Number range CHAPTERCHAPTER 1

# INTRODUCTION TO EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

This chapter provides an overview that describes the basic types of
hazards threatening the United States and provides definitions for some
basic terms such as hazards, emergencies, and disasters. The chapter
also provides a brief history of emergency management in the federal
government and a general description of the current emergency management
system---including the basic functions performed by local emergency
managers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the *all-hazards*
approach and its implications for local emergency management.

**Introduction**

There are many ways to describe emergency management and the importance
of the tasks emergency managers perform. Indeed, in some respects, it
hardly seems necessary to explain the need for a profession whose
purpose is saving lives and property in disasters. It is likely that,
while many people recognize their communities are exposed to
environmental threats requiring a systematic program of protection, only
a few appreciate the magnitude and diversity of the threats. One can
introduce the study of emergency management by noting losses from
disasters---in the United States and the rest of the world---have been
growing over the years and are likely to continue to grow (Berke, 1995;
Mileti, 1999; Noji, 1997b). Losses can be measured in a variety of
ways---with deaths, injuries, and property damage being the most common
indexes. The 1995 Kobe, Japan, earthquake killed more than 6000 people
and left another 30,000 injured. In the previous year, the Northridge,
California, earthquake resulted in approximately \$33 billion in
damages. These individual events are impressive enough, but the losses
are even more dramatic when accumulated over time. Between 1989 and
1999, the average natural disaster loss in the US was \$1 billion each
week (Mileti, 1999, p. 5). Furthermore, many costs must be absorbed by
victims---whether households, businesses, or government
agencies---because only about 17% of losses are insured. Spectacular as
they are, these past losses pale in comparison to potential future
losses. Major earthquakes in the greater Los Angeles area or in the
midwestern New Madrid Seismic Zone, which are only a matter of time,
could generate thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of injuries, and
tens of billions of dollars in economic losses.

Indeed, the daily news seems to suggest the world is plagued by an
increasing number and variety of types of disasters, an impression that
is certainly heightened by what seem to be frequent, very large scale
natural disasters---including earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanic
eruptions, and wildfires---all over the globe. When we add to these
events a wide range of severe storms, mudslides, lightning strikes,
tornadoes, and other hazard agents affecting smaller numbers of people,
one might conclude that natural disasters are increasing. Technological
activities also initiate disasters. Hazardous materials are transported
via road, rail, water, and air. When containment is breached,
casualties, property loss, and environmental damage can all occur. Some
technologies, such as nuclear power plants, pose seemingly exotic risks,
whereas more commonplace technological processes such as metal plating
operations use chemical agents that are very dangerous. Even the queen
of American technology, the space program, has experienced disaster
associated with system failures. Finally, we see terrorists operating on
US soil---made forever visible by the attacks on the World Trade Center
on September 11, 2001.

At times, it seems as if humankind is living out the script of a Greek
tragedy, with the natural environment exacting retribution for the
exploitation it has suffered and an unforgiving modern technology
inflicting a penalty commensurate with the benefits that it provides.
Though such a perspective might make fine fiction---disaster movies are
recurrent box office successes despite their many major scientific
errors---it does not accurately portray events from a scientific and
technological view. The natural environment is, of course, not "getting
its revenge". Geophysical, meteorological, and hydrologic processes are
unfolding as they have for millennia, beginning long before humans
occupied the earth and continuing to the present. Given the eons-long
perspective of the natural environment, it would be very difficult to
identify meaningful changes in event frequency for the short time period
in which scientific records are available on geological, meteorological,
and hydrological phenomena. Event frequency, from an emergency
management perspective, is not really the issue. It is certainly true
that, over the years, more people have been affected by natural
disasters and losses are becoming progressively greater. The significant
feature driving these observations, however, is the extent of human
encroachment into hazard prone areas. With increasing population density
and changing land use patterns, more people are *exposed* to natural
hazards and consequently our accumulated human and economic losses are
increasing. Much of this exposure is a matter of choice. Sometimes
people choose hazardous places, building houses on picturesque cliffs,
on mountain slopes, in floodplains, near beautiful volcanoes, or along
seismic faults. Sometimes people choose hazardous building materials
that fail under extreme environmental stresses---for example,
unreinforced masonry construction in seismically active areas. Some
exposure results from constrained choices; the cheap land or low rent in
flood plains often attracts the poor. The point is that one need not
precisely estimate event frequency to understand rising disaster losses
in the United States. As Mileti (1999) writes in *Disasters by Design*,
the increasing numbers of humans, our settlement patterns, the density
with which we pack together, and our choices of location for homes,
work, and recreation place more of us at risk and, when disasters occur,
exact an increasing toll.

The pattern observed among technological disasters is somewhat
different. Certainly more people are affected by technological threats
simply because there are more people, and we often make unfortunate
choices (as was the case with natural hazards) about our proximity to
known technological hazards. However, the nature of the threat from
technological sources also appears to be changing. The potential for
human loss from technological sources increases with the growth and
change of existing technologies and with the development of new
technologies. For example, risks are rising from the increasing quantity
and variety of hazardous materials used in industry, as well as from
energy technologies such as coal and nuclear power plants and liquefied
natural gas facilities. Such facilities and the processes they use pose
a variety of risks for both employees who work in the facilities and
those who live in nearby neighborhoods. Furthermore, as technologies
develop it is sometimes found that what was thought not to be hazardous
a decade ago does, in fact, have deleterious effects upon health,
safety, and the environment. Yet, unlike natural events, advancing
technology often produces an improved capability to detect, monitor,
control, and repair the release of hazardous materials into the
environment. Ultimately, as technologies grow, diversify, and become
increasingly integrated into human life, the associated risks also grow.

Although terrorism has a long history (Sinclair, 2003), it has been a
low priority that only recently become prominent on emergency managers'
lists of threats to their communities (Waugh, 2001). Recent events,
especially the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, have
made it obvious that the outcomes of at least some terrorist attacks can
be considered disasters. Although some consider terrorism to be a
hazard, this is not a very useful conceptualization. According to the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (1996a, p. PH2.11), the Federal
Bureau of Investigation defines terrorism as "the unlawful use of force
against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the
civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political
or social objectives". That is to say, terrorism is a strategy, not a
hazard agent. Most of the technological hazard agents (chemical,
radiological/nuclear, or explosive/flammable) that could threaten
American communities in terrorist attacks can also occur by means of
accidents. As Winslow (2001) notes, terrorists have typically used
explosive agents, sometimes used chemical agents, and have the potential
to use radiological or biological agents. Thus, although radiological
materials have not yet been used in terrorist attacks, emergency
managers should be prepared to respond to their deliberate or accidental
release. Similarly, concern has been expressed about terrorist attacks
using biological agents, but these can also occur naturally. Biological
hazards are normally the concern of public health agencies, but
emergency managers should be knowledgeable about them because terrorist
attacks involving these agents will require coordination between the two
types of agencies.

It remains to be seen precisely how terrorism will be fitted into the
lexicon of disaster research. Already, definitions of terrorism vary
between the academic community and emergency managers (Buck, 1998).
Nonetheless, emergency managers must address the consequences of
terrorist attacks using the same basic approaches that are used in other
emergencies and disasters. One major difference between most terrorist
attacks and many other types of disasters such as floods and hurricanes
is the uncertainty about the time, place, and magnitude of the event.
Advance detection is a prerequisite for forewarning, but experience to
date indicates detection accuracy is not high even for the timing of an
attack, let alone the place, magnitude, and type (chemical, biological,
radiological/nuclear, explosive/flammable) of agent involved. At the
present, emergency management efforts must focus on prompt detection
once an incident has occurred, along with preparedness for a timely
response and recovery. Even these strategies are complicated because it
is so difficult to anticipate the competence of the terrorists. For
example, the Aum Shinrikyo cult's attempt to disperse the nerve agent
sarin in the Tokyo subway during 1995 underscored the importance of
agent quality and diffusion effectiveness. Cult members carried bags of
the liquid form of the agent onto subway cars and cut the containers as
a means of initiating the release. Although Sarin is extremely lethal,
the attack resulted in only twelve deaths and approximately 1,046
patients being admitted to hospitals (Reader, 2000). If the Sarin had
been effectively aerosolized, the death and injury rates could have been
phenomenal. Ultimately, whether terrorism and its consequences are
increasing or not seems to be a matter of many factors that defy
meaningful measurement at this time.

Given the increasing toll from disasters arising from natural hazards,
technological accidents, and terrorist attacks using technological
agents, American society must decide whether the risks are "acceptable".
Moreover, given the limited amount of time and resources that can be
devoted to risk management, decisions must be made about which risks to
address (Lowrance, 1976). When individuals, organizations, or political
jurisdictions reach consensus that a given risk is unacceptable,
resources can be marshaled to reduce the risk to some level deemed more
acceptable. Such resources can be used to attempt to eliminate the
source of the danger, or, alternatively, change the way people relate to
the source of danger. For example, building dams or channeling streams
can eliminate the risk of seasonal floods (at least for a time).
Alternatively, people and dwellings can be relocated outside the
floodplain, or a warning and evacuation system could be devised to
provide population protection (but generally not property) in times of
acute flood threat. Emergency management is rooted in this process of
identifying unacceptable risks, assessing vulnerabilities, and devising
strategies for reducing unacceptable risks to more acceptable levels. Of
course, emergency managers cannot perform all of these activities by
themselves. However, as later chapters will show, they can act as
"policy entrepreneurs" that propose strategies and mobilize community
support for risk reduction.

In general terms, emergency management is "the discipline and profession
of applying science, technology, planning and management to deal with
extreme events that can injure or kill large numbers of people, do
extensive damage to property, and disrupt community life" (Drabek,
1991a, p. xvii). Thus, emergency managers identify, anticipate, and
respond to the risks of catastrophic events in order to reduce to more
acceptable levels the probability of their occurrence or the magnitude
and duration of their social impacts. In the United States, emergency
management traditionally has been conceptualized as the job (if not the
legal responsibility) of government---local, state and federal.
Particularly since the middle of the 20^th^ Century, private business
organizations have taken an increasingly active interest in emergency
management, especially as it relates to their own business continuity.
Certainly as the 21^st^ Century begins, emergency management is best
conceived as relying on alliances among all levels of government and the
broader private sector (including for-profit and nonprofit organizations
with a wide range of missions).

Many factors have contributed to the increasing salience of emergency
management in American society. One important factor lies in changes in
the principle of sovereign immunity at the state level in the last
quarter of the 20^th^ Century and the establishment of levels of tort
liability for local and state governments (Pine, 1991). Although some
levels of immunity persist, it is important that government liability
can be established under state and federal law, particularly in cases
where negligence (failure to plan where appropriate) can be contended
successfully. Another factor promoting the importance and visibility of
the emergency management is the professionalization of emergency
managers. A recognition of the need for specialized training and
development for emergency managers has led to the establishment of
professional associations, the use of training certifications (e.g.
technician certificates for hazardous materials and emergency medical
expertise, and general certificates in incident management systems), and
of professional credentialing processes such as the Certified Emergency
Manager program promoted by the International Association of Emergency
Managers. These developments have contributed to the growth of an
organized body of specialists who understand how to appraise and cope
with a range of environmental threats. Still a third factor is a growing
sensitivity to hazards on the part of the public-at-large that is driven
by media attention to periodic catastrophes associated with the forces
of nature and technology. Finally, private businesses have become
increasingly sensitive to the fact that disaster losses can have
significant negative consequences on business plans and performance,
sometimes forcing bankruptcy, closure, or the loss of significant market
share (Lindell & Perry, 1998). With such significant potential
consequences, vulnerability assessment and disaster preparedness have
become both imbedded in business planning and thriving businesses in
themselves. Collectively, these factors have generated a social
environment in which governments\' ethical and legal obligations to
protect citizens, and private sector interest in self-protection, have
attracted attention to emergency management.

**Fundamental Theories of Disaster**

Over the centuries, there have been four fundamental theories about
disasters. These four theories have conceived of disasters as:

-   Acts of fate/acts of God,

-   Acts of nature,

-   Joint effects of nature and society, and

-   Social constructions.

