The readiness road ahead

When experts from various emergency disciplines envision America's path to stronger domestic preparedness, they tend to see the same needs: better leadership, training and communication.

The emergency response to Hurricane Katrina and the disastrous flooding of New Orleans that followed may one day be seen as a watershed event for disaster preparedness. The shortcomings stemmed not so much from equipment failures as from failures of leadership and management. As such, they reinforced the idea that emergency management and response are very much "people" businesses.

In this article, some of the nation's top emergency management and emergency response professionals and consultants look ahead 10 years to suggest what emergency preparedness is likely to look like — and should look like — in the United States. Overall, they call not for better technology, but for better management and for better coordination and cooperation between agencies and across levels of government.

They largely agree that if emergency preparedness and disaster response in 2016 are to look any different than they do today, issues related to leadership, training, and roles and responsibilities must be addressed and somehow resolved.

Measuring outcomes
Few disasters can be prevented; think of how your agency might stop an earthquake, tornado or hurricane, or even a terrorist attack, from occurring. So in measuring how effective an emergency response is, the test should not be whether the disaster itself was prevented, says Craig Fugate, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. Instead, the measure should be to what extent the disaster's outcome was changed. Were there fewer deaths? Was there less suffering? How long after the disaster did the local tax base recover?

"We spend all this money for systems, but can we implement them and can we have a better outcome?" Fugate asks. "I get concerned when we build systems solely because federal money is available."

In the coming years, disaster managers will need to question why they're buying a piece of equipment, he says, and decide whether it's something the community really needs to protect itself.
"It's the inherent responsibility of elected officials to identify threats, capabilities and also weaknesses," he says. After Sept. 11, thinking that everything was a potential target, leaders at all levels of government responded by spending money on equipment.

"Small towns think they need a bomb squad," Fugate says. "I'm not so sure all of America needs funding." Instead, sharing resources across multiple jurisdictions may be a better way to provide adequately trained and equipped specialized response teams.

One need over the next 10 years, Fugate says, will be for the emergency response community to attract, train and retain leaders who are skilled in emergency management and can guide coordinated and integrated local, regional, state and federal response plans.

Disaster ownership
Gerry Hoetmer, executive director of the Public Entity Risk Institute in Alexandria, Va., agrees that a key issue shaping emergency management in 2016 will be people. In particular, an issue that emerged from the confusion of Hurricane Katrina is disaster ownership.

"Who is going to own this thing: the mayor, the county, the state or the feds?" Hoetmer asks. One barrier to deciding ownership is the stovepipe mentality that for years has kept many first responder agencies from working together and communicating adequately.

"If we can get city managers and mayors to understand what their role is, what they are supposed to do, and to coordinate between governments, we will have an effective response" in 10 years. The United States is certain to have more disasters between now and 2016, he says, and places where enough training has been offered and where officials understand the practice of emergency management, "and not just police and fire response," will be more likely to cope successfully with almost any disaster. It comes down to communication and training.

By 2016, Hoetmer expects colleges and universities to train public administrators to better understand local emergency response functions. He estimates that as much as 70% of a typical municipality's tax dollars go to pay for police and fire operations. But when it comes to counting the number of professional city managers who've taken courses related to fire and police activities, he says probably fewer than 1% have.

"Department of Homeland Security money goes for suits, equipment and robots, everything but the leadership factor," Hoetmer says, even though during a disaster, leadership is the factor that will "make or break you."

One reason the Federal Emergency Management Agency successfully dealt with four hurricanes in Florida in 2004, yet stumbled with Hurricane Katrina, may be that emergency management had a stronger foundation in Florida, Hoetmer suggests.

"FEMA will fail every time if the foundation sucks," he says, noting that FEMA builds on the capabilities and leadership of local government. "You need to train local responders and state emergency managers first."

That's not to discount the role the federal government plays in shaping local disaster management priorities. James M. Mullen, director of the Emergency Management Division of the Washington State Military Department, says that on Sept. 11 his response as then-director of emergency management for Seattle was to activate the city's emergency operations center, protect religious sites, check potentially vulnerable infrastructure, communicate with state officials and the public on the city's actions, and stay in contact with FEMA officials. "I think we get an 'A' in how we reacted to an event 3,000 miles away," he says.

