I have said that emergency management today is in its "tweens." If we use Bill's 100-year timeline, we might best be described as a profession at present as "sitting up and drooling on ourselves."
Please take time to comment and provide your feedback. Bill is looking to spark some good discussion.
A Hierarchy of Emergency Management Needs — Parroting A. Maslow
Abraham Maslow is famous for his writings and study of the so-called hierarchy of human needs that underpin our humanity.
Increasingly, I am supportive of the notion that emergency management is not a contrived subject or profession but in fact underlies much of organizational process that leads to various forms of governance. Some wit, perhaps Winston Churchill, once stated that "democracy is the worst form of government, except all others!" Well in my opinion, emergency management is the worst form of organizational response to crisis management and resilience (that includes elements of preparedness, planning, prevention, protection, mitigation, response and recovery) except all others. What alternative choices are there?
And I find it remarkable that the underlying good sense and American inventiveness is what in reality caused emergency management to develop. The term, of course, goes back even institutionally to the FDR era when the executive offices of the White House had an EM section. Nonetheless the term got its remarkable rebirth when the states in an unsuccessful effort to restructure the federal civil defense program operated from 1951 to 1994 under Public Law 920 of the 81st Congress as amended started to develop a new paradigm for disaster efforts. Just as the crucial failure of the states and their local governments had failed to see the need for civil defense and development and knowledge of radiological defense as part of their existing public safety sector, the clear and always present danger of natural hazards was driving the need for both enhanced effort and efficiency in the public safety arena and others. Thus it might well have been either the policing profession or fire service that became the leader in EM, and either or both still might given the numbers of personnel involved. But the increased complexity of organizing for crisis management and response, and in particular recovery, meant that the traditions and paradigms of those professions could not truly encompass EM adequately.
Now after four decades, given the developments both nationally and internationally in EM, the increasing expertise and standards of the profession and its academic community indicates to me that over this century it will in fact become a wholly new field of human endeavor and likely to be adopted among many of the nation-states that now utilize a military model.
And tracking back to Maslow, exactly what is the pyramid or building block of EM that might be agreed upon? I can offer only a suggestion but others will decide and argue over its merits. I deliberately don't use the Maslow Hierarchy of needs but do recognize their relevance to this discussion.
So here is my approach:
First, underlying emergency management should be competence and technical knowledge and experience.
Second, should be organizational and governmental relationships that facilitate resilience (including planning, preparedness, prevention, protection, mitigation, response and recovery).
Third, would be public education of individuals and families to clearly give all an accurate vision of capabilities and systems that can be brought to bear in a crisis or disaster, and what the limitations are on those capabilities and systems without further dedication of resources.
Fourth, a basic mobilization structure including personnel, logistics and other systems that will be necessarily employed when the planning basis or basic capabilities of the existing organizations and systems are proved inadequate to the tasks necessarily expanded by the incident or event beyond the planning basis and day-to-day capability and system.
Fifth, a way to integrate technical, scientific and engineering knowledge into EM on both an ongoing basis and in an emergency with facilitation of the expertise of various professions and those with training and experience that might be of assistance. The medical profession should not be stove piped, for example, but deliberate mechanisms created and operated so that profession can operate comfortably in the EM realm, both independently and as advisers to political decision-makers so that protective action recommendations and decisions are able to prevent the larger catastrophe possible by misinformation or lack of knowledge.
In summary, perhaps the system of emergency management must promote collaboration and cooperation so that the system is supportive of the best resilience. And while individual brilliance will from time to time appear and needs to be utilized, systems and processes must reflect the collective wisdom of those involved with the emergency management process in any crisis or disaster.
It is this last concept that shows that we have a long way to go. Just as Maslow recognized a hierarchy of needs, I open debate here, I hope, on exactly what is necessary to establish priorities, systems and processes that reflect on the reality that the crisis or disaster does not end when food, water, shelter, emergency medical assistance and even public safety have provided a secure environment. It is the totality of the effort and judgment needed based on all factors that makes emergency management so exciting and worthy an endeavor.
And to focus more closely on the real goals of homeland security, not emergency management, it is necessary that basic civil security is the mission of homeland security. This is a far different mission than the emergency management discipline, profession and organizations I have attempted to describe above. Homeland security reflects only one of Maslow's needs — safety — and none of the others. Emergency management represents all his higher order needs.