    *Acts of Fate/Acts of God*

    For millennia, disasters were considered to arise from impersonal
    and uncontrollable forces---either from unfortunate alignments of
    stars and planets or as acts of God that were beyond human
    understanding. Both forms of this theory viewed a disaster as
    predetermined and, thus, completely beyond the victim's control. A
    variation on this theory was that disasters were cosmic or divine
    retribution for human failings---personal disasters for personal
    failings and collective disasters for societal failings.

    *Acts of Nature*

    Over time, increased scientific knowledge led many people to
    substitute natural causes for supernatural ones. Thus, floods
    occurred because the large amount of rainfall from a severe storm
    exceeded the soil's capacity to absorb it. The rapid runoff exceeded
    the river basin's capacity, so the excess spilled over the river
    banks, flooded buildings, and drowned people and animals.
    Accordingly, the term *natural disaster* came to refer to "an
    outside attack upon social systems that 'broke down' in the face of
    such an assault from outside" (Quarantelli, 1998, p. 266). The
    resulting conception of *man against nature* has been especially
    potent as the driving force behind attempts to "tame" rivers by
    straightening their channels and building dams and levees.

    *Interactive Effects of Nature and Society*

    Still later, it was proposed that hazards arise from the interaction
    of a physical event system and a human use system. Thus, it takes
    *both* a hazardous physical event system *and* a vulnerable human
    use system to produce disasters. If either one is missing, disasters
    do not occur. According to Carr (1932, p. 211)

> Not every windstorm, earth-tremor, or rush of water is a catastrophe.
> \[S\]o long as the levees hold, there is no disaster. It is the
> collapse of the cultural protections that constitutes the disaster
> proper.

According to this view, human societies adapt to the prevailing
environmental conditions (e.g., temperature, wind speed, precipitation,
seismic activity) at a given location. Unfortunately, they fail to
anticipate the variation in those environmental conditions.
Consequently, their adaptation to normal conditions usually is
inadequate for extreme events---blizzards, heat waves, tornadoes,
hurricanes, and floods. This perspective is perhaps best illustrated by
earthquake damage and casualties. As earthquake engineers are fond of
saying, earthquakes don't kill people, collapsing buildings kill people.
According to this view, people can avoid disasters if they stay out of
seismically active locations or, if they do move there, they must build
structures that resist the extreme environmental events that will
eventually occur.

*Social Constructions*

Most recently, researchers have recognized that disasters are quite
systematic in the types of people they harm, as well as the types of
geographic locations and human use systems they strike. To the
*interactive effects* theory's concerns about hazard exposure at
specific locations and physical vulnerability of specific structures,
social construction theory calls attention to the social vulnerability
of specific population segments. To say that hazard vulnerability is
*socially constructed* does not mean people are vulnerable because they
think the wrong thoughts---as most people would now categorize the
belief that floods are caused by the alignment of the planets and stars.
Rather, socially vulnerable population segments emerge because our
psychological, demographic, economic, and political processes tend to
produce them. Of course these processes have produced many good things.
Many residents of the US, in particular, have good jobs, comfortable
lives, and we have enjoyed one of the most democratic governments in the
world. Nonetheless, all of these conditions have changed over
time---life now is much improved from what it was a century ago and
there are many ways in which it can be improved still further. Of
particular concern to emergency managers should be the many ways in
which our institutions can reduce the hazard vulnerability of those who
have the least psychological resilience, social support, political
power, and are the poorest economically.

*Theoretical Comparisons*

These theories have, in one sense, succeeded each other over time as
scholars have found later theories to provide a better account of the
data from their research. However, scientific acceptance is different
from popular acceptance. Each of the four theories is currently believed
by at least some members of society. Indeed, the most cynical version of
the *Acts of fate/acts of God* theory uses it to avoid responsibility
for actions that are substantially within human control. For example,
representatives of the coal company that built a dam across Buffalo
Creek West Virginia claimed the dam's collapse was an "Act of God"
because the dam was "incapable of holding the water God poured into it"
(Erikson, 1976, p. 19). This was clearly a feeble attempt to avoid
admitting the company negligently built a non-engineered dam from
unstable materials, thus risking the lives of downstream residents to
maintain company profits.

Each community throughout the world probably has at least some believers
in each theory. Because each theory has different implications for
environmental hazard management, the prevalence of each theory has
significant implications for policy at the local, state, national, and
international levels.

**Hazards, Emergencies, Disasters, and Catastrophes**

Hazards, emergencies, and disasters afflicted human societies much
longer than either the profession of emergency management or academic
disaster research has existed. Thus, many vernacular terms have arisen
that refer to the negative consequences of environmental
events---accident, emergency, crisis, disaster, catastrophe, tragedy,
and calamity, to name a few. Over the years, many of these terms have
become embedded in the American vocabulary, often introduced through the
mass media or literary usage. As such events have become the focus of
academic study and professional emergency management, it has also become
necessary to devise technical---as opposed to vernacular---meanings for
them to communicate a standardized meaning for each of these terms. For
the purposes of this introduction to emergency management, it is
important to distinguish the meaning of three terms: hazards, disasters,
and emergencies.

The environment humans occupy consists of natural and technological
components, each of which contains elements that pose a variety of risks
to the human occupants and their property. These risks include both
health and safety dangers for the occupants themselves and dangers to
the physical or material culture created by the occupants. The risks
arise from the intrusion of the human use system into natural and
technological processes. The term *hazard* captures the notion that, to
the extent that people co-exist with powerful natural and man-made
processes, there is a non-zero probability that the natural variation in
these processes will produce extreme events having very negative
consequences (Burton, Kates & White, 1993; Cutter, 2001). The human
danger posed by these hazards varies with the level of human intrusion
and the knowledge and technology associated with the hazard (Lindell &
Perry, 1992). Tsunami (seismic sea waves) hazard is nonexistent in Ames,
Iowa, because human occupancy at that location is so far from the runup
zones near the ocean shore, but tsunami hazard is very significant along
the Pacific coast---especially the Hawaiian islands. Hazards are
inherently probabilistic; they represent the potential for extreme
environmental events to occur. Thus, hurricane hazard refers to the
potential for hurricanes to affect a given location. Hurricane hazard
does not describe the condition when a hurricane strikes a coastal
community causing death, injury, and property destruction. Of course, to
achieve long-term survival, humans must adjust to or accommodate both
natural and man-made processes in some fashion. The classic definition
of hazard adjustment focuses upon the modification of human behavior
(broadly speaking, to include even settlement patterns) or the
modification of environmental features to enable people to live in a
given place (or with a given technology) under prevailing conditions
(Lindell & Perry, 2004).

The term *emergency* is commonly used in two slightly different but
closely related ways. The first usage of the term refers to an event
involving a minor consequences for a community---perhaps a few
casualties and a limited amount of property damage. In this sense,
emergencies are events that are frequently experienced, relatively well
understood, and can be managed successfully with local
resources---sometimes with the resources of a single local government
agency. Emergencies are the common occurrences we see uniformed
responders managing---car crashes, ruptured natural gas pipelines, house
fires, traumatic injuries, and cardiac crises. They are managed via
(usually government, but sometimes private) organizations with specially
trained, specially equipped personnel. One commonly associates
emergencies with fire departments, police departments, and emergency
medical services (EMS) organizations. These events are "routine" in the
sense that they are well understood and, thus, elicit standardized
response protocols and specialized equipment (Quarantelli, 1987).
Nonetheless, it is important to understand each emergency can present
unique elements; experts caution there is no such thing as a "routine"
house fire. The belief that each new fire will be like all the previous
ones has a high probability of producing firefighter deaths and injuries
(Brunacini, 2002).

The second usage of the term emergencies refers to the imminence of an
event rather than the severity of its consequences. In this context, an
emergency is a situation in which there is a higher than normal
probability of an extreme event occurring. For example, a September
hurricane approaching a coastal community creates an emergency because
the probability of casualties and damage is much greater than it was in
March before hurricane season began. The urgency of the situation
requires attention and, at some point, action to minimize the impacts if
the hurricane should strike. Unlike the previous usage of the term
emergency, the event has not occurred but the consequences are not
likely to be minor and routine methods of response are unlikely to be
effective if the event does occur.

The term *disaster* is reserved for the actual occurrence of events that
produce casualties and damage at a level exceeding a community's ability
to cope. As Table 1-1 indicates, a disaster involves a very specific
combination of event severity and time/probability. Unlike the uncertain
time of impact associated with a hazard (whether or not the impact would
exceed community resources), a disaster reflects the actuality of an
event whose consequences exceed a community's resources. Unlike imminent
emergencies, the consequences have occurred; unlike routine emergencies
having minor impacts, disasters involve severe consequences for the
community. By extension, a *catastrophe* is an event that exceeds the
resources of many local jurisdictions---in some cases crippling those
jurisdictions' emergency response capacity and disrupting the continuity
of other local government operations. Hurricane Katrina's destruction of
the local emergency response agencies and disruption of other local
government agencies in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama certainly
qualifies for this designation.

Prince's (1920) study of an explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia was the
first modern piece of disaster research, but it was twelve years later
that Carr (1932) made the first attempt at a formal definition of
disaster. Presently, disaster is commonly defined as a nonroutine event
in time and space, producing human, property, or environmental damage,
whose remediation requires the use of resources from outside the
directly affected community. This definition captures the two features
that are minimally (and traditionally) cited as features of disasters:
they are out of the ordinary events whose consequences are substantial
enough to require that extra-community resources be marshaled to respond
to and recover from the impact (Quarantelli, 1984; Perry, 1991; Tierney,
Lindell & Perry, 2001). There are many different definitions of disaster
present in the professional and academic literature, but most of them
include the dimensions listed in this definition. In addition, some of
the other definitions specify the mechanism that generates the event
such as acts of God, social injustice, acts of nature, aspects of social
organization, etc. As will be discussed later in this chapter, there are
important distinctions to be made among different types of disasters and
the ways in which emergency management strategies vary with the source
of the disaster (Drabek, 1997). Whether one believes God, nature, social
injustice, or purposeful encroachment produce disasters certainly
affects the attitude we express toward victims. The academic community,
in particular, is still debating the details of such distinctions and
consensus about the specific details of different meanings is still
developing (Quarantelli, 1998). However, in the profession of emergency
management, the focus is typically on the assumption that disasters are
caused by the overlap of human use systems with natural and
technological processes and the charge is to minimize the negative
consequences. At least on this applied level, emergency managers can
operate on a concise definition of disasters, while remaining cognizant
that the concept can be extended in a variety of ways and has myriad
dimensions.

**[Table 1-1]{.underline}**. Relationships Among Hazards, Emergencies,
Disasters, and Catastrophes.

+---------------+----------+-----------+------------+-----------------+
|               |          | Time/pr   |            |                 |
|               |          | obability |            |                 |
+---------------+----------+-----------+------------+-----------------+
|               |          | Uncertain | Imminent   | Occurred        |
+---------------+----------+-----------+------------+-----------------+
| Demand        | Less     | Hazard    | Emergency  | Emergency       |
| compared to   | than     |           |            |                 |
|               |          |           |            |                 |
| community     |          |           |            |                 |
| capacity      |          |           |            |                 |
+---------------+----------+-----------+------------+-----------------+
|               | Greater  | Hazard    | Emergency  | Disas           |
|               | than     |           |            | ter/catastrophe |
+---------------+----------+-----------+------------+-----------------+

**The Development and Tasks of the Emergency Management System**

Most hazard/disaster researchers and emergency managers would probably
agree that it presumes much to claim that an *integrated* emergency
management system exists in the United States. Certainly this is so if
by an integrated system one means a well-defined and clearly
differentiated structure of components with mutually agreed upon roles
interacting over time in a coordinated manner to achieve common goals
(see Katz & Kahn, 1978, for a discussion of the systems perspective on
organizations). However, there is a *loosely-coupled* collection of
organizations that perform relatively differentiated roles in planning
for, responding to, and recovering from disasters. Indeed, a basic
understanding of the emergency management system and the demands that
shape it has existed only since the late 1970s. Even this basic
conception of emergency management continues to change and the rudiments
of what may yet become an integrated system for managing emergencies
continues to evolve. Clearly, even after the intense efforts to enhance
the system after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, much of what currently exists remains both fragmented and
incomplete. In many respects, the old adage that "disasters are a local
problem" seems as true now as it was thirty years ago (Perry, 1979).
What is different today is the fact that there is a greater degree of
consensus regarding how to assess and respond to the risks of natural
and technological hazards. Concomitantly, there appears to be increasing
agreement regarding the goals and structures by which federal, state,
and local governments work with private organizations and the general
public to develop an integrated emergency management system.

