**Evolution or Revolution Need in U.S. Emergency Management: Evolutional
Change**

**David McEntire, Ph.D.**

**8^th^ Annual Emergency Management Higher Education Conference**

**National Emergency Training Center**

**Emmitsburg, Maryland**

**June 7-9, 2005**

Good morning, it's great to be with you today.

When Wayne asked me to speak on this subject I was a little bit
hesitant. My own work actually pushes for, in many ways, a revolution in
Emergency Management. Specifically, my research attempts to promote
holistic, inter-disciplinary and proactive approaches in the field, so I
certainly don't want to be considered anti-progress. Also, I am a little
bit hesitant to speak because we've had some excellent panels today.
And, of course, Dr. Sylves is very articulate and knowledgeable, and so
it is difficult to say anything that would add significantly to our
discussion, but I'll give my best shot.

What I would like to do is answer a few questions today. Are disasters
on the rise? Can a paradigm shift occur? And can we reach all of our
goals and overcome all of the barriers to change?

First of all, I think that it is important to recognize that disasters
are indeed on the rise. This has been noted by scholars such as Cuny,
Burton et. al., Quarantelli, Mileti and many others. Disasters are more
costly, more deadly, and more disruptive than in the past.

There is some disagreement about hazards however. Are hazards
increasing? Are they remaining constant in number? Some might argue that
certain hazards are more active than they were in the past (for example,
there have been more hurricanes in recent years than there were five or
ten years ago). Some people would say that we're having more episodes of
flooding as we urbanize because we use concrete and cement and paved
roads and parking lots that create more flooding episodes. Others might
assert that were presented with additional hazards such as SARS, West
Nile, hoof and mouth disease, computer related disasters and of course
9/11.

One area where there is agreement concerns our vulnerability to
disasters. The rise in vulnerability is due to our industrialization and
urbanization. Our population is getting older and the elderly may be
less able to care for themselves in disasters. Also, we know poverty is
an issue and that is certainly related to disasters. Of course, we don't
always plan our communities adequately to prevent disasters or prepare
sufficiently to deal with them when they occur. So, I think that, yes,
we are having more disasters. They are becoming worse and evidence
suggests that we are loosing a billion dollars a week on these events.

There seems to be a couple of different perspectives on what this means
for the future, though, and we heard about this the other day when Dr.
Blanchard was talking. He quoted Neal Britton who said that there are
two approaches: we can park the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff or
put a fence up to prevent further falls. I would argue that it is not
either/or - you actually need both. Now, we could argue the balance -
trying to find the right mix of ambulances verses fences - but I think
it is safe to say that we need both approaches.

So there are two schools. One asserts that we need to alter our culture,
protect the environment and improve construction. Non-structural
mitigation approaches will be needed and urban planning will be
necessary. And then there is the second approach that says we need to
adapt our reactive efforts of the past by including proactive measures
for the future.

Both perspectives might include a paradigm shift of some sort. We might
need more land, or better land use planning. We need to build our
structures with new materials and in new ways so that they can withstand
the forces of nature. We need to make sure that we're not subsidizing
risks. If someone chooses to live in a dangerous area or a more
hazardous prone area, then that person should bear the cost of settling
in that location.

Both views assert that we need more technological advances and use GIS
or remote sensing to help us plot hazardous and plan more effectively.
They assert that we need more preparedness -- we need to develop
capabilities. It's not enough to write a plan and assume you are
prepared -- that does not work. We need to develop capabilities to
implement that plan, we need more networking and collaboration. We need
partnerships, and we need to work together. We need educate politicians
and citizens about disasters. I think we should also require students to
take a class on disasters and what we do about them while they are going
through their elementary, middle school, or high school education. I
think that should be a requirement.

