Major Read: Thinking infrastructurally about emergency management (longer version)

Preliminaries

Let’s start with several commonplaces: Infrastructures are key to defining and structuring societies, economies and markets; their owners wield great power; and some of the major consequences have been significantly negative, not least of which are hyper-profits for the owners and wider inequalities in wealth, production and consumption.

I agree with the commonplaces–as far as they go. But they don’t go far enough to capture the complexities and caveats of really-existing infrastructures. When the latter are left out, the commonplaces aren’t empirical generalizations over the diversity of cases. The commonplaces that stop short end up as exaggerations in policy and management.

So to be clear from the outset. I believe major infrastructures do define and limit societies. I also believe their owners–including Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Agriculture and Big Pharma–are doing harm in furthering major crises, including but not limited to the Climate Emergency. I also believe that there are many significant cases, under-acknowledged if not unreported, where real-time operators of critical infrastructures have far less control than credited to them.

This stopping short of the wider complexities matters precisely because infrastructures are so essential to societies and economies. Since infrastructure power theories (direct, indirect and dispersed control) go only part of the way in determining real-time infrastructure operations and impacts, this blog entry seeks to push the matter further, namely: to an approach that identifies and describes what else is going on by way of real-time determination and their implications for policy and management.

III

An important test case for the latter approach is emergency management. Assume what we are told holds: Our current crises are caused by capitalism, racism, militarism, imperialism, nationalism, populism, consumerism, extractivism, settler colonialism along with financialization, urbanization, marketization, commodification, globalization, and more. This means, in aggregate, more calls for managing more emergencies arising within and from the crises.

If so, then also assume that those responses and emergencies unavoidably vary on the ground, and majorly so. Why? Because the factors that affect really-existing emergency management are many and heterogenous: societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, legal, geographic, governmental, and religious, among others. To quote Marx, people “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” There is no better example of that truth than emergency management, case by case.

The particular problem with power theories, at least from the perspectives of our two assumptions about emergency management, is their notion of control. In natural language and in academics, to control and to manage have been and often still used interchangeably. But the field of infrastructure studies I work in sees a marked distinction. In this field, critical infrastructures are socio-technical systems that distinguish between real-time control and real-time management.

Think of the socio-technical system in terms of inputs, outputs, and the processes to convert those inputs into outputs. Control is when the variations in inputs, processes and outputs are rendered low and stable. Management is the case where input variance cannot be controlled. Here, process variance has to increase, if output variance is to remain low and stable (this reflecting the so-called law of requisite variety). Management is having about more and more diverse options and strategies so as to produce or maintain, e.g., electricity at the regulated frequency and voltage, water coming out of the tap, and a busy signal that actually indicates a line in use rather than a malfunction somewhere–even when an emergency is underway if possible.

The emergencies I have studied involve infrastructures that manage because they can’t control input variability and have to respond in a variety of different ways in order to maintain system wide reliability. In these cases, reliability is defined as the safe and continuous provision of the critical service, even during (especially during) turbulent times. Of course, it is easy for critics to dismiss this kind of reliability. Think reliable train service to the concentration camps. But that is a cheap shot in a world often more notable precisely because of the vast majorities who want but lack reliable and safe water, energy and communications.

Yes, of course, operating these infrastructures, reliably or otherwise, create inequalities. But wouldn’t you want to know before changing them the effects on systemwide reliability and safety of that change? Even low-cost, more sustainable socio-technical systems will be reliable only up to that unpredictable failure ahead they can’t prevent.

I shift now to what I see as the major under-acknowledged features of emergency management that derive from infrastructures lack of control and from the complexities under which this occurs. I address specific policy and/or management implications in each case. Several general implications are drawn by way of the Conclusion.

Eight features of emergency management often not recognized

–1. Because of the complexities, there are professions of emergency management

Readers are familiar with advocacy pieces that call for more adaptive, collaborative, comprehensive, integrated, holistic, and resilient approaches to crises, without however providing the details for that implementation.

It’s arguably too easy to make such calls, but notice their positive practical implication: 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 infrastructure operations 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.

Two inter-related assumptions are important to recognize in the preceding. First, these operators and managers are professionals, whether officially certified or not. Second, because they are professionals, their operationalized definitions of adaptation, resilience and coordination, in particular, matter for and in practice.

Yet what do we hear in our interviews of formal emergency managers? Answer: the attempt to separate the goats from the sheep by some, 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. It’s accepted that boundaries between professional/nonprofessional, formal/informal and organized/unorganized are blurred in major disasters. But those are exceptions and do not determine emergency management from the perspective of the incident command systems.