By focusing upon an ideal emergency management system, the current state
of the art, imperfect as it may be, can be described and placed into
historical perspective. Since the primary aim here is to describe rather
than evaluate, the purpose of the following section is to provide a
picture of the organizations comprising the system as it has changed
over time. To some extent, the discussion will include *what might be*
with respect to an emergency management system as well as *what is*.
Consequently, instances will be noted in which organizational links are
tenuous at best and where functions assigned to agencies (particularly
at the federal level) are minimally fulfilled or in some cases
completely ignored. What follows, then, is an attempt to describe in a
very short space what is really a very complex and extensive
constellation of agencies, programs, and interrelationships. Although
the limited space available here requires compressing and simplifying
many complex issues, the next two sections will describe the history of
emergency management organizations, followed by a discussion of the
functions that comprise emergency management.

## A Brief History of Federal Emergency Management

Since the founding of the United States, the responsibility for and the
locus of emergency and disaster management has moved from one agency to
another within the federal government (and the same is true for many
state and local governments). Except for two pieces of legislation,
however, very little systematic work was done that resembles modern
emergency management until the 1930s. Drabek (1991b, p. 6) reports that
the first national disaster management effort was the 1803 Fire Disaster
Relief Act, which made funds available to help the city of Portsmouth
and the state of New Hampshire recover from extensive fires. The next
piece of legislation came 125 years later when the Lower Mississippi
Flood Control Act of 1928 was passed as a means of responding to the
lower Mississippi River flooding in 1927 (Platt, 1998, p.38). It is
important to note that both of these pieces of early legislation
*followed* a disaster and were aimed at supporting *recovery* because
this is a pattern that has been continued to the present day. An
emphasis on reconstruction after disaster has characterized emergency
response efforts at the federal level even in the 21^st^ Century.

Federal disaster management, if we characterize it as concerted attempts
to manage the negative consequences of natural forces, really began when
President Franklin Roosevelt created the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation in 1933 and authorized it to make loans for repairing public
buildings damaged by earthquakes (Drabek, 1991b). In addition, many New
Deal social programs provided services and various types of financial
aid to natural disaster victims. Aside from individual programs, the
National Emergency Council operated within the White House between 1933
and 1939, primarily to cope with the Great Depression, but also to
oversee natural disaster relief. The Flood Control Act of 1936
established the Army Corps of Engineers as an important agency in the
management of American waterways. In 1939, when the worst part of the
Great Depression had begun to subside, the National Emergency Council
was moved to the Executive Office of the President and renamed the
Office for Emergency Management. Natural disaster relief continued to be
centered in this agency, which functioned as a crisis management team
for national scale threats of various types.

The beginning of World War II demanded the full attention of the
Roosevelt administration in much the same way as the Depression had
previously. In addition to its responsibilities for natural hazards, the
Office for Emergency Management became the President's agency for
developing civil defense plans and addressing war-related emergencies on
the home front. Many programs devised by the Office for Emergency
Management were based in the Department of War, under the Office of
Civil Defense (directed by Fiorello La Guardia). This office was
abolished in 1945, leaving the Office for Emergency Management again as
the principal federal emergency agency (Yoshpe, 1981, p.72).

Following World War II, President Harry Truman initially resisted
pressures to establish another civil defense agency, believing that
civil defense should be the responsibility of the states (Perry, 1982).
An Office of Civil Defense Planning was created in 1948 under the
year-old Defense Department, and the Office for Emergency Management was
again left to concentrate on natural disasters and other domestic
emergencies. This separation of planning for civil defense versus
natural and domestic disasters continued for nearly two years, but has
reappeared over the decades with subsequent reorganizations of federal
efforts. After the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in the
summer of 1949, Truman relented and created the Federal Civil Defense
Administration within the Executive Office of the President as a
successor to the Office for Emergency Management. Responsibility for
federal assistance in the case of major natural disasters became the
responsibility of the Housing and Home Finance Administration.
Legislation quickly followed with the passage of the Federal Civil
Defense Act of 1950 and the Disaster Relief Act of 1950 (Blanchard,
1986, p. 2). It is noteworthy that this legislation continued to assign
responsibility for civil defense and disasters to the states and
attempted to spell out specific federal obligations. At the end of
President Truman's administration on January 16, 1953, Executive Order
10427 removed natural disaster relief responsibility from Housing and
Home Finance and added it to FCDA (Yoshpe, 1981, p.166).

This arrangement of functions and agencies persisted through both
Eisenhower administrations, though the primary agency name changed first
to the Office of Defense and Civilian Mobilization and then to the
Office of Civil Defense Mobilization. The Office of Civil Defense
Mobilization was the first emergency organization to be given
independent agency status (in 1958) rather than being under another
cabinet department or the White House. On the policy side, the Federal
Civil Defense Act was amended in 1958 to make civil defense a joint
responsibility of the federal government and state and local
governments. This amendment also provided for federal matching of state
and local government civil defense expenditures, which actually began to
be funded in 1961 under the administration of President John F. Kennedy.
Thus, the Kennedy era saw the first rapid expansion of civil defense
agencies at the state and local level. President Kennedy again separated
federal responsibility for domestic disasters and civil defense in 1961
when he created the Office of Emergency Planning (in the White House)
and the Office of Civil Defense (in the Defense Department). Kennedy's
successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, moved the OCD to the Department of the
Army in 1964, signaling a reduction in importance (and funding) for this
function. This general separation of functions was maintained until
1978, although the Office of Civil Defense became the Defense Civil
Preparedness Agency in 1972. Beginning with the creation of the Office
of Emergency Preparedness under the Executive Office of the President in
1968, programs dealing with natural and technological hazards began to
be reconstituted and parceled out among a variety of federal agencies.
For example, the Federal Insurance Administration was established in
1968 as part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In
1973, President Richard M. Nixon dismantled the Office of Emergency
Preparedness and assigned responsibility for post-disaster relief and
reconstruction to the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration in the
Department of Housing and Urban Development. General management and
oversight of federal programs was assigned to the Office of
Preparedness, which was moved to the General Services Administration
and, in 1975, became the Federal Preparedness Agency.

Throughout the 1970s, as new federal legislation or executive orders
mandated federal government concern with different aspects of natural
and man-made hazards, new programs were created within a variety of
federal offices and agencies. These were included in the Department of
Commerce's National Weather Service Community Preparedness Program
(1973) and the National Fire Prevention and Control Administration
(1974). Following the 1972 havoc wreaked by Hurricane Agnes, the
Disaster Relief Act of 1974 was passed granting individual and family
assistance to disaster victims (administered through the Federal
Disaster Assistance Administration). In the late 1970s, four major
programs were established within the Executive Office of the President:
Dam Safety Coordination, Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, Warning
and Emergency Broadcast System, and Consequences Management in
Terrorism. Other technological hazards programs also involved such
agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency, Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, and the Departments of Energy and Transportation.

This diffuse assignment of responsibilities for emergency management
programs to a diverse set of federal agencies persisted through the late
1970s and, as time passed, created a growing concern in the executive
branch and the Congress that federal programs for disaster management
were too fragmented. Similar concerns by state and local governments
became the focus of the National Governors' Association (NGA) Disaster
Project in the late 1970s. The project's staff traced many state and
local problems in emergency management back to federal administrative
arrangements. They argued that federal fragmentation hampered effective
preparedness planning and response, masked duplicate efforts, and made
national preparedness a very expensive enterprise. The Director of the
Federal Preparedness Agency, General Leslie W. Bray, acknowledged that
when the emergency preparedness function was taken out of the Executive
Office of the President and assigned sub-agency status, many people
perceived that the function had been downgraded to a lower priority, and
his job of coordinating became more complicated. The states argued that
their job of responding to disasters was hampered by being forced to
coordinate with so many federal agencies. In 1975, a study of these
issues sponsored by the Joint Committee on Defense Production (1976, p.
27) concluded:

> The civil preparedness system as it exists today is fraught with
> problems that seriously hamper its effectiveness even in peacetime
> disasters. . . It is a system where literally dozens of agencies,
> often with duplicate, overlapping, and even conflicting
> responsibilities, interact.

In addition to the administrative and structural difficulties, there was
also concern the scope of the functions performed as part of emergency
management was too narrow, too many resources were devoted to
post-disaster response and recovery, and too few resources devoted to
the disaster prevention. When the federal response to the nuclear power
plant accident at Three Mile Island was severely criticized, calls for
reorganization became very loud (Perry, 1982).

Responding to these concerns in 1978, President Jimmy Carter initiated a
process of reorganizing federal agencies charged with emergency
planning, response, and recovery. This reorganization resulted in the
creation, in 1979, of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA),
whose director reported directly to the President of the United States.
Far from being an entirely new organization, FEMA was a consolidation of
the major federal disaster agencies and programs. Most of FEMA's
administrative apparatus came from combining the three largest disaster
agencies: the Federal Preparedness Agency, Defense Civil Preparedness
Agency, and Federal Disaster Assistance Administration. Thirteen
separate hazard-relevant programs were moved to FEMA, including most of
the programs and offices created in the 1970s (Drabek, 1991b). These
moves gave FEMA responsibility for nearly all federal emergency programs
of any size, including civil defense, warning dissemination for severe
weather threats, hazard insurance, fire prevention and control, dam
safety coordination, emergency broadcast and warning system, earthquake
hazard reduction, terrorism, and technological hazards planning and
response. Where FEMA did not absorb a program in its entirety,
interagency agreements were developed giving FEMA coordinating
responsibility. These agreements included such agencies as the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Transportation
(DOT), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

At least on paper, the Executive Order made FEMA the focal point for all
federal efforts in emergency management. Although FEMA remained the
designated federal *lead agency* in most cases, there were 12 other
independent agencies with disaster responsibilities. The EPA is the
largest of these agencies, but others included the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission (FERC), the National Transportation Safety Board
(NTSB), NRC, Small Business Administration (SBA), and the Tennessee
Valley Authority (TVA). Because disaster related federal relief programs
were so scattered through the government, many small programs remained
in their home agencies. For example, the Emergency Hay and Grazing
program allows federal officials to authorize the harvesting of hay for
emergency feed from land assigned for conservation and environmental
uses under the Conservation Reserve Program. This program is operated in
the Farm Service Agency of the US Department of Agriculture. Ultimately,
some emergency or disaster related programs remained in thirteen cabinet
level departments, including Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education,
Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development,
Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation and Treasury. Certainly
the creation of FEMA moved federal emergency management to a much more
central position than it had ever been given previously, but it was not
possible to completely consolidate all federal programs and offices
within the new agency.

The FEMA Director is appointed by the President of the United States
and, until the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, was
part of the cabinet. The organization has a regional structure composed
of ten offices throughout the United States plus two larger area
offices. Although by far the most comprehensive effort, the
establishment of FEMA represented the third time that all federal
disaster efforts and functions were combined; the first was the National
Emergency Council (1933-1939), followed by the Office of Civil Defense
Mobilization (1958-1961). The early history of FEMA was dominated by
attempts to define its mission and organize its own bureaucracy. John
Macy, the agency's first director, was faced with organizational
consolidation as a most pressing task: converting thirty separate
nation-wide offices to 16 and eight Washington, D.C. offices to five
(Macy, 1980). Ultimately, creating a single bureaucracy (with a \$630
million budget) from thirteen entrenched organizations proved to be a
herculean task.

