In 1991, when I began my civilian career in emergency management, it was possible for one person to be very knowledgeable about all aspects of the job. That’s no longer true for many reasons.
First, I’d say the advent of communications allows for the sharing of information and a technological revolution in the way that people communicate and organizations interact. The levels of government and society have come much closer together. Today, via the Internet, the world is literally at your fingertips. And so is the research that’s being done on emergency management and its allied partners.
The second contributing factor to our emergency management lives becoming complicated was the establishment of the U.S. DHS. It not only made life complicated, it also made it confusing — and the confusion still exists today. With the creation of the DHS, FEMA was assimilated into its amalgamation of departments. The 9/11 attacks caused a wholesale shift to a terrorism-focused approach to disasters. This wasn’t corrected until the Hurricane Katrina debacle after which the pendulum swung back to an all-hazards approach.
In the meantime, we wandered through the homeland security wilderness. The establishment of homeland security grants caused the entire profession to chase grant dollars and detracted from our overall disaster preparedness mission.
However, I can’t say that it’s been all bad. The grant funding required multidiscipline approaches and eventually the DHS realized that regional coalitions were a good thing to promote. The list of our partners with whom to coordinate grew exponentially. There are now closer ties to law enforcement, public health and tribal nations. Although this is better, it’s more complicated.
We have state and local agencies with names that reflect emergency management, homeland security or legacy civil defense monikers. This confusion in the profession extends to higher education and the plethora of degrees that you can obtain today. If you get a degree in homeland security, does that mean you’re a fully qualified emergency manager by training? In reality, a mishmash of degree programs mix and match emergency management and homeland security. I suppose in this era of not having a fully developed doctrine for emergency management and its relationship to homeland security, it’s OK to have a mixture of programs and approaches to educating our future workforce.
It’s no longer possible for one person to have all the knowledge and information available on the topics of emergency management and homeland security. The pace of change and new doctrine is amazing. Sometimes I wonder if we’re just reinventing the wheel with new acronyms and programs. It’s certainly been a full employment era for consultants back in Washington, D.C.
The saving grace is that now all the information we need is readily available and the only limiting factor is the number of hours in the day in which to work and productively apply the information.