That said, major disasters are on the increase and, most certainly, 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 once. As one reader with a background in emergency management also put it: “Ordinary people can be on site in acute disasters and start search and rescue operations, and often continue being part of the response also after formal first responders arrive. Existing organizational structures can be repurposed to meet unmet needs in the recovery phase.”

Emergency management today, in this version of the 21st century; should have no time or place for the likes of 19th century canine veterinarians asserting their professionalism by deriding 18th century dog-doctors.

(My thanks to Stian Antonsen for the quote and his insight about blurred boundaries.)

–2. Because of the complexities, there are always other optics with which to recast emergency management.

Suffice it to say, there is great worry that not enough is being done by way of preparing for, responding to, and recovery from a magnitude 9.0 earthquake to occur as predicted off-shore of Oregon and Washington State.

More formally, the counterfactual to get more resources for emergency management 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, initial service restoration and intermediate recovery.

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

If your world is the world, you will come across the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection (SRSP) that also addresses massive multiple shocks. But here you’d find a very different set of terms, namely, how social protection programs work with humanitarian response and disaster risk management for what is called 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 so far in Oregon and Washington State who described “humanitarian aid” as a key emergency response, let alone from anywhere outside the US.

For its part, Global South 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

So what?

We are a rich country, we tell ourselves, that knows the ins and outs of emergency management better. SRSP, if we were to get that literature, is for poor countries. We have sophisticated 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.

–3. Because of the complexities, retrofitting a bridge, by way of example, isn’t just about the bridge.

Retrofitting a bridge pre-disaster isn’t a chancy wager on what might or might not happen to the bridge in a later disaster. Retrofitting is managing latent interconnectivities between bridges and related infrastructures that become manifest during and because of 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, a comparison involving 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 required. 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.

This means that 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 better response, restoration and recovery, post-disaster?”

–4. Because of the complexities, the first duty as a professional is to question what are taken to be today’s overarching approaches to emergency management.

We 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.

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 or corrected empirically. But, methodologically, the burden of proof was on us, the team of levee experts, to explain why the decades and decades of levee use wasn’t “long enough” or what that long-enough might actually look like.

Also, 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 or 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 the 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, 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 insist that these island levees are themselves a key infrastructure protecting other infrastructures, including river-water supplies, island agriculture and adjacent wetlands.

–5. Because of the complexities, those interested in emergencies must be sensitive to the interview as a means for their information gathering.

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

The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, 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 Oates’ 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 may well have felt put on the spot while answering other questions about 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,” cautions 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 that is also not untrue about a M9 catastrophe desperate indeed. Thus, it should not be surprising that “not-untrue statements” are by definition of insufficient granularity for managing in desperate situations.

–6. Because of the complexities, risk management and error avoidance in emergency management are not the same activity.

To talk about known management 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 the unexpected 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 of these cases. Despite the shocks, 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 here.

Vulnerabilities arise because the interconnectivities between and among infrastructures, when and where 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 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 bulleted three 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. Risk is to be managed, more or less; errors are to be avoided categorically, yes or no.

2. That earmarked funding should be allocated to already existing units and organizations focused on interconnectivities between and among infrastructures. This means focusing beyond the official emergency management structures at the local, regional and national levels here. 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 natural 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 its own 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, their real-time corrections and adjustments are then hampered by lack of prior error avoidance and attention.

(My thanks to Paul Schulman in thinking through and formulating these points. Any shortfalls in interpretation, however, are mine alone.)

–7. Because of the complexities, the realities for emergency management are necessarily multiple, which means radical action to prevent the emergencies are necessarily multiple as well.

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.

As emergencies have different realities, so too must radical actions to prevent them be really multiple. This is easily illustrated by the actually-existing Climate Emergency, when the radical action to be undertaken is orthogonal to what ideologically-inspired activists on the extreme left or right want.

It’s one thing to call for radical resistance against the major polluting nations. It’s another thing to lay out how the next wave of environmental activism includes cadres of digital hackers ready to take on, say, Xi Jinping and the CCP. China is responsible for an estimated one-quarter of annual global GHG emissions, largely due to its massive fleet of coal-fired power stations. Where is the hacktivism ready and able to disable these plants? Or disable the real-time operations of, say, the “Big 3” credit rating agencies (S&P Global, Moody’s and Fitch) for their insanely positive ratings of the economies fueling climate change?