The efforts to obtain an optimal structure for FEMA continued over the
next two decades; later directors undertook major reorganizations of
headquarters and FEMA's mission, like its structure, continued to
evolve. The early years of FEMA saw much significant legislation and
activity. In 1979, the NGA Disaster Project published the first
statement of Comprehensive Emergency Management (CEM, the notion that
authorities should develop a capacity to manage all phases of all types
of disasters), and the concept was subsequently adopted by both the NGA
and FEMA. In 1980, the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950 was amended to
emphasize crisis relocation of population (evacuation of people from
cities to areas less likely to be Soviet nuclear targets), signaling a
fundamental change in US civil defense strategy. Also in 1980, the
Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act
(called the Superfund Law) was passed, precipitated by the 1978 dioxin
contamination of Love Canal, New York (Rubin, Renda-Tanali & Cumming,
2006---www.disaster-timeline.com). In 1983, FEMA adopted the concept of
Integrated Emergency Management System (IEMS) as part of the strategy
for achieving CEM (Blanchard, 1986; Drabek, 1985). The basic notion was
to identify generic emergency functions---applicable across a variety of
hazards---and develop modules to be used where and when appropriate. For
example, population evacuation is a useful protective technique in the
case of hurricanes, floods, nuclear power plant accidents, or a wartime
attack (Perry, 1985). Similar generic utility exists is developing
systems for population warning, interagency communication, victim
sheltering, and other functions. Thus, in the early 1980s, FEMA was
formed, shaped by organizational growing pains, and also shaped through
the adoption of new philosophies of emergency management. While FEMA's
basic charge of developing a strategy and capability to manage all
phases of all types of environmental hazards remained, the precise
definitions of hazards, the basic conception of emergency management,
and the organizational arrangements through which its mission should be
accomplished continued to evolve through the end of the 20^th^ Century.

The end of the 1980s saw passage of the Superfund Amendments and
Reauthorization Act (SARA Title III) in 1986 (Lindell & Perry, 2001) and
President Ronald Reagan's Presidential Policy Guidance (1987) that
became the last gasp of nuclear attack related civil defense programs in
the United States (Blanchard, 1986). Passage of the Robert Stafford
Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988 again boosted state
and local emergency management efforts. The Stafford Act established
federal cost sharing for planning and public assistance (family grants
and housing).

The 1990s opened with controversy for FEMA. In 1989, FEMA response to
Hurricane Hugo was criticized as inept---a charge repeated in 1992 when
Hurricane Andrew struck Florida. In 1993, flooding in the mid-western US
caused more than 15 billion dollars in damage and resulted in six states
receiving federal disaster declarations. President Clinton appointed
James Lee Witt Director of FEMA in 1993, marking the only time a
professional emergency manager held the post. Witt (1995) aggressively
increased the federal emergency management emphasis on hazard mitigation
and began a reorganization effort. Prior to this time, the federal
emphasis had been largely upon emergency response and, to a lesser
extent, short-term disaster recovery. Witt began the first real change
in federal strategy since emergency management efforts had begun. By the
close of the 1990s, FEMA's organization reflected its critical
functions. In 1997, there were seven directorates within FEMA:
Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery, the Federal Insurance
Administration, the United States Fire Administration, Information
Technology Services, and Operations Support (Witt, 1997). As the 21^st^
Century began, the overall emphasis of FEMA remained mitigation and both
comprehensive emergency management and integrated emergency management
systems remained concepts in force.

The most recent epoch in American emergency management began on
September 11, 2001, when the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon shocked Americans and challenged government disaster response
capabilities. The attack initiated a comprehensive rethinking of
"security", "emergencies", and the appropriate role of the federal
government. During October, 2001, President George W. Bush used
Executive Orders to create the Office of Homeland Security (appointing
Governor Tom Ridge as Director) and the Office of Combating Terrorism
(General Wayne Downing as Director). On October 29^th^, President Bush
issued Homeland Security Presidential Directive Number 1 (HSPD-1),
establishing the Homeland Security Council, chaired by the President. In
June of 2002, President Bush submitted his proposal to Congress to
establish a cabinet level Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which
was passed later that year.

Since the establishment of DHS, the department's mission has encompassed
three goals: preventing terrorist attacks within the United States,
reducing vulnerability to terrorism, and minimizing the damage and
recovering rapidly from terrorist attacks (Bush, 2002, p. 8). Although
not reflected in the mission statement, DHS would also retain the *all
hazards* responsibilities assigned to FEMA. As was the case in the
establishment of FEMA over two decades earlier, DHS incorporated a
variety of agencies and programs from many cabinet-level departments,
including Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human
Services, Interior, Justice, and Treasury. The US Secret Service reports
directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security, as does the Coast Guard.
The line agencies of DHS comprise four Directorates. The *Border and
Transportation Security Directorate* incorporated the Customs Service
from the Department of Treasury, Immigration and Naturalization Service
from the Department of Justice, Federal Protective Service, the
Transportation Security Agency from the Department of Transportation,
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center from the Department of Treasury,
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service from the Department of
Agriculture, and Office of Domestic Preparedness from the Department of
Justice. The *Emergency Preparedness and Response* *Directorate* was
built around FEMA and also included the Strategic National Stockpile and
National Disaster Medical System of the Department of Health and Human
Services, Nuclear Incident Response Team from the Department of Energy,
the Department of Justice's Domestic Emergency Support Teams, and the
FBI National Domestic Preparedness Office. The *Science and Technology
Directorate* incorporates the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and
Nuclear Countermeasures Programs and the Environmental Measurements
Laboratory from the Department of Energy, the National BW Defense
Analysis Center from the Department of Defense, and the Plum Island
Animal Disease Center from the Department of Agriculture. Finally, the
*Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate*
absorbed the Federal Computer Incident Response Center from the General
Services Administration, the National Communications System from the
Department of Defense, the National Infrastructure Protection center
from the FBI, and the Energy Security and Assurance Program from the
Department of Energy.

Since 2001, the President has issued additional HSPDs defining the
fundamental policies governing homeland security operations
(www.dhs.gov/dhspublic). Thirteen HSPDs were issued through mid-2006.
Recent documents have established the National Incident Management
System (HSPD-5), the Homeland Security Advisory System (HSPD-3), the
Terrorist Threat Integration Center (HSPD-6), and a common
identification standard for all federal employees (HSPD-12). Other
documents proposed strategies to combat weapons of mass destruction
(HSPD-4), protect critical infrastructure (HSPD-7) and the agriculture
and food system (HSPD-9), coordinate incident response (HSPD-8), and
enhance protection from biohazards (HSPD-10). In addition, these
documents have established policies for protecting international borders
from illegal immigration (HSPD-2), promoting terrorist-related screening
(HSPD-11), and securing maritime activities (HSPD-13).

These developments make it clear that the President and the Congress
consider homeland security to be much broader than emergency management.
Incorporation of FEMA into DHS's Emergency Preparedness and Response
Directorate seems to imply FEMA is responsible only for preparedness and
response (and perhaps disaster recovery if this is viewed as an
extension of the emergency response phase). Consistent with this line of
reasoning, one can interpret the mission of the Border and
Transportation Security Directorate and the Information Analysis and
Infrastructure Protection Directorate in terms of incident prevention.
This gives these directorates responsibilities analogous to what
emergency managers call hazard mitigation. Even so, the DHS organization
chart seems to indicate a significant loss in the priority given to
mitigation of natural and accidental technological hazards.

At the present, many questions remain unanswered regarding the new
department and the fate of the agencies and programs that it absorbed.
Of particular concern is FEMA's loss of high level access; there are now
two positions between the FEMA Director and the President where before
there were none. FEMA's poor performance during and after Hurricane
Katrina has led members of Congress to consider restoring its
independence. However, it may be too early to draw meaningful
conclusions about the degree to which DHS is accomplishing its mission
regarding natural hazards and technological accidents. As a point of
comparison, it took FEMA a decade after its establishment to become an
effective organization even though FEMA was never more than a small
fraction of the size of DHS.

**Characterizing Emergency Management Activities**

Before discussing the tasks that constitute emergency management, it is
important to briefly ground the discussion in the process of
accomplishing emergency management. There have been years of dialogue
regarding "who really does emergency management". Although the history
just reviewed focuses largely on federal efforts, it is both accurate
and appropriate to conceive of emergency management as a *local*
endeavor to influence events with *local* consequences. This is in
keeping with FEMA's practice of attempting to make US emergency
management a "bottom up" proposition. Of course, the job can be done
optimally only with intergovernmental communication and cooperation that
links local, state, and federal efforts. In some cases---for example,
biological threats---the full resources of the federal government are
needed to even begin the management process. Certainly in a major
incident, external support (particularly state and federal) of many
forms is made available to local jurisdictions. There is an inevitable
time lag, however; currently the *National Response Plan* alerts local
communities they must plan to operate without external help for
approximately 72 hours after disaster impact. In addition, when external
support does arrive, the response proceeds most efficiently and
effectively if there is a strong, locally devised structure in place
into which external resources can be integrated (Perry, 1985). Taking
these realities into account, the tasks of emergency management can be
discussed more effectively if there is a structure into which to fit the
discussion.

*The Local Emergency Management System*

Figure 1-1 describes the elements of a local emergency management system
with some of its intergovernmental connections. By reviewing the figure,
one can place in context some of the tasks and the tools available for
emergency management. This chart is not intended to capture all actors
and processes but, rather, to indicate the critical elements in the
emergency management system. Ultimately, of course, the processes and
tasks described here take place at every level of government.

The process of emergency management should be based on a careful
hazard/vulnerability analysis (HVA) that identifies the hazards to which
a community is exposed, estimates probabilities of event occurrence, and
projects the likely consequences for different geographic areas,
population segments, and economic sectors (Greenway, 1998; Ketchum &
Whittaker, 1982). It is important to emphasize that HVA is not a static
activity because hazards are not static. HVA is probably best
conceptualized as a process that periodically reassesses the hazard
environment so emergency managers can facilitate the challenging process
of deciding which hazards are significant enough to require active
management. This is a complex process that involves myriad
considerations and input from a variety of actors; more detailed
descriptions of this process are available in the work of Birkland
(1997) and Prater and Lindell (2000).

[**Figure 1-1.** The Local Emergency Management System.]{.underline}

Hazard management decisions are influenced by multiple considerations.
There are statutory and administrative mandates to manage certain
hazards. The available hazard data, derived from national sources such
as FEMA's *Multi-Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment* (Federal
Emergency Management Agency, 1997) and supplemented by local sources
such as Local Emergency Planning Committees (LEPCs) and State Emergency
Response Commissions (SERCs), are also critical components of the
decision process. In addition, decisions to manage hazards are
determined by state and federal resources, local resources (including
the jurisdiction's budget), and the local resource allocation
priorities.

Once a decision has been made to actively manage one or more hazards,
three processes are initiated concurrently. The first is a hazard
management planning process that examines mitigation and preparedness
strategies. That is, the community must consider whether it is possible
to eliminate a risk or reduce it through some emergency management
strategy. At the local level, these deliberations involve not just
emergency managers but also departments of land use planning, building
construction, engineering, public works, public health, and elected
officials because mitigation and preparedness actions require
significant commitments of resources to reduce community hazard
vulnerability. At the same time, the process of judging hazard impact
begins, using much of the same technical hazard data to create
strategies and acquire resources for response and recovery when a
disaster strikes. The local response usually centers on preparations for
the mobilization of local emergency services (fire department, EMS,
hazardous materials teams, police, transportation and public works
departments, and emergency managers) under an agreed upon incident
management system (Brunacini, 2001; Kramer & Bahme, 1992). Both response
and recovery activities are organized in conjunction with support from
external sources, particularly the state and federal government. The
purpose of this planning process is to institutionalize emergency
response as much as possible while looking at disaster recovery as
another path to sustainability or disaster resilience (in addition to
mitigation). The third process to be initiated is environmental
monitoring for the hazards to be managed. Typically, such monitoring is
coupled with a warning system whose activation initiates response
actions when disaster impact is imminent. The quality of the warning
system depends upon the state of technology associated with the hazards
to which the community is exposed and could provide days (in the case of
hurricanes or riverine flooding) or minutes (in the case of tornadoes)
of forewarning (Sorensen, 2000). The nature of the warning system is
also affected by jurisdictional mitigation, preparedness, and response
plans. In many cases, hazard monitoring is beyond the technical and
financial capability of most communities and assumed by federal agencies
and programs. In such cases---tsunamis, for example---the results of the
monitoring program are relayed to local jurisdictions. Furthermore,
information regarding the state of the warning system (its ability to
accurately forecast and detect hazards) is shared with hazard planning
systems as a means of informing longer term risk management plans.

