Disaster Recovery: A Harvard Perspective

Notes from session by Professor Dutch Leonard, Harvard University, Advanced Planning for Recoverry

[Excuse any typos--I'm typing as fast as I can!]

If they can see your incident from space, it is generally not a good thing. 

The job of emergency managers is to reduce the loss in continuing improvement of our social status when disasters strike.  This is the recovery part.

• We can't get back to where we were
• It will take a long time to get back to where we were
• We might be able to forge a better future, an opportunity, to improve our situation

Comprehensive Risk Management Framework:

Emergency management tends to focus on response.  It is the intellectual home for crisis management.  Need to spread our time with more work on the before and after.  Most people have not worked on the issues of recovery.  Recovery is the long and expensive time line.

How can we shape the recovery by what we do today? 

There were many things we did wrong in response to Katrina.  But the setting for the disaster took centuries to put in place.  For instance:  We put value in harm's way, failing to build coordination structures and training, failure to mobilize quickly, failure to execute a recovery.  Katrina is an example of a failure in comprehensive risk strategy.

Key questions for comprehensive risk management:

1. What is the overall level of investments in the five risk domains taken together?
2. What is the distribution of investments across the risk domains
3. What is the best investments within each risk domain?
4. Do we think the current level of investments is right?  Or, is there a bias?

Remember:

• Balancing the future against the present (myopia)
• Dealing with probabilistic events (especially low probability events)
• People have trouble dealing with things that are dreadful and frightening events

Our level of investments is out of whack.  Prevention and mitigation investment is low.  Preparation for response has a variable.  Preparation for recovery has been something we have not worked on.  After an event: response and recovery are immediate, current, obvious, and unavoidable and probably overrepresented.

Most of the capacity you will have is what is provided locally.  Outsiders turned loose locally without guidance would likely compound the disaster. We need to rethink the doctrine of response and therefore: preparation for response and therefore our doctrine of recovery.

There is a revolution underway.  We are in the middle of it, not recognizing it now.

• Revolutions are hard to see from the middle
• Already underway
• In many places largely implemented
• But not acknowledged

Lessons from Katrina:

• Obvious failures of response, too little coordination, too many agencies
• Corresponding prescription: need a unitary command structure. A military model of top down, centralized command and control hierarchy--which is not true
• A centralized, unified, superagency response is not possible, wouldn't work even if we could do it.
• This is really not the military model anyway--basic principle is decentralized battlefield authority.
• Big events are not a small event, just bigger--not a true statement!!!
• Not all the problems in response came from the response.  The setting was predictive of the failure

You can't reproduce unitary command and control:

• Can't feasibly produce unitary command
• Decentralization is therefore is not a choice--it is a fact

Change our philosophy:

• We seem to be trying to centralized rather than trying to make decentralization work
• What would it take to make decentralized intelligent adaptation work?

Theory of Emergence--examples of:

• Schools of fish and flocks of birds don't have leaders
• Ant colonies and beehives.  Look for book called "Emergence"
• Evolution
• Free market economies
• Future of disaster response?

You don't try to engineer a solution/performance.  [what I call the Commander's Intent in military operations is what is needed.  The strategic guidance]

Fast and Light concept, comes from mountain climbing.  In emergency management response:

• Multiple operational units
• Organized to integrate with and guide arriving teams
• Focus is on local teams guiding arriving teams
• This is coordination focused, not command and control

Role for the EOC:

• Establishing overall goals and priorities
• Providing aggregated (big picture) information
• Coordination
• Monitoring progress
• It is not directing operational activity

Coast Guard is a good example of Fast and Light

• Self-dispatched
• Mobile
• Self-contained
• Self-sustaining
• Didn't wait to be asked

The above concept is inconsistent with the mindset of many outsiders/critics of FEMA (press/congress)

Instead we need to do much more to set the stage for recovery from a decentralized response.

Example of work being done in the San Francisco Bay Area:

• Assume that mitigation was effective
• Assume that the response was effective
• But there is still huge amount of disruption
• People need to "tip in" to the recovery process.  They are uncertain about what their neighbors are going to do. What is their loyalty to the local area and the region?  These are traumatized people.  They don't have to stay put, they could move on.

Tipping: [Role for social media is huge in this aspect]

• Happens quickly
• Need capable local leadership
• Rapid, substantive action to encourage tipping in
• Sense of inclusiveness
• Self-reliance
• Connections to the outside world that help in providing resources
• Need local and central capacities--an ability to coordinate them
• Mechanisms for building positive perceptions

Domains for advance recovery actions

• Political devices
• Neighborhood devices
• Financial devices/incentives

He believes that the role of social media is going to be huge. You can't predict how it is all going to turn out, but it is not going away.

If I end up getting a web link to his presentation I'll post it in the future.