In what world is unprecedented but recommended global governance of the consumption and production of nearly 8 billion people easier than, say, mobilizing the Chinese proletariat of some 220 million or disrupting the operations of the Big 3 CRAs, both for the planet’s survival? Answers, I believe, are part of what we should expect to find but are not talked about—except perhaps inside the respective departments of defense and global asset managers.

–8. Because of the complexities, the massive sums typically said to be needed for emergency preparedness, management and recovery require major rethinking.

Recently, I attended a conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, now and projected into the near decades. Among other things, I was told that:

The Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–to restore area wetlands and mudflats;
Also required would be an estimated US$110 billion dollars locally to adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and
We should expect much more sea level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap melting in Antarctica and Greenland.

Millions of cubic yards equivalent to over 420 Salesforce Tower high-rises? Some $110 billion which has no possibility whatsoever of being funded, locally let alone regionally? And those massive new requirements posed even locally by the melting ice caps? How are these unprecedented high climate-related losses to be compensated for?

It’s not surprising that the individual interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work challenges posed by the bulleted challenges.

What to do? How to respond?

You respond first and formost by critically rethinking the direct or underlying estimates of losses (economic, physical, lives, and more) incurred if we don’t take action now. It’s been my experience that none of these estimated losses take into account the losses already prevented from occurring by infrastructure operators and emergency managers who avoid systemwide and regional system failures from that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment.

Why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae?

Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for climate restoration and recovery.

Conclusion

Nothing stops the critic from ascribing the above issues and problems to capitalism, or any of the other -isms and -izations. I confess, however, I find tracing back to any such root causes difficult in the case of these eight features.

Of course critics are right to shout out how levees, electricity grids, and shoreline infrastructures have socio-economic functions and reflect the powers-that-be. But so many of these criticisms, in my view, are removed from the level of granularity at which really-existing emergency management proceeds, including with respect to the other big “earthquake” issues of the day. In these more detailed scenarios, those fine but abstract binaries of costs and benefits, pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, along with long term and short term, become justifiably and productively more complicated.

Source. Earlier, different examples of thinking infrastructurally can be found in http://When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene

Scores in risk registries for critical infrastructures

The focus on present risks of critical infrastructure components volatilizes in an odd way the infrastructure and its longer-term. It’s not only the specific focus on “scores,” namely: the attempt is to abstract from real-time operations risks associated with specific assets, components and processes that by definition do NOT add up to the infrastructure-as-a-system operated in real time and through time.

It’s also because the real-time management for systemwide reliability in its centralized control room is about the only place in the infrastructure we observed that didn’t lose sight of the infrastructure operations as an articulated–not fissiparous–entity, now and in the next steps ahead.

“Once nuclear power plants have been in operation long enough, we’ll see more major accidents more of the time”: Yes or No?

–By way of answering, yes or no, let’s start with an anecdote:

There is an apocryphal story about Frederick Mosteller, a famous professor of statistics at Harvard University. Sometime in the 1950s, a student of Mosteller´s was unconvinced that a six-sided die had a precise 1/6 chance of landing on any of its six sides, so he collected a bunch of (cheap) dice and tossed them a few thousand times to test his professor´s theory… Evidently, according to said (bored) student the numbers five and six appeared more frequently than the numbers one through four. Professor Mosteller´s unsurprising response was that the student had not tossed the dice enough times. ‘Rest assumed’, the student was told, the law of large numbers would ‘kick in’ and everything would (eventually) converge to 1/6. Undeterred, the student continued rolling a few thousand more times, but the fives and sixes were still showing up way too frequently. Something fishy was afoot. It turns out that the observed frequencies were not quite 1/6 because the holes bored into dice – to represent the numbers themselves – shift the centers of gravity toward the smaller numbers, which are opposite the numbers five and six. Ergo, the two highest numbers were observed with greater frequency.
https://cpes.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/stefan_voss_paper.pdf

In other words, it takes a very great deal of work to undertake a randomized control experiment, as “control” is such a misleading term in the real world. Something uncontrolled/uncontrollable intervenes significantly between treatment and measurement.

–This means that one reason why there haven’t been more nuclear accidents (given their complex and unpredictably interactive technologies) is not because “we haven’t waited long enough.” It’s more likely other intervening factors are at work.

And one such reason is that the plants have been managed beyond their technologies. They are managed more reliably than theory predicts precisely because of the next failure ahead–that is, there are no guarantees and as such must be managed reliably instead.

