Is it Selfishness that Prevents Cooperation?

Here in the Pacific Northwest the states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho all participated along with local emergency management agencies and associated other government, nonprofit and private-sector businesses. The exercise called Cascadia Rising 2016 also had participation from FEMA, other federal agencies and all of the active-duty services, along with the National Guard from each respective state. For the "civilian side of things" it was a four-day exercise with most local jurisdictions participating for two of the four days. The military played along, but also continued the exercise the following week, since a "time-jump" was not included and they were playing in real time.

As I attended an after-action briefing last week there were plenty of outcomes that could be written about. Two that jumped out at me specifically relate to our ability to work in a cross-jurisdictional manner at the local level and  hierarchically between the levels of government.

The bottom line is this, in this digital age, here in Washington state (but, I think this is true in many other states), there is no single system for the sharing of information, situational awareness, maps, or the passing of logistical requests among and between government jurisdictions. 

Oh, there are plenty of systems out there that hold the promise of doing this. Here in Washington state WebEOC dominates as an information management system, but the connections between agencies, jurisdictions and levels of government are not there. It isn't because the system is so new that we have not been able to capitalize on its capabilities. It has been around for probably more than a dozen years. I could go off on a tangent on why we in Washington state missed the boat on that particular system, but I'd like to broaden the issue to the baseline problems I see that deal more with human behaviors.

It appears that there is an unwillingness to:

• Subordinate a single agency's desires to that of the greater regional and state needs
• Use or learn digital information management systems
• Provide leadership (I know you can't dictate) and try to influence others to cooperate
• Share data and information since it provides a sense of power and influence
• Expend the time and effort to do the above

Given that the planning horizon for Cascadia Rising was two years, there was plenty of time to try to establish system(s) to do the above. It is not a single agency's failure, it is a failure on everyone's part to do something that is absolutely needed — and we knew it before the exercise. The Oso mudslide from 2014 clearly showed the lack of a system(s) for a significant, but rather isolated event. 

If we continue on the path we are on, with the advent of the next big disaster, we will have made no progress.