Within months, however, efforts were under way at the federal level to "turn everything upside down."

"FEMA choked," Mullen says. The Department of Justice soon became involved at the local level and tried to "fix a system that wasn't broken." Then inadequate analysis took place to assess the need for establishing the Department of Homeland Security, he says.

Effective emergency management in 2016 will see a return to state agencies supporting local response and recovery efforts, he says. Federal assistance agencies, when they are needed, will be invited as "guests" of the affected state to support emergency response efforts already under way.

"There is a huge concern that we'll be playing defense against the feds" in a disaster, Mullen says. "The notion that the president needs to take over a disaster is dangerous. It's more important to have a governor and mayor negotiate where resources should go. The feds need to support, not drain the effort. That's something that needs to sink in. It's not about DHS, it's about helping people."

Defining "prepared"
For Irwin Redlener, m.d., associate dean for Public Health Advocacy and Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, a scenario for a high level of domestic preparedness in 2016 will include a clear understanding of federal responsibilities and those of state and local governments.

"We will have developed a well-understood definition of ‘prepared,'" he says, one that will include specific deliverables that each level of government will be responsible for, and a timeline for providing them. "We'll have a clear notion of where we'd like to be."

Achieving that will require changes to a number of structures that currently thwart efforts at greater coordination. One such obstacle, Redlener says, is the stovepipe nature of bureaucracies, which hampers agencies like the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services from being on the same page with local governments.

Equally harmful is the way Congress legislates and appropriates money for homeland security. Multiple congressional committees exercise oversight of preparedness issues, which sometimes means that committee turf issues trump preparedness, Redlener says. "If we continue to do business as usual, there is no way we are going to get close" to a world where coordination and cooperation can enhance preparedness.

An engineering view
Reason for optimism exists, however, and it comes from the cool rationality of a systems engineer. Gerold Yonas, vice president and principal scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and head of its Advanced Concepts Group, has been looking at the problem of domestic preparedness and terror since before the Sept. 11 attacks. He says that as recently as 100 years ago, the fear of fire was pervasive. People saw it as an unpredictable threat that could strike almost anywhere, anytime.

In today's parlance, the "war on fire" focused on reducing the risk and managing the threat. Specifically, building codes banned certain types of construction that could help spread a fire and specified other kinds of safeguards, such as fireproofing and emergency exits. Career and volunteer fire departments became commonplace across the country. And devices such as smoke detectors and sprinklers were installed to alert people of immediate danger and initiate basic firefighting.

Despite the safeguards, thousands of people die each year in fires, but the point, Yonas says, is that fire no longer leads to pervasive fear. "The public, psychologically, has learned to live with fire."
Over the next 10 years, he thinks, the United States will similarly learn how to adapt to and manage the risk of a terror attack. Attacks will likely occur and lives may well be lost, but techniques of risk management and systems engineering will help reduce anxiety levels.

Regional cooperation
Enhanced communications and a greater willingness to share resources will characterize the effective emergency response agency in 2016, says William Killen, president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs and chief of the Holston Army Ammunition Depot, Kings­port, Tenn.

"Instead of every community staff­ing a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or hazardous material team, we need to go into regional capabilities," he says. He points to the effectiveness of mutual aid agreements that have been set up in thousands of communities across the country. Multiple local agencies can help fund a single, high-quality specialized response unit that's then made available to participants. He also advocates regional training facilities as a way to enhance local partnerships and resource sharing.

Urban areas will likely be well prepared for emergency response in 2016, but Killen worries about rural communities. Around 70% of the nation's 1.1 million firefighters are volunteers, he says, creating issues related to training and the lack of local funding to provide adequate equipment. The story is a familiar one, Killen says: limited resources and expanding responsibilities and vulnerabilities.

A downside exists to accumulating equipment, however, because equipment has to be maintained and eventually wears out. Drugs stockpiled to protect against biological hazards lose their effectiveness.

"How do we sustain masks and suits when they wear out?" asks Mullen. He suggests that the country would be better off with a "steady-state funding stream" that allows for a sustainable flow of money for equipment. "What level of safety do we want to have?"

Asking, and answering, that question will require the sort of leadership that money simply can't buy.