We need to promote personal responsibility. We need to protect the
environment. Research illustrates that disasters are exacerbated when
there is environmental degradation. We need to be concerned for those
who are more vulnerable. We need to make sure that people have access to
insurance and they rely on it. We need to spend more on mitigation.
Right now we are pumping money into disaster responses but not
necessarily to prevent them. I think this means that that we need to
focus on vulnerability instead of hazards. We can't really control
hazards, but we can control our vulnerability to the hazards and I think
that is very important conceptual shift.

I think that most people agree on these principles. Where there is
disagreement, perhaps, is on epistemological issues - looking at our
assumptions and values - and this that I want to talk about next.

As you will note in my presentation, some scholars implicitly - maybe
not explicitly - but implicitly imply that we may not need to worry
about preparedness and response in the future. Let me give you some
quotes from other people - not from me - who seem to make this argument.

First, sustainable development. I have written a few articles on
sustainable development and I think that I understand its history, I
think I understand what it means, and I also agree with many of the
recommendations that it provides. In some ways, I am a little bit
concerned that this perspective may not be as holistic as is currently
claimed, however, so I would like to bring that to light today.

To start off, I think that we would all agree with the recommendation
from *Disasters by Design*. I think that this is the most important book
in the field - if you are an emergency manager I recommend that you get
this on-line or that you purchase a copy. We currently use this in my
Capstone in Emergency Management class and it really gives a lot of
outstanding recommendations for the future of emergency management.
However, well-known scholars have questioned if sustainability relates
to safety and the unique characteristics of disasters themselves when
they occur. Does sustainable development help us when we are in the
emergency phase of disaster? Mitchell says no. Burke also asserts that
sustainable development has trouble relating to certain phases -
preparedness and response in particular.

Is this true? We might as ourselves, "Does sustainable development help
with the following functions:" response planning, disaster exercises,
grant management and budgeting, warning, damage assessment and other
functions immediately before a disaster or after a disaster. If there is
no clear relation, our policy of sustainable development might exclude
these important functions.

If we struggle answering the aforementioned question, we might also ask
"What recommendations does sustainable development have for the
following practitioners?" Emergency planners, grant managers,
meteorologists, coroners, ham radio operators, EMTs, and CERT teams.
There's a vague relationship between these actors and the sustainable
development concept, and thus we might question if there services are
needed in the future. We seem to be given the impression that we don't
need to give attention to certain phases and these actors in emergency
management. I ask "Could the implications of this hurt the theory and
practice of emergency management in the future?"

Mitchell says that you can't just look at mitigation issues; you also
have to have a perspective that will help us with preparedness and
response operations. Berke believes that our decisions about what to do
about disasters could be problematic if we rely on sustainable
development as a policy guide for the future. Aguirre has written an
article on sustainable development and it is in many ways related to my
own work on this subject. He and I both acknowledge that there are
strengths and that there are weaknesses as well. But he questions if we
should base our future paradigm on sustainable development alone. Maybe
we can rely on a paradigm for mitigation which is based on sustainable
development. But, for overarching, holistic approach to emergency
management sustainable development will not work.

He is not alone. Others like Dr. Wisner and his colleagues in *At Risk*
agree with Aguirre but they also say that sustainable development is a
slippery concept. So, I would ask that we be careful about our
epistemological assumptions as we develop theory for practitioners for
the future of emergency management.

We'll definitely need more mitigation in the future, but I want to
reiterate that we can't ignore disaster when they occur, response
operations, preparedness measures and the actors that perform them.

If you look at the research literature over the past several decades,
what we see is numerable barriers that we have to overcome to be able to
start reducing disasters. As has been emphasized in the prior panel, we
will have more and worst disasters in the future. This not only implies
the need for prevention measures but it also implies the importance of
measures for preparedness. In addition to that, we are going to be
dealing with terrorism, and terrorism might require more difficult or
challenging responses. For example, how can we effectively inoculate
people after a bioterrorism attack? I am not sure that we have those
capabilities yet even thought we are trying to develop them currently.

Also people seem accept risk; they live in dangerous areas. They live
near resources and jobs and beautiful beaches. So, in some ways we can
never eliminate risks and, of course, there are no hazard free areas. If
one moves away from Florida, California or Texas, they are still going
to be faced with a hazard of some sort.

