, the modeling of infrastructure operations has two stages, normal and failed. In actual practice, the temporary disruption of systemwide services–hardly ever modeled, let alone sufficiently–identifies highly relevant conditions for returning to normal operations or tipping into failure.

Engineers said the probability of infrastructure failure during post-disaster recovery of assets and operations was higher than the probability of failure during normal operations. Think: re-energizing line by line during a table-top Black Start exercise. Actually, nonmeasurable uncertainties–nothing like probabilities–are faced by operators post-disaster (the Black Start exercises for electric transmission infrastructure assume no asset destruction, as improbable as that is).

Consider the frequent “restore.” What’s it with respect to: interrupted services restored back to normal? Or services to be initially restored after major system failure? Or key equipment or facilities restored after a non-routine outage as part of normal maintenance and repair activities? Restore is one of the most ambiguous terms in infrastructure studies.

You are on one of the upper floors of a huge skyscraper, looking out on the morning. That is Reality I: You are the observing subject looking out at reality. After a point, you realize that dot in the distance is actually a plane headed toward you, this morning in the World Trade Center. That is Reality II: You become the object of reality, in that grip of the real, and no longer just observer.

There is, however, Reality III. This is of the air traffic controllers during 9/11. Neither the observer of the first reality nor the object of second, the professionals achieved the unprecedented without incident that day. They were instructed to land all commercial and general aviation aircraft in the United States—some 4,500 aircraft—and did so.

Without overdrawing the point, so too do we demand that professionals land those water, electricity, transportation, telecommunications, and many more critical services every day without major incident.