The community planning process generates hazard management strategies
that incorporate knowledge about hazards derived from many sources,
including the scientific community and state and federal agencies. The
resulting hazard management strategies can be categorized as hazard
mitigation, disaster preparedness, emergency response, and disaster
recovery. As will be discussed in greater detail below, mitigation seeks
to control the hazard source, prevent the hazard agent from striking
developed areas, limiting development in hazard prone areas, or
strengthening structures against the hazard agent.

These community hazard management strategies must be individually
implemented by households and businesses, or collectively implemented by
government agencies acting on behalf of the entire community. The
individual strategies only reduce the vulnerability of a single
household or business. These generally involve simple measures to
mitigate hazards by elevating structures above expected flood heights,
developing household or business emergency response plans, and
purchasing hazard insurance. The collective strategies are generally
complex---and expensive---technological systems that protect entire
communities. Thus, they mitigate hazards through community protection
works such as dams and levees and prepare for hazard impacts through
measures such as installing warning systems and expanding highways to
facilitate rapid evacuation.

Collective hazard adjustments are relatively popular because they permit
continued development of hazard prone areas, yet do not impose any
constraints on individual households or businesses. In addition, their
cost is spread over the entire community and often buried in the overall
budget. Indeed, the cost is often unknowingly subsidized by taxpayers in
other communities. For this reason, these collective hazard adjustments
are often called "technological fixes". By contrast, individual hazard
adjustments strategies require changes in households' and businesses'
land use practices and building construction practices. Such changes
require one of three types of motivational tactics---incentives,
sanctions, or risk communication. Incentives provide *extrinsic rewards*
for compliance with community policies. That is, they offer positive
inducements that add to the inherent positive consequences of a hazard
adjustment or offset the inherent negative consequences of that hazard
adjustment. Incentives are used to provide immediate extrinsic rewards
when the inherent rewards are delayed or when people must incur a
short-term cost to obtain a long-term benefit. For example, incentives
are used to encourage people to buy flood insurance by subsidizing the
premiums. Sanctions provide *extrinsic punishments* for noncompliance
with community policies. That is, they offer negative inducements that
add to the inherent negative consequences of a hazard adjustment or
offset the inherent positive consequences of that hazard adjustment.
Sanctions are used to provide immediate extrinsic punishments when the
inherent punishments are delayed or when people incur a short-term
benefit that results in a long-term cost. For example, sanctions are
used to prevent developers from building in hazard prone areas or using
unsafe construction materials and methods. The establishment of
incentives and sanctions involves using the political process to adopt a
policy and the enforcement of incentives and sanctions requires an
effective implementation program (Lindell & Perry, 2004).

By contrast, risk communication seeks to change households' and
businesses' practices for land use, building construction, and contents
protection by pointing out the *intrinsic* consequences of their
behavior. That is, risk communication explains specifically what are the
personal risks associated with risk area occupancy and also the hazard
adjustments that can be taken to reduce hazard vulnerability.

With this overview, discussion can be turned to the four principal
functions or phases of emergency management: hazard mitigation,
emergency preparedness, emergency response, and disaster recovery. Much
of the development and systematization of this four-fold typology may be
traced to the efforts of the NGA's Emergency Management Project. As this
group grappled with what it means to manage emergencies, it generated
considerable discussion and some controversy within both the disaster
research and emergency management communities. Since being adopted by
FEMA, it is now widely accepted as an appropriate model for
understanding the activities of emergency management. This scheme
consolidates emergency activities into four discrete but interconnected
categories distinguished by their time of occurrence in relation to
disaster impact. Mitigation and preparedness activities are generally
seen as taking place before the impact of any given disaster, whereas
response and recovery activities are seen as post-impact measures.

*Hazard mitigation*

Hazard mitigation activities are directed toward eliminating the causes
of a disaster, reducing the likelihood of its occurrence, or limiting
the magnitude of its impacts if it does occur. Officially, FEMA defines
mitigation as "any action of a long-term, permanent nature that reduces
the actual or potential risk of loss of life or property from a
hazardous event" (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 1998a, p. 9).
This definition is somewhat ambiguous because it encompasses the
development of forecast and warning systems, evacuation route systems,
and other pre-impact actions that are designed to develop a capability
for active response to an imminent threat. Thus, Lindell and Perry
(2000) contended the defining characteristic of hazard mitigation was
that it provides passive protection at the time of disaster impact,
whereas emergency preparedness measures develop the capability to
conduct an active response at the time of disaster impact. Since 1995,
FEMA has emphasized mitigation as the most effective and cost-efficient
strategy for dealing with hazards. Indeed, a recent study by the
Multihazard Mitigation Council (2005) concluded investments in hazard
mitigation return four dollars in losses averted for every dollar
invested. The ways in which mitigation activities can reduce hazard
losses can best be understood in terms of a model proposed by Burton, et
al. (1993) that contends natural hazards arise from the interaction of
natural event systems and human use systems. Thus, the potential human
impact of an extreme natural event such as a flood, hurricane, or
earthquake can be altered by modifying either the natural event system,
or the human use system, or both. In the case of floods, for example,
the natural event system can be modified by dams or levees that confine
flood water. The human use system can be modified by land use practices
that limit development of the flood plain or building construction
practices that floodproof structures. Although the amount of control
that can be exercised over natural event systems is often limited,
technological hazards are inherently susceptible to such controls.
Chemical, biological, radiological/nuclear, and explosive/flammable
materials can all be produced, stored, and transported in ways that
avoid adverse effects to plant workers, local residents and the
public-at-large. However, this control can be lost, resulting in
releases to the air, or to surface or ground water. It is possible to
control the hazard agent by locating the system away from populated
areas; designing it with diverse and redundant components or by
operating it with smaller quantities of hazardous materials (known as
*hazmat*), lower temperatures and pressures, safer operations and
maintenance procedures, and more effective worker selection, training
and supervision). Alternatively, one can control the human use system by
preventing residential and commercial development---especially schools
and hospitals---near hazardous facilities and major hazmat
transportation routes. The choice of whether to mitigate technological
hazards by controlling the hazard agent or the human use system depends
upon political and economic decisions about the relative costs and
benefits of these two types of control. Specific questions include who
has control over the hazards, what degree of control is maintained, and
what incentives there are for the maintenance of control.

Attempts to mitigate natural hazards, or events over which there is
little human control, involve controlling human activities in ways that
minimize hazard exposure. Thus, land use practices restricting
residential construction in floodplains are important mitigation
measures against riverine floods. The Hazard Mitigation and Relocation
Act of 1993, for example, allows FEMA to purchase homes and businesses
in floodplains and remove these structures from harm's way. Although
moving entire communities involves considerable stress for all
concerned, an intense and systematic management process---characterized
especially by close coordination among federal, state, and local
agencies---can produce successful protection of large numbers of
citizens and break the repetitive cycle of "flood-rebuild-flood-rebuild"
that is so costly to the nation's taxpayers (Perry & Lindell, 1997b).
Likewise, building code requirements are used to restrict construction
to those designs that can better withstand the stresses of hurricane
force winds or earthquake shocks.

*Disaster Preparedness*

Disaster preparedness activities are undertaken to protect human lives
and property in conjunction with threats that cannot be controlled by
means of mitigation measures or from which only partial protection is
achieved. Thus, preparedness activities are based upon the premise that
disaster impact will occur and that plans, procedures, and response
resources must be established in advance. These are designed not only to
support a timely and effective emergency response to the threat of
imminent impact, but also to guide the process of disaster recovery. A
jurisdiction's disaster preparedness program needs to be defined in
terms of

-   What agencies will participate in preparedness and the process by
    which they will plan,

-   What emergency response and disaster recovery actions are feasible
    for that community,

-   How the emergency response and disaster recovery organizations will
    function and what resources they require, and

-   How disaster preparedness will be established and maintained.

Emergency managers can address the first of these questions---what
agencies and what will be the process for developing disaster
preparedness---by defining an emergency management organization. This
requires identifying the emergency management stakeholders in the
community and developing a collaborative structure within which they can
work effectively. It also requires ensuring an adequate statutory basis
for disaster preparedness and administrative support from senior elected
and appointed officials.

Emergency managers can address the second question---what are the
feasible response and recovery actions---by means of analyses conducted
to guide the development of major plan functions. These include, for
example, evacuation analyses to assess the population of the risk areas,
the number of vehicles that will be taken in evacuation, when people
will leave, and what is the capacity of the evacuation route system.

Emergency managers can address the third question---how will the
response and recovery organizations function---in the emergency
operations plan (EOP), the recovery operations plan (ROP), and their
implementing procedures. These documents define which agencies are
responsible for each of the functions that must be performed in the
emergency response and disaster recovery phases. Some of the generic
emergency response functions include emergency assessment, hazard
operations, population protection, and incident management (Lindell &
Perry, 1992, 1996b). While developing the plans and procedures,
emergency managers also need to identify the resources required to
implement them. Such resources include facilities (e.g., mobile command
posts and emergency operations centers---EOCs), trained personnel (e.g.,
police, fire, and EMS), equipment (e.g., detection systems such as river
gages and chemical sensors, siren systems, pagers, emergency vehicles,
and radios), materials and supplies (e.g., traffic barricades, chemical
detection kits, and self-contained breathing apparatus), and information
(e.g., chemical inventories in hazmat facilities, congregate care
facility locations and capacities, and local equipment inventories).

Emergency managers can also address the fourth question---how disaster
preparedness will be established and maintained---in EOP and ROP.
Sections of these plans should define the methods and schedule for plan
maintenance, training, drills, and exercises. Training should always be
conducted for emergency responders in fire, police, and EMS. In
addition, training is needed for personnel in special facilities such as
hospitals, nursing homes, and schools.

## Emergency Response

Emergency response activities are conducted during the time period that
begins with the detection of the event and ends with the stabilization
of the situation following impact. FEMA (1998b, p. 12) indicates the
goal of emergency response is "to save lives and property by positioning
emergency equipment and supplies; evacuating potential victims;
providing food, water, shelter and medical care to those in need; and
restoring critical public services". In many cases, hazard monitoring
systems ensure authorities are promptly alerted to disaster onset either
by means of systematic forecasts (e.g., hurricanes) or prompt detection
(e.g., flash floods detected by stream gages), so there is considerable
forewarning and consequently a long period of time to activate the
emergency response organization. In other cases, such as earthquakes,
pre-impact prediction is usually not available, but prompt assessment of
the impact area is feasible within a matter of minutes to hours and can
quickly direct emergency response resources to the most severely
affected areas.

Some of the more visible response activities undertaken to limit the
primary threat include securing the impact area, evacuating threatened
areas, conducting search and rescue for the injured, providing emergency
medical care, and sheltering evacuees and other victims. Operations
mounted to counter secondary threats include fighting urban fires after
earthquakes, identifying contaminated water supplies, or other public
health threats following flooding, identifying contaminated wildlife or
fish in connection with a toxic chemical spill, or preparing for
flooding following glacier melt during a volcanic eruption. During the
response stage, emergency managers must also continually assess damage
and coordinate the arrival of converging equipment and supplies so they
can be deployed promptly to those areas with the greatest need.

Emergency response activities are usually accomplished through the
efforts of diverse groups---some formally constituted, others
volunteer---coordinated through an EOC. Usually, local emergency
responders dominate the response period. These almost always include
police, firefighters, and EMS personnel, and often include public works
and transportation employees. Uncertainty and urgency---less prevalent
in mitigation, preparedness, and recovery---are important features of
the response period. In the world of disaster response, minutes of delay
can cost lives and property, so speed is typically essential. However,
speed of response must be balanced with good planning and intelligent
assessment to avoid actions that are impulsive and possibly
counterproductive. Finally, emergency response actions need to be
coordinated with disaster recovery. That is, life and property are
priorities, but response actions foreshadow recovery actions. For
example, damage assessments are later used to support requests for
Presidential Disaster Declarations and debris removal might be
concentrated on roadways that are essential for restoring
infrastructure. The emergency response phase ends when the situation is
stabilized, which means that the risk of loss of life and property has
returned to precrisis levels.

## Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery activities begin after disaster impact has been
stabilized and extends until the community has been returned to its
normal activities. In some cases, the recovery period may extend for a
long period of time. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (1995a, p.
XX) states "\[r\]ecovery refers to those non-emergency measures
following disaster whose purpose is to return all systems, both formal
and informal, to as normal as possible." The immediate objective of
recovery activities is to restore the physical infrastructure of the
community---water, sewer, electric power, fuel (e.g., natural gas),
telecommunication, and transportation---but the ultimate objective is to
return the community's quality of life to at least the same level as it
was before the disaster. Recovery has been defined in terms of
short-range (relief and rehabilitation) measures versus long-range
(reconstruction) measures. Relief and rehabilitation activities usually
include clearance of debris and restoration of access to the impact
area, reestablishment of economic (commercial and industrial)
activities, restoration of essential government or community services,
and provision of an interim system for caring for victims---especially
housing, clothing, and food. Reconstruction activities tend to be
dominated by the rebuilding of major structures---buildings, roads,
bridges, dams, and such---and by efforts to revitalize the area's
economic system. In some communities, leaders view the reconstruction
phase as an opportunity to institute plans for change that existed
before the disaster or to introduce mitigation measures into
reconstruction that would constitute an improvement upon the community's
pre-impact state. Such an approach to reconstruction has been documented
after the great Alaska earthquake of 1964 (Anderson, 1969a). After the
eruption of Mt. Usu on the northern island of Hokkaido, Japan, local
leaders convinced the central government to invest in a wide range of
civic improvements aimed at enhancing the local area's economic
viability as a tourist center (Perry & Hirose, 1982).

Finally, it should be noted that the bulk of the resources used in the
recovery phase (particularly on reconstruction) are derived from
extracommunity sources. In the United States, these sources include
private organizations and state governments, but for the most part they
come from the federal government. Furthermore, even after James Lee Witt
began FEMA's emphasis on hazard mitigation, most of the money and
resources for emergency management continued to be consumed in the
recovery phase.

## Evaluation of the Emergency Management System

The preceding discussion has examined the four principal functions of
the emergency management system---mitigation, preparedness, response,
and recovery. In summary, two points should be reiterated here. First,
although the distinctions among these four functions are fuzzy (i.e.,
the transition from one phase to the next is gradual rather than sharp),
they are distinctly time phased. Mitigation and preparedness measures
take place in advance of any specific disaster impact, whereas response
takes place during and recovery occurs after disaster impact. Therefore,
practical problems accompany the development of mitigation and
preparedness strategies because they must usually be accomplished during
periods of normal activity, when environmental threats are not imminent.
Historical evidence indicates that it has been difficult to mount
efforts to engage in these sorts of activities. Response and recovery
take place within the context of a disaster impact---clearly unusual
times---and benefit from the operation of an emergency social system as
well as from the high level of community cohesiveness that usually
emerges in the immediate aftermath (Lindell & Perry, 1992).

The second point is that, in the past, far more resources and emphasis
have been allocated to response and recovery activities than to
mitigation and preparedness. This is consistent with a cycle, well known
to disaster researchers and emergency management professionals, of
citizen and governmental interest in disasters. Immediately after
impact, the attention of both the public and community officials is
riveted upon the physical devastation and social disruption.
Considerable resources are made available for shelter, food, clothing,
and financial aid to victims, as well as debris clearance and the
physical restoration of critical facilities within the community.
However, public attention declines significantly as time passes. Because
considerable time is required to translate such concern into budget
allocations and coherent programs, many preparedness measures---and to
an even greater extent mitigation measures---have simply failed to be
implemented.

To a certain extent this differential emphasis has been a function of
the difficulty citizens and political officials have in maintaining a
high level of concern about disasters during times when they seem so
remote. To do so requires that both citizens and leaders dwell upon
negative events that may or may not occur sometime in the future---a
task that is almost universally regarded as unpleasant and thus elicits
procrastination. Perhaps equally important in the resource disparity,
however, are the limitations posed by the technical state of knowledge
regarding various hazards. The state of technology itself imposes limits
on the types of mitigation and preparedness activities that can be
undertaken. If the location of a potentially catastrophic event cannot
be defined in advance, the feasible set of mitigation actions is
severely limited. For example, tornado risk is essentially uniform
within each local jurisdiction. so land use regulation would achieve
little reduction in hazard vulnerability. Furthermore, in the absence of
a technology of detection and highly accurate impact predictions, many
preparedness measures are not feasible---such as evacuation from
unreinforced masonry (e.g., brick) buildings immediately before an
earthquake. Thus, in the past, it may have not been possible to devote
resources anywhere other than to response and recovery. In the future,
as more comprehensive forms of emergency management are implemented, the
emphasis must shift toward the development of mitigation and
preparedness measures within the limits of existing technology while
pursuing research and development designed to advance the state of that
technology.

**Visions of Emergency Management**

This overview of emergency management in the United States has included
a discussion of the kinds of organizations that operate within the
emergency management system, the different patterns of responsibility
and interaction among the components of that system, and the general
time phases of emergency management. The development of a perspective on
emergency management requires consideration of at least two additional
topics. The first of these deals with the evolution of prevailing
federal conceptions of how hazards are managed---especially the
underlying assumptions that define what goals are important and that
determine the creation and structure of emergency organizations. The
second topic concerns the way in which hazards are
conceptualized---whether one focuses upon the event itself or upon the
demands that events place upon social systems.

## Alternative Conceptions of Managing Hazards

As one might infer from the history of emergency management
organizations, there is a separation of emergency functions that has
emerged and persisted over the years. With only a few exceptions,
federal organizations charged with addressing wartime attacks have been
different from those charged with concerns about natural disasters. This
separation of functions has also been reflected in the research by
social scientists on human performance in the face of disasters.
Historically, this is one of the earliest and, in terms of research and
theory, one of the most fundamental distinctions in emergency management
and research. Hence civil defense issues have been isolated,
particularly since the advent of nuclear weapons. Although nuclear (or
other wartime) attack involved functions---warning, protective action,
emergency medical care, search and rescue, communications, and
sheltering---similar to those addressed in natural disasters, the two
were treated separately and usually under the auspices of different
agencies. Indeed, Drabek (1991b, p. 3) concluded "the two principal
policy streams that have shaped emergency management in the United
States \[are\] responses to natural disasters and civil defense
programs".

This separation of emergency management systems appears to have spawned
what has been called the philosophy of "dual use", a term that was first
used officially when President Nixon created the Defense Civil
Preparedness Agency in 1972 (Harris, 1975). At the federal level, this
meant funding priority was given to research and planning that would be
useful in coping with both natural disasters and nuclear attack. Perhaps
the most persistent application of the dual use philosophy was found in
the natural disaster research sponsored by the Defense Civil
Preparedness Agency in the l970s. As part of contract fulfillment,
researchers were required to include an appendix to reports describing
how their results applied to the nuclear attack setting. Although the
dual use philosophy implied basic comparability between natural and
technological disasters, this had little impact on the way either
emergency managers or researchers partitioned such events. Even under
dual use, the comparability issue was addressed largely after the fact
(in the case of research, after the data collection and analysis were
completed). Conceptions of emergency management practice and disaster
research continued to compartmentalize wartime threats and natural
disasters. Of course, the compartmentalizing was not limited to this
broad division; there was also a tendency to separate different types of
natural disasters. Yoshpe (1881, p. 32) indicates that legislation
sanctioned dual use by 1976: "\[It was\]...established as a matter of
national policy that resources acquired and maintained under the Federal
Civil Defense Act should be utilized to minimize the effects of natural
disasters when they occurred."

Beginning with the classic study of the Halifax explosion (Prince,
1920), social scientists interested in disaster response sporadically
studied events that were not products of the natural environment or
wartime attacks. Although few in number, a 1961 catalog of disaster
field studies compiled by the National Academy of Sciences listed 38
research studies on technological incidents (Disaster Research Group,
1961). By the mid-1960s, a third distinct body of research was
developing with respect to technological threats. These studies
generally reflected the body of research conducted in connection with
natural disasters and wartime attack. At the federal level, President
Nixon's creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 (with a
major emphasis on chemicals and chemical processes) solidified the
concept of technological hazards as distinctly different phenomena.

By the late 1960s, each type of hazard or disaster had begun to be
treated differently by policymakers, federal agencies, emergency
management practitioners, and researchers. The separations were not
analytic but largely reflected differences in the threat agent. Thus,
there were lines of research on hurricanes, tornadoes, floods,
explosions, mine collapses, wartime attacks, and so on. These divisions
were also reflected in public policy for dealing with disasters;
different organizations focused on different threats. An important
consequence of this approach was the concentration on the
distinctiveness of disaster agents and events. The prevailing idea was
that disaster agents differ qualitatively, rather than just
quantitatively, and that each of these hazards required its own unique
mode of understanding and management.

This orientation was supported by the loosely coupled collection of
federal agencies and programs that addressed emergencies through the
1960s and most of the 1970s. As public policy, difficulties began to
arise with "dual use" as a philosophy and an organizational strategy.
The difficulties became the basis for the beginning of a radical change
in the way disasters were conceptualized. In retrospect, at least three
forces guided the change in thinking. First, the persistence of "dual
use" as a principle for justifying the support of disaster research by
civil defense agencies pressed scientists to make explicit comparisons
among disaster events. Such justification was based upon two
rationales---generalizability and cost-effectiveness. The
generalizability principle held that, in the absence of real war,
natural disasters provided the next best approximation to study human
disaster response. The cost-effectiveness rationale assumed that, by
funding studies of one class of events, inferences could be made to
other types of events at relatively small incremental cost---loosely
described as "getting more knowledge for the research dollar". The
cost-effectiveness rationale was to ultimately play a significant role
in subsequent changes in emergency management philosophy. It was clear,
however, that "dual use" forced researchers to think about and conduct
cross-disaster applications of various emergency functions---emergency
assessment, hazard operations, population protection, and incident
management. Without a conscious intention of doing so, these comparisons
began to build an empirical body of evidence regarding dimensions along
which events normally thought to be quite distinct could be compared.

The second force that promoted changes in basic conceptions of emergency
management was the rise of social scientific subdisciplines or
specializations in disaster behavior. An important factor in this
development was the growth of the Disaster Research Center (DRC---which
was located first at The Ohio State University and later at the
University of Delaware) under Quarantelli and Dynes beginning in 1963.
This institution trained social scientists to study events caused by a
diverse set of natural and technological hazard agents and complying
with the dual use demands for comparisons with nuclear attack. These
researchers focused not on the differences among disaster agents, but
upon the *social management* of the consequences of disasters. They
linked these diverse studies using a theoretical framework that was
marked by the designation of a focal social system and discussions of
generic management issues, such as the problems of resource
mobilization, interactions of system components, and the
interrelationships of the focal system with external systems. An early
and important contribution of the DRC studies was to focus research and
management attention upon the demands a crisis imposes upon a social
system. These were conceptualized as *agent-generated* demands (i.e.,
tasks generated by a disaster as a function of impact---warning, search
and rescue, emergency medical care) and *response-generated* demands
(i.e., those tasks necessary to meet agent-generated
demands---communication, resource mobilization). By focusing upon a
disaster's demands and not on the physical characteristics of the
disaster agent itself, this line of research posed a significant
challenge to both the theoretical and operational perspectives that
differentiated events based on the agent involved. It is important to
point out that DRC did not ignore the effects of different types of
hazard agents; each agent was acknowledged to produce its own
distinctive pattern of demands. Instead, DRC's contribution lay in
establishing a concern with social management of events within a systems
perspective. This practice emphasized the problem of identifying and
responding to different demands growing out of the crisis and set the
stage for subsequent identification of generic or "common" management
functions across disasters.