Thinking infrastructurally about emergency management

—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 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.

Yet what do we hear in 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’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.

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

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

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

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.

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!“

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 that is also not untrue about a M9 catastrophe desperate indeed.

Error avoidance is NOT risk management: an example from China

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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

Shaming a bullying catastrophism

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.

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.

Examples of “contrary to what you think” in infrastructure studies

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.

Realities I, II and III in emergency management

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.

Rescuing error avoidance from risk management under emergency conditions

Introduction

How do you know you’ve made a mistake if caught in the grip of everything else being uncertain? You know more, of course, after the fact when consequences are clearer in hindsight. But how do you know in real time and in these fogs of struggle and strife that this or that action on your part is a mistake to be avoided, right now and here?

It is highly relevant for the purposes of policy and management to insist that real-time error avoidance is possible even under particular (but not all) conditions of widespread systemwide complexity and uncertainties.

Research Findings

Paul Schulman and I have been undertaking research on a set of interconnected critical infrastructures in Oregon and Washington State. The upshot is that not only do major uncertainties and risks change with shifting interconnectivities, but new errors to be avoided emerge as well, and clearly so for some cases.

Based on interviews with infrastructure control room operators and emergency managers, real-time surprises are widespread in flooding, wildfire, road and other transportation disruptions, levee breaches, and transmission failures in electricity and water.

But, as many also told us, there can be and often are an urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time or just-for-now interventions. What needs to be done is at times evident to front-line infrastructure staff and emergency management professionals, when not so to those in incident command centers or higher-level management or official positions. For these experienced front-line staff and in these circumstances, not doing what needs to be done constitute errors to be avoided in real-time. They are, in other words, opportunities that cannot be missed.

What are those circumstances and conditions of urgency, clarity and logic?

Ones identified by our interviewees focus on an infrastructure’s key interconnectivities with infrastructures they depended upon and which depended upon them. More specifically, this focus and concern centers around shifts in the interconnectivity involving their respective systemwide control variables, like frequency and voltage for electricity transmission, main-pipe pressures for large-scale water supply or natural gas systems, and network bandwidth in telecommunications.

During normal operations, these control variables are already interconnected. What defines system disruption and failure is when the interconnectivities shift in unignorable ways. Fire-fighters setting their firebreaks under more accessible rights-of-way, which are the same rights-of-way created for electricity transmission lines, can create conflict between backfires needed by the fire- fighters and the voltage and flow paths along the transmission lines. Because they share the same waterway, clearing a river passage for ongoing marine transport and re-opening a major port along the way is important to both infrastructures.

When these systems as systems are disrupted, or fail outright, restoring or recovering what had already been interconnected system control variables require urgent and often improvisatory behavior by all manner of infrastructure operators from the control rooms on down to field staff. These improvisations may be last-second one-offs saving the day, like seen in battle. From our perspective, these are better understood as part and parcel of the wide range of workarounds that line operators and field staff undertake–beginning in normal operations, routine maintenance and non-routine repair–to ensure safe and reliable operations at the system level.

III

In particular, we found:

–Under conditions of shifting or shifted 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 addition, there are also errors of anticipation and planning. It would be a management error in anticipation and planning not to provide robust and contingent interinfrastructure communication capabilities, including phone connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is also greatly facilitated by establishing lateral interinfrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies

–Further, it would be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and recovery activities such as vehicles, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.

While these three errors are not the entire set, our interviews and prior research convince us that they are of primary concern and are to be avoided because they seriously degrade effective resilience in emergency prevention and responses.

Three Important Policy and Management Implications

I. Error avoidance is not risk management

Let’s start with a US example. It would be an error not to put into the mandated county/city hazard mitigation plan a proposal to replace a majorly vulnerable culvert with a new bridge, should the former be washed away in new flooding and when federal funds would be available for bridge replacement under those conditions. Put this way, there is a role for forward planning in anticipating and taking advantage of these already existing funding and construction opportunities.

Or from the other direction, rural town that did not anticipate accelerated gentrification after a major wildfire in its hazard mitigation plan will have to deal with the consequences of not having prepared for this gentrification (e.g. newly added residential water and wastewater demands and transportation requirements).

In both cases and from this perspective, the mandated hazard mitigation plan is a problem definition, parts of which are latent until activated during immediate emergency response, initial service restoration or longer-term recovery. Collapsing either example under the category of “risk management” is to miss the fact that these errors (or, if prefer, missed opportunities) are not to be managed, more or less like risks, but rather managed categorically as yes or no. Did you avoid or did you not?

