Disaster response is sexy, and it is what people think emergency management is all about. It is the thing of disaster movies. People dying, people being rescued, buildings falling down, airplanes crashing, etc. etc. Heroes rushing in to save people, pets and the world! My favorite made for TV movie scene was when the FEMA Director was lowered into a deep hole to sacrifice himself by manually setting off an atomic bomb that would stop a series of earthquakes devastating the West Coast of the USA. He died and the quakes stopped. That a great example of "disaster response!"
Mitigation sounds like litigation, and people in general do not know much about it, or for that matter care about it. Resiliency is a new term that people of all walks of life are trying to grapple with to understand. Perhaps the one thing that has stopped recovery planning from happening is that you can't get first responders from talking about the response phase of emergency management.
If you are going to work on mitigation, recovery, and resiliency the first thing you need to do is set the stage. I would say or write something like this:
"We have just experienced a disaster/catastrophe. It has been terrible and here are all the damages and losses. It is now two weeks later and all the rescue operations are completed. Fire trucks are parked back in their fire stations and victims are being buried and survivors have been treated at hospitals and released, or remain being treated. While operations are not 'normal' the extreme measures being taken during the response are over."
Then you move on to getting the group to focus on mitigation, recovery or resiliency. When someone brings up a response issue you remind them that the response is over and we are working on mitigation, recovery or resiliency. If they persist, there are other options, none of which are legal, moral or ethical.
Good luck with this effort--it is not for the faint of heart!