Even our best efforts fail at times: the Titanic was regarded as being
unsinkable and it sank. People died because there were no life boats to
rescue them as the ship was going down. There's another example from
Florida. Some of the buildings that were regarded to be the safest - the
Emergency Operations Centers - actually collapsed in 2004 and were
damaged by hurricane force winds. Now perhaps they were not built with
the latest codes, but it shows that sometimes our efforts just are not
enough.

In addition, it will take time to reverse the trends that are before us.
If it takes years or decades or centuries to create risk, it might take
a similar amount of time to undo or reverse it.

We also have limited control and knowledge over hazards and disasters. I
have a few quotes from Lovins and Price: "The impact of human
fallibility and the malice on hazardous and highly engineered systems is
not at root in engineering problem, but a people problem. It arises
because the world is peopled by human beings rather than angels or
robots. Fallibility problems will become more prominent as vulnerable
systems proliferate, salesmen outrun engineers, investment conquers
caution, routine doles commitment, boredom replaces novelty, and less
skilled technicians take over in countries with little technical
infrastructure and tradition." They go on: "The sheer complexity of many
technical systems can defeat efforts to predict their failure modes. The
sequence of human and mechanical events leading to the two most serious
power reactor failures in the U.S. (at Browns Ferry and Three Mile
Island) were excluded from fault tree analysis in the most comprehensive
study of a reactor safety ever under taken."\
As long as we are not omniscient or omnipotent, we will have future
disasters.

Also, what is well known is that people are apathetic about disasters.
You can ask any emergency manager what the barrier is and they will say
people just don't care. Disasters are low probability events and people
are not willing to spend money on disasters and that is unfortunate. We
also have competing priorities. We're trying to build schools, to repair
roads, to fight crime and we may not be able to do everything we want in
each one of those areas.

We also have some dilemmas: do we focus on floods that are very probable
or terrorism which is not probable but may have some high consequences?
We can pay for boarder control or we can pay for land acquisition to
reduce natural disasters or any mix in-between. But, we will have some
trade offs.

I recommend an article to you by Dr. Sylves which was in the *Journal of
Emergency Management*. He compares Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian modes of
decision making or policy making. Do we listen to policy experts or do
we heed citizens? As long as we live in a democracy, we will have some
disagreement and that will have a bearing on disasters.

One last thing: there is an irony associated with sustainable
development. I think in many ways it will reduce different types of
disasters, but in some ways it could even create them. And, I think that
we need to acknowledge this or at least consider it. For example, the
recent fires in southern California were exacerbated, at least in part,
to a hesitancy to cut back some of the underbrush and dying trees in
that area because of environmental concerns. Thus, some policies that
are intended prevent disasters may actually and ironically create them.
We definitely have a challenge ahead of us.

So where does that leave us? Quarentelli said "A risk free society is a
chimerical dream; the notion that disaster occasions can be completely
eliminated is not born out by history." We will always need to prepare
and respond, and rely on the actors that perform the functions within
those phases. And, if you look at some of the research and consensus
among some of the scholars and practitioners today, you find this stated
in many ways. There was a disasters roundtable in Washington, DC, in
2003, and all of the experts there agreed that we need more mitigation,
but they also note that we need to improve our preparedness and response
measures and recover activities as well.

In conclusion, what I would like to reiterate is that we do need to be
more proactive. We need to emphasize mitigation, but we also will need
at least some degree of preparedness to respond and recover effectively.
Let me quote Steve Sharro, who I think started our conference earlier
yesterday: "Its not an either/or process." We are going to have to do
everything in emergency management in terms of mitigation, preparedness,
response and recovery. Finding the right balance - I think that is the
major challenge. So, I would argue we need more holistic policy. We must
do more, but we can't do everything. Nevertheless, we must push for
change anyway. Thank you for your attention. Now I will address any
questions that you might have.