Broadening the Imaginary in Disaster Management

Disaster managers spend most of their time inhabiting imaginary worlds. Rather than respond directly to emergencies, which are by definition rare events, these professionals focus their daily work on accounting for the human and infrastructural consequences of potential emergency and disaster scenarios such as ice storms, tornadoes, floods, train derailments, or chemical plant explosions. They then develop training modules, simulation exercises, planning documents, and cross-agency relationships that reflect their educated guesses about the hazards we are likely to face and how to best manage their inherently uncertain impacts. In my ongoing interview and observational study of the disaster management profession in the Greater Toronto Area, I have been struck by the creativity, imagination, and openness involved in this accounting work. I have also been struck by how narrowly confined these interventions tend to be.

Disaster and Emergency Management, or DEM, is a professional field organized around the coordination of resources and responsibilities in the preparation for, response to, and recovery from specific emergencies and large-scale disasters. DEM offices are typically located at municipal, regional, provincial, and federal levels of Canadian government, or city, county, state, and federal levels in the United States. The DEM professionals I have been fortunate to spend time with tend to be deeply invested in building networks and listening to those ideas that will help us save lives and money. Yet they tend to place an overriding emphasis on dealing with emergency events (e.g. a multiple-vehicle collision, building fire, or chemical spill) and specific disasters (e.g. a flood, ice storm, or tornado), rather than thinking at the level of ecological and social structural systems. Furthermore, the overriding goal is almost always to rebuild the status quo, so that those individuals, groups, and communities impacted by an emergency or disaster can regain a sense of normalcy as quickly as possible. Given the increasingly dire impacts of global climate change over the coming decades, these professionals would do well to start thinking beyond how to protect a status quo that continues to create the very ecological crisis we now face. Our communities, cities, and regions are poorly equipped to cope with the chronic but slow-building consequences of climate chaos. The DEM profession would prove more vital in this moment if it were to shift from planning for and managing specific emergency and disaster events and toward planning for and building more sustainable, resilient, just, and symbiotic systems of human existence.

Is this too much to expect from DEM professionals? Maybe, but keep in mind that DEM is different from first response. Unlike first responders (i.e. fire patrols, paramedics, and the police), DEM professionals play a coordinating role before, during, and after a disaster. As the director of Brampton’s Emergency Management Office described to me about his agency’s work, “We have an understanding that […] when we’re activated, anything that happens inside the yellow tape is theirs [first responders]. Anything that’s outside the yellow tape is ours.” Outside the yellow tape, it turns out, involves an ever-expanding realm of service coordination. DEM professionals are responsible for evacuations, and so spend a lot of time working long before a disaster event with transportation, hotels, and shelters to develop interoperable contingency plans for quickly moving large numbers of people out of their homes and into safe dwellings. Disaster managers also handle crisