# Presentation: 020049

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management 

- Richard Sylves, Ph.D.
- University of Delaware
- Presentation was developed for delivery at the 8th Annual Emergency Management Higher Education Conference
- June 7-9, 2005

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## DHS/FEMA Higher Education Conference, June 7-9, 2005

- Professor Richard Sylves
- Dept of Political Science & IR
- University of Delaware
- Newark, DE 19716
- Sylves was asked by Dr. Wayne Blanchard to argue the proposition: Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Whereas,
- Emergency Management in the U.S. evolved conjointly, and often unhappily, with Civil Defense Against Nuclear Attack
- Emergency Management, even in recent years, has been done in fundamentally different ways by federal, state, and local governments, sometimes compatibly but often in confliction.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Whereas,
- Emergency Management has evolved ostensibly under the rubric of all-hazards emergency management but in fact many first responders such as police, fire, EMS, etc. and many different disaster agent constituencies (flood interests, hurricane interests, earthquake interests, etc.) continue to work quite independently and parochially as if emergency management were merely a sub-category of what they do.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Whereas,
- The Terrorism Disaster of 9/11/01 (at the WTC and the Pentagon) was a mega-disaster that represents an epiphenomenon for both emergency managers and disaster policy makers.
- The Homeland Security Act of 2002, related laws, and a series of Presidential Homeland Security Directives, have forced epic changes to both FEMA and the domestic and international world of emergency management.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Whereas,
- What were previously defined as “major disasters” and “emergencies” in presidential declaration decision making are being subsumed under the terms  “INCIDENTS” or “INCIDENTS OF NATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE” by the President, thus conflating the official definition of disaster (natural or human-caused) with any president perceived threat to the nation.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Whereas,
- The National Incident Management System and the new National Response Plan no longer assigns predominant emergency management duties and leadership roles to what’s left of the former Federal Emergency Management Agency.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Whereas,
- Emergency Management continues to have such a weakly defined self-identity that it continues to be poorly understood by policy makers and the public.
- Emergency Management is now vulnerable to being supplanted by Homeland Security as both a profession and as a field of academic research, teaching, and practice.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Whereas,
- Emergency Managers are losing out in bureaucratic competitions, particularly in the realm of emergency planning, to other agencies and programs of Department of Homeland Security and because IAEM and NEMA lack the political clout to champion the interests of their emergency manager memberships.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- BE IT RESOLVED THAT,
- Those who seek the perpetuation and improvement of Emergency Management press for a revolutionary overhaul of Emergency Management across all domains.
- This overhaul must concede that emergency management is no longer exclusively the intellectual property of former FEMA officials, or current state and local emergency management officials.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Be it resolved that,
- Those who favor the perpetuation of emergency management must concede that terrorism events, the threat of terrorism, and existing Homeland Security law and public policy require a revolutionary change in what emergency management is and what is means.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Be it resolved that,
- Emergency Management must fundamentally rebuild itself to demonstrate its role in all the domains of homeland security, most particularly in regard to terrorism consequence management.
- Emergency Management cannot simply relegate homeland security to a category of all hazards emergency management. Rather, homeland security has been defined in a way that makes all hazards emergency management one component of a much broader schema of security work.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Be it resolved that,
- Emergency Management break free of its narrow intellectual confines and use the superiority of its systems of coordination, planning, response, mitigation and recovery to penetrate and make contributions to all realms of homeland security.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Be it resolved that,
- Emergency Management move beyond the confines of (so far) futilely attempting to integrate public management, disaster-agent focused political interests, and sundry academic disciplines and fields with one another and instead champion a synthesis of emergency management and homeland security responsibilities that makes emergency management much more than it is today.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Be it resolved that,
- Emergency managers lead a revolutionary transformation of emergency management because like it or not policy makers, led by the President and Congress, have already forced a transformation of emergency management in law, policy, and in government organization (i.e. DHS). Resistance is futile.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Be it resolved that,
- Because domestic homeland security now involves much more of a military and national security role than emergency management did in the 1990s, emergency management needs to rediscover dual use disaster management and establish new working relationships with active military, national guard, and reserve military authorities.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential

## Why Revolutionary Change is Needed in Emergency Management

- Be it resolved that,
- Because emergency managers need to be re-educated, re-tested, and recertified to prove their qualifications in homeland security work, emergency management must be re-designed in a manner that absorbs whole new sets of responsibilities, beyond the skill sets of conventional emergency managers.

- Sylves, Why Revolutionary Change in EM is Essential