II. An example of how distinguishing between error avoidance and risk management is also important for locality residents affected by the disaster

Friends are telling us wonderful things about their recent move to a rural area in the Pacific Northwest. They were also surprised, given all the rain, about the high fire hazard risk mapped for their area and nearby environs. As in California, such maps created political and insurance company push-back. And there are methodological issues in mapping fuel loads in the absence of not knowing point-of-ignition information in advance.

So what to do? In their case, they talked about how they and neighbors agree in advance to help each other should a wildfire threaten (ignited, say, by vehicle sparks along the roadside). If one neighbor was threatened, all would move to that site to help out.

Such self-organizing happens all over the world and there is nothing extraordinary in this example, except one thing that deserves highlighting: What is going on here (and I suspect many other examples) is not managing the risks associated with fire hazards but rather avoiding known errors when faced with fire hazards, whatever the associated risks.

These errors include the aforementioned need for robust communications in this case among the neighbors and the need to have firefighting tools and associated equipment distributed and accessible beforehand. In addition, it is hoped that here too they and other residents use their county’s hazard mitigation plan to seek federal and state support for improving their lifeline infrastructures (water, electricity, roads and telecoms), should fires and other disasters actually undermine them in the future.

To repeat, it is an error to have missed really-existing opportunities for more robust communications, more dispersed equipment and tools, and greater use of existing planning and funding mechanisms. But why is that distinction important? It implies that there should dedicated support and staffing to assist such locality-based error avoidance, in addition to and separate from risk management efforts, not least of which being those fire hazard maps.

III. The special institutional niche for infrastructures in error-avoiding disaster management

Those who study major earthquakes, tsunamis, or other place-based catastrophes often remark about how populations left behind self-organize by way of saving lives and providing what relief they can on their own. We have seen this too. What is less recognized, I believe, is the institutional niche that critical infrastructures hold in this group adaptive behavior.

In some cases, the group-organization of groups takes place because there is little government presence, let alone as the disaster unfolds. One thinks of the media attention given to earthquakes in some low-income countries.

Self-organizing groups, however, are also observed in disaster situations that destroy longstanding critical infrastructures in middle to high-income countries. Error-avoiding behavior in the form of increased lateral communication and improvisational behavior are witnessed, in particular, among front-line infrastructure staff, emergency managers and some local communities.

I want to suggest that group adaptation in these latter cases differs in at least one under-acknowledged respect. A major part of that self-organization of field crews and the public is to provide initial restoration of some kind of electricity, water, road, communications and other so-called lifeline services, like medical care. This niche of critical infrastructures is already established.

Indeed, what better acknowledgement of society’s institutional niche for interconnected critical infrastructures than the immediate emergency response of trying to avoid all manner of errors in restoring the backbone infrastructures of electricity, water, telecoms and roads?

————-

Acknowledgement. My thanks to Paul Schulman for working through and crafting a number of these points. All errors–!–remain mine.

Reference. For an initial discussion of topics in this blog entry and its source material, see: E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2023). “An Interconnectivity Framework for Analyzing and Demarcating Real-Time Operations Across Critical Infrastructures and Over Time.” Safety Science (available online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106308)

An example of the high stakes in not thinking error avoidance is the same as “risk management” (major read)

Such self-organizing happens all over the world and there is nothing extraordinary in this example, except one thing that deserves highlighting.

What is going on here (and I suspect many other examples) is not managing the risks associated with fire hazards so much as avoiding known errors when faced with fire hazards, whatever their risks. More formally, risks are to be managed more or less effectively in an emergency; errors in contrast are to be avoided—not more or less, but categorically yes or no.

And what errors are these? They include the need for robust communications among the neighbors and the need to have firefighting tools and associated equipment distributed and accessible beforehand. This may or may not be in our friends’ case. In addition, it is hoped that they and other residents use their county’s hazard mitigation plan to seek federal and state support for improving their lifeline infrastructures (water, electricity, roads and telecoms), should fires and other disasters actually undermine them in the future.

Ensuring more robust communications, more dispersed equipment and tools, and greater use of existing planning and funding mechanisms are opportunities that must not be missed, if they already exist. In fact, it is an error not to take advantage of them.

And why is that distinction important? It implies that there should dedicated support and staffing to assist such locality-based error avoidance, in addition to and separate from risk management efforts, not least of which being those fire hazard maps.