The third force for change came well after DRC began its operation. This
was the NGA's emergency preparedness project. Primarily concerned with
public policy associated with emergency management, these analysts
focused first upon what they saw as the ineffective allocation of
emergency management responsibilities among the federal agencies
assigned to help states and localities cope with disasters. It was their
contention that the presence of a bureaucratized and compartmentalized
collection of federal disaster agencies made it difficult for lower
levels of government to obtain necessary aid for both planning and
recovery. Moreover, they emphasized the lack of cost effectiveness of
the diverse constellation of federal programs and agencies. Another
contribution of the NGA project was its perspective on disasters. As
members of state government who were sensitive to the problems
experienced by local governments, their view of disasters was less
compartmentalized than that of their federal counterparts. States and
localities had long been forced to plan for and respond to disasters
without the benefit of a bureaucracy that had as many specialized
agencies as that of the federal government. Among other reasons, their
revenues simply could not support much specialization. The same people
who were called upon to deal with floods also dealt with explosions,
hurricanes, hazmat incidents, and tornadoes. Over the years, state and
local emergency response personnel developed an approach based upon
managing all types of disasters without regard to the precipitating
agent. From a practical standpoint, their orientation meant that they
focused on each disaster's demands and sought to manage those, making
specific procedures apply to as many types of events as feasible. In one
sense, this produces an emphasis upon the idea of developing
organizational systems to perform generic functions. For example,
warning systems, emergency medical care systems, evacuation plans,
damage assessment procedures, communication systems, and search and
rescue plans may all be applicable to crises associated with floods,
hurricanes, nuclear power plant accidents, volcanic eruptions,
earthquakes, and others. Driven in part by economic need, the NGA
project became strong advocates for an "all hazards" approach to
emergency management---which they called comprehensive emergency
management---and their efforts drew intellectual strength from the
comparative research at the Disaster Research Center.

Operating together, these forces gave rise to Comprehensive Emergency
Management (CEM) as a basic conceptual approach to disasters and to
managing emergencies. In 1979, NGA issued a *Governor's Guide to
Comprehensive Emergency Management* (National Governors' Association,
1979) that provided an articulate statement of the philosophy and
practice of CEM. The approach was further legitimated through its
adoption and promotion by FEMA in 1981. In 1993, when the US Congress
repealed the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, a provision (Title VI)
was added to the Stafford Act requiring the federal government to adopt
the all-hazards approach inherent in CEM. In summary, CEM refers to the
development of a capacity for handling emergency tasks in all
phases---mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery---in
connection with all types of disaster agents by coordinating the efforts
and resources of a wide variety of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
and government agencies. CEM is distinguished from previous
conceptualizations---particularly dual use---by two important
characteristics. First, CEM emphasizes comprehensiveness with respect to
the performance of *all disaster relevant activities* by dictating a
concern for mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. The second
distinguishing feature of CEM is its concern with the management of *all
types of emergencies* whether technological, natural, or willful
(including state sponsored and terrorist attacks). This characteristic
is an outgrowth of the idea that an emergency may be seen as a
disruption of the normal operation of a social system. To the extent
possible, one would like to minimize the likelihood and magnitude of
system disruptions in the first place and minimize their duration by
creating the potential for quickly stabilizing the system and
subsequently restoring it to its normal activities following an
unpreventable disruption. In this context, the cause of the disruption
is less important than the nature and magnitude of its effects upon the
social system. The only reason to distinguish among disrupting agents
rests on the extent to which different agents impose distinctive demands
on the system. For example, hurricanes can be distinguished as events
that provide long periods of forewarning when compared with earthquakes.

In developing a framework for managing all phases of all types of
disasters, CEM can be seen as an attempt to integrate emergency
management by developing a body of techniques effective for managing the
responses to multiple disaster agents. CEM represents an extremely
significant departure from historical views of emergency management that
make sharp distinctions among hazard agents and claim (either explicitly
or implicitly) that a unique strategy must be developed for managing
each of them. Furthermore, aside from the intuitive appeal of a more
parsimonious theoretical approach, cost conscious officials at all
levels of government are attracted to the more efficient use of
resources promised by a comprehensive approach to emergency management
(Quarantelli, 1992).

Once state and local governments began to adopt some variant of CEM,
FEMA introduced the concept of Integrated Emergency Management Systems
(IEMS) in 1983. The initial goal of IEMS was to facilitate the
development of disaster management functions and (at the time it was
introduced) to increase congressional support for a larger civil defense
budget (Perry, 1985, p. 130). When pressed to distinguish IEMS from CEM,
the principal reply was: "CEM is the long term objective, IEMS is the
current implementation strategy" (Drabek, 1985, p. 85). It appears that
the meaning of IEMS on a practical level derives from the term
"integrated"---identifying the goal of addressing all hazards and
consolidating emergency actions into a single office or organization
within a jurisdiction. However, CEM remains the primary vision of
disaster management in the US.

## Classifying Hazard Agents

An emergency management vision that addresses all hazards must by
necessity focus upon the concept of generic functions while
acknowledging that special functions will be needed in the case of
hazard agents that present unique or singular challenges. CEM implies a
basic comparability across all types of disasters. Moving from emergency
management to the academic study of disasters, one implication of
comparability is that one should be able to distinguish hazard agents in
terms of a common set of characteristics. A typology of hazard agents is
a system for classifying them into categories within which the social
management demands are similar. On a practical level, implementing CEM
involves identifying generic emergency response functions and then
specifying circumstances (tied to the impact of different disaster
agents) under which they will need to be employed. If one could use such
functions as key characteristics of disasters, then one could begin to
develop meaningful taxonomies.

There have been few attempts to make systematic comparisons of human
response to different disaster agents. Indeed, there has been a tendency
among researchers to avoid examining relationships among different
disaster agents, partly on the assumption that each "type" of event was
simply unique. For example, the matter of comparing natural with
technological threats rarely appeared in the professional literature at
all until the 1970s. In part, this condition reflects the state of
disaster research. For many years disaster studies were very descriptive
in nature (Gillespie & Perry, 1976). Hence, attention often focused upon
the event itself---the hurricane or the earthquake---and upon
descriptions of specific consequences for disaster victims. Therefore,
the research literature provided illustrative accounts of earthquake
victims crushed under rubble, fire victims plucked from rooftops, and
hurricane victims drowned in the storm surge. In this context,
researchers argued that different agents have different characteristics
and impose different demands on the social system and as a result
probably must be explained using different theories. A typology is
actually a form of theory created through taxonomy or reasoning (Perry,
1989). Thus, human reactions to different disaster events were expected
to be different.

In one sense, it is entirely correct to consider each disaster agent, as
well as each impact of each agent, to be different. Floods present
obvious differences from earthquakes and, indeed, the eruption of the
Mt. St. Helens volcano on March 27, 1980, was very different from its
eruption on May 18, 1980. Such comments reflect an essentially
phenotypic classification system, focusing upon the surface or visible
properties of an event. Emergency managers and disaster researchers are
not so much interested in classifying disasters in these terms, however,
because their goals are associated primarily with the behavior of the
affected social system. It is human response to the natural environment,
technology, or other humans that produces the disasters of hurricanes,
tornadoes, hazmat releases, or wartime attacks. Thus, the goal is to
distinguish among social causes, reactions, and consequences, not
necessarily to distinguish hurricanes from chemical plants. There has
been an increased concern with the development of conceptual schemes for
explaining human behavior in disasters. This theoretical concern directs
one to identify characteristics of disasters that determine the nature
and types of agent-generated and response-generated demands imposed upon
stricken communities. This leads to the creation of a classification
system that characterizes disasters, not in phenotypic terms, but in
terms of features that will have an impact on the kinds of assessment,
preventive/corrective, protective, or management actions that might be
used in disaster response. To pursue such a goal, one might begin by
choosing a given function---population warning, for example---and
examine the ways in which performance of that activity varies across
disaster events as a function of differing *agent characteristics* such
as the amount of forewarning provided by detection and forecast systems.

There has been much discussion and only limited consensus among academic
disaster researchers regarding either definitions of disaster or
classification schemes for distinguishing among different types of
disasters. However, as Perry (1998) has pointed out, most definitions of
disaster contain many common elements---disagreements among definers
tend to lie in minor aspects of definition or in the logic that is used
to develop a definition. From the standpoint of practicing emergency
managers, such minor variations pose few operational difficulties. Most
events that are characterized as disasters, whether they arise from
natural forces, technology, or even deliberate attacks, fit most of the
academic definitions of the term. As defined by Fritz (1961, p. 652), a
disaster is any event:

> concentrated in time and space, in which a society or a relatively
> self-sufficient subdivision of society, undergoes severe danger and
> incurs such losses to its members and physical appurtenances that the
> social structure is disrupted and the fulfillment of all or some of
> the essential functions of the society is prevented.

From this classic definition (as well as from the definitions discussed
previously in this chapter) one can surmise that disasters occur at a
distinguishable time, are geographically circumscribed and that they
disrupt social activity. Barton has proposed a similar definition, but
chose to focus upon the social system itself, arguing that disasters
exist "when many members of a social system fail to receive expected
conditions of life from the system" (1969, p. 38). Both Fritz and Barton
agree that any event that produces a significant change in the pattern
of inputs and outputs for a given social system may be reasonably
characterized as a disaster. The important point to be derived from
these definitions is that events precipitated by a variety of hazard
agents---floods, chemical spills, volcanoes, nuclear power plant
accidents, terrorist attacks---all fit equally well into these
definitions as disasters. At this level of abstraction, there is no
compelling reason to differentiate among natural, technological, or
other types of hazard agents. Given the breadth of most definitions of
disasters, the *analytic problem* becomes one of determining the
characteristics by which to distinguish among the events that do satisfy
the definition. As noted earlier, such dimensions should not be
restricted to physical characteristics of the hazard agent and its
impact, but should also include attributes relevant to the effects of
the event upon the social system and its consequences for management.

There has been some discussion among researchers regarding the lines
along which natural disasters, technological accidents, and willful
attacks might be meaningfully distinguished. While there remains much
disagreement in the research community about *which* dimensions are
meaningful, it is possible to begin to identify dimensions from the
research literature. Much of this work can be traced to the staff of the
Disaster Research Center who attempted to draw parallels between natural
disaster response and possible response to nuclear attack (particularly
between 1963 and 1972; see Kreps, 1981). Barton (1969) developed a
scheme for identifying distinguishing features of disasters that
characterize the nature of social system stress. Barton's system defined
four basic dimensions---scope of impact, speed of onset, duration of
impact, and social preparedness of the threatened community. These
dimensions have been used by a number of researchers in developing
classification schemes (Lindell & Perry, 1992) and can be briefly
explained here. *Scope of impact* is usually defined as the absolute
geographic area (e.g., in square miles) affected by a disaster but, as
will be described in Chapter 5, it also can be defined in terms of the
affected percentage of a jurisdiction's area (geographic scope),
population (demographic scope), or economic production (economic scope).
Aside from sheer size, this dimension has implications for resource
mobilization within the affected social system and for the availability
of supporting resources that might be drawn from nearby communities or
higher levels of government. *Speed of onset* refers to the interval of
time between a physical event's first manifestation of environmental
cues until its impact on a social system. Speed of onset varies both by
the inherent nature of the hazard agent and the level of technological
sophistication of the detection system. For example, earthquakes have a
very rapid onset (there are often no detectable environmental cues
before the initial shock), whereas droughts have a very slow onset (some
take years to develop). In other cases, the technology to forecast
meteorological hazards such as hurricanes has developed considerably
over the course of the past 50 years so events, such as hurricanes, that
could at one time occur with little or no forewarning are now routinely
monitored and forecast days in advance. *Duration of impact* refers to
the time that elapses between initial onset and the point at which the
threat to life and property has been stabilized. This can be a few
minutes (short) in the case of a tornado, a few hours or days (moderate)
in the case of riverine floods, persistent for years in the case of
drought, or intermittent for years in the case of volcanoes. Finally,
*social preparedness* is a dimension that attempts to capture the
ability of the social system to anticipate the onset of an event,
control its impact, or cope with its negative consequences. Obviously,
this social preparedness dimension is precisely the objective of
emergency management.

Anderson (1969b) contributed another comparative dimension from his
research on the functioning of civil defense offices (now more commonly
called emergency management departments) during natural disasters and
attempted to extrapolate to the nuclear attack environment. In
developing his analysis, Anderson (1969b, p. 55) concluded that in spite
of obvious differences between nuclear threats and natural disasters:

> \[these differences\] can be visualized as primarily ones of degree.
> With the exception of the specific form of secondary threat, i.e.
> radiation, and the probability that a wider geographic area will be
> involved, a nuclear \[threat\] would not create essentially different
> problems for community response.

Anderson's analysis introduced the issue of secondary impacts of
disaster agents as an important defining feature. It should be
remembered that virtually all hazards, whether natural or technological,
accidentally or deliberately caused, entail some secondary impacts.
Indeed, the secondary threat can be more devastating than the initial
threat. Riverine floods tend to deposit debris and silt that persists
long after the water has receded. Earthquakes often produce urban fires,
and volcanic eruptions can melt glaciers or ignite forest fires.

By assembling lists of distinguishing characteristics such as those
discussed above, one can compare or classify an apparently widely
differing (in terms of superficial features) range of disaster events.
As an example of how such comparisons might work, Table 1-1 compares
three disaster agents---riverine floods, volcanic eruptions, and nuclear
power plant accidents---in terms of the five distinguishing
characteristics.

**Table 1-1. Classification of Selected Hazard Agents.**

+------------+------------------+---------------+---------------------+
| Hazard     | Riverine Flood   | Volcanic      | Nuclear Power Plant |
| Agent      |                  | Eruption      | Accident            |
| Char       |                  |               |                     |
| acteristic |                  |               |                     |
+------------+------------------+---------------+---------------------+
| Scope of   | Highly variable  | Highly        | Highly variable     |
| impact     | long, and narrow | variable      | broad area          |
|            |                  | broad area    |                     |
+------------+------------------+---------------+---------------------+
| Speed of   | Rapid: flash     | Rapid         | Variable            |
| onset      | flood            |               |                     |
|            |                  |               |                     |
|            | Slow: main stem  |               |                     |
|            | flood            |               |                     |
+------------+------------------+---------------+---------------------+
| Duration   | Short            | Long          | Long                |
| of impact  |                  |               |                     |
+------------+------------------+---------------+---------------------+
| Health     | Water inhalation | Blast, burns  | Ingestion,          |
| threat     |                  | ash           | inhalation, direct  |
|            |                  | inhalation    | radiation           |
+------------+------------------+---------------+---------------------+
| Property   | Destruction      | Destruction   | Contamination       |
| threat     |                  |               |                     |
+------------+------------------+---------------+---------------------+
| Secondary  | Public health    | Forest fires, | Secondary           |
| threats    | danger from      | glacial       | contamination       |
|            | water/sewer      | snowmelt      |                     |
|            | inundation       |               |                     |
+------------+------------------+---------------+---------------------+
| Pred       | High             | Poor          | Variable ability to |
| ictability |                  |               | predict releases    |
|            |                  |               | after accident      |
|            |                  |               | onset               |
+------------+------------------+---------------+---------------------+

It is interesting to note that, at this analytic level, volcanic
eruptions and nuclear power plant accidents are similarly classified.
Both threats involve variable scopes of impact that are potentially
widespread. Usually, a volcanic eruption's threats to human safety are
limited to within a few miles of the crater. Life threatening levels of
radiation exposure from a nuclear power plant accident is likely to be
confined to the plant site or a few miles downwind from it (US Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, 1978). Under special conditions, however, either
type of event might involve a considerably greater scope of impact. The
May 18, 1980, eruption of Mt. St. Helens volcano spread a heavy layer of
volcanic ash over a three state area and the Chernobyl nuclear power
plant accident spread radioactive material over an entire region. The
speed of onset for volcanic eruptions and nuclear power plant accidents
is likely to be rapid, although each of them has the potential for a
significant degree of forewarning prior to the onset of a major event.
These two events are also similar with respect to the duration of impact
of the primary threat to human safety. In both cases, a volcanic
eruption and a release of radioactive materials, the event could last
from hours to days. Persistence of secondary impacts could, in each
case, last for years, although the long-term health effects of volcanic
ash are less significant than radiation. To the extent that volcanic
eruptions continue in an eruptive sequence that lasts for years, the
duration of impact can be said to be long. A nuclear power plant
accident would be expected to be of moderate length although so few
actual accidents have occurred that the empirical data are extremely
limited. The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant,
which is more accurately labeled as an emergency than as a disaster,
involved a danger period that lasted for about six days. However, the
Chernobyl accident severely contaminated areas that are still
uninhabitable two decades later.

Both volcanic eruptions and nuclear power plant accidents generate
secondary threats. The sheer number of secondary threats associated with
volcanoes is quite large; ultimately they involve long-term threats to
public health, to the stability of man-made structures, and to plants
and animals in land and water ecosystems. The most probable secondary
threat of a nuclear power plant accident is associated with the effects
of residual radiation exposure arising from ground deposition and water
contamination by radioactive materials. In addition to the potential
exposure by way of external gamma radiation and inhalation of
radioactive materials, there is the threat of exposure by means of
ingestion of contaminated vegetation or animal products (meat or milk).

Finally, the state of technology is such that neither volcanic eruptions
nor nuclear power plant accidents can be forecast accurately far in
advance. There is in both cases, however, a technology for detecting and
monitoring events once they are in progress. In the case of some
volcanoes, once an eruptive sequence has begun either seismic or
geochemical cues can be used to make approximate forecasts of eruptive
events. With nuclear power plants, monitoring instruments are designed
to detect even minor aberrations early in order to facilitate the
implementation of corrective action before more serious difficulties
arise. Thus, although one might not be able to predict a power plant
accident, instruments are designed to detect problems in their early
stages before they can escalate to an atmospheric release of radioactive
material.

Riverine floods differ from the other two hazard agents primarily in
terms of two characteristics. First, floods are frequently predictable,
often days in advance. Second, speed of onset typically is gradual (by
definition requiring a minimum of six hours to reach a flood crest,
although more rapid onset can occur during flash floods in mountainous
areas). Another general point of distinction is the frequency with which
floods occur; they are the most common geophysical hazard in the United
States (Perry, Lindell & Greene, 1981). Thus, from the standpoint of
both emergency managers and the public, riverine floods are a familiar
threat. Moreover, the duration of the primary flood impact is much
shorter than a volcanic eruptive sequence or a nuclear power plant
accident. Secondary impacts of floods include both public health threats
and dangers to man-made structures, but in general the extent and
duration of the effects of their secondary threats are less than either
of the other two disaster agents. Finally, like a volcanic eruptive
sequence or a nuclear power plant accident, the scope of impact of
riverine floods is highly variable. Usually the scope of flood impacts
is narrower than either of the other hazards, but there is a potential
for widespread scope.

The preceding discussion demonstrates that it is possible to classify
diverse disaster agents in terms of an underlying set of dimensions and
then to discuss the agents in terms of functional emergency management
activities. Such dimensions could include the physical characteristics
of the hazard agent and its impact, as well as attributes relevant to
the effects of the event upon the social system and its consequences for
management. The characteristics derived from the disaster research
literature have provided a systematic set of attributes that could be
used to examine and compare riverine floods, volcanic eruptions, and
nuclear power plant accidents. As indicated above, the differences
between classification schemes in the academic literature tend to rest
on differences between researchers regarding exactly which dimensions
and how many dimensions are optimal in creating the typology. The 21^st^
Century has seen no more agreement than the 20^th^ Century did, although
there are two discernable trends in the literature. One trend, followed
by only a few, involves attempts to elaborate on the analytic approach
described here, adding or subtracting dimensions or otherwise changing
the complexity of the approach (Kreps, 1989; Tobin & Montz, 1997). By
far most disaster researchers have continued to ignore the issue of
analytic typology and remained with some sort of phenotypic
classification, most commonly with the classic categories of "natural
disasters", "technological accidents" and "willful attacks" (Cutter,
2001; Drabek, 1986).

Without regard to the low level of consensus among researchers, analytic
classification systems are more than an abstract intellectual exercise.
They provide an opportunity to demonstrate how, by means of careful
examination, one can begin to identify differences among disaster agents
with respect to their demands upon the emergency response system. From
the information listed in Table 1-1, an emergency manager might conclude
that two protective measures might be used in all three events:
population evacuation and the imposition of access controls to the
threatened area. Because a volcanic eruption or a nuclear power plant
accident could present a health threat resulting from inhalation of
airborne materials (volcanic ash or radioactive gases and particulates,
respectively), taking shelter indoors and using respiratory protection
is feasible. Ad hoc measures for respiratory protection could be as
simple as folding a wet towel and breathing through it.

The importance of developing a comparative perspective structured by
disaster agent characteristics lies in the prospect of identifying a
profile of disaster demands that, in turn, define the functions that the
emergency response organization must perform. Thus, classifying hazard
agents with respect to defining characteristics allows emergency
managers to better define the ways in which generic functions (e.g.,
emergency assessment, hazard operations, population protection, and
incident management) should be implemented to achieve comprehensive
emergency management. That is, the reason for identifying distinctive
aspects of hazard agents is not to define each of them as "unique", but
rather to highlight the ways in which generic functions must be adapted
to the needs of a particular type of emergency. By adopting this
approach, emergency managers are better able to identify the range of
hazard agents for which a particular emergency response action is
appropriate or to identify the ways in which an emergency response
action must be adapted to the constraints of a given hazard agent. For
example, evacuation is an appropriate protective action in response to a
wide range of hazards such as floods, hurricanes, and volcanic
eruptions. However, authorities recommend sheltering in-place rather
than evacuation during tornadoes because of the rapid onset and
unpredictable track of the funnel cloud. In some cases, especially
hazmat releases, the hazard agent's speed of onset is so variable from
one incident to another that there is no general rule regarding
evacuation versus sheltering in-place. Moreover, evacuation was listed
as a protective measure in nuclear power plant accidents and it was
noted that the primary health threat to citizens in such events was
radiation exposure. Research indicates that radiation hazard is feared
as much or more than other natural and technological hazards (Lindell &
Earle, 1983; Slovic, 1987). Assuming the conditions were appropriate for
an evacuation warning, the emergency manager would be well advised of
the possibility for a high level of spontaneous evacuation (people
evacuating from areas that emergency managers consider to be safe). In
turn, this alerts the emergency manager to a need for timely
dissemination of information to the public about the characteristics of
the impact and the potential personal consequences of exposure, thereby
reassuring those who are not at risk that they are indeed safe.

*The Remaining Chapters*

The remaining chapters in this volume will expand on the topics that
have been introduced in this chapter. Chapter 2 will describe the
stakeholders involved in emergency management. Chapter 3 will address
the process of building an emergency management organization. Chapter 4
will examine the issues of risk perception and risk communication.
Chapter 5 will describe the principal hazards in the United States.
Chapter 6 will present a basic model of environmental hazards risk
assessment and broadly describe the basic process by which emergency
managers can conduct risk assessments in their communities. Chapter 7
will present an overview of hazard mitigation, briefly describing some
of the methods of mitigating hazards, but emphasizing the process by
which mitigation can be achieved. Chapter 8 will describe the actual
demands that disasters impose on communities and compare these to some
of the misconceptions (often called "myths") many people have about how
people and organizations respond. Chapter 9 will describe what is needed
to prepare for emergency response and disaster recovery. Chapter 10 will
describe the activities involved in emergency response. Chapter 11 will
examine disaster recovery by discussing the activities of households,
businesses, and government agencies as they attempt to restore the
normal pattern of community activities. Chapter 12 will describe the
ways in which emergency management activities can be standardized and
evaluated. Chapter 13 will address international emergency management by
examining the experiences of other countries, especially in light of the
differences in governmental structures. Chapter 14 will address legal
issues in emergency management. Chapter 15 will examine the future of
emergency management in terms of the issues and trends that are likely
to affect emergency managers in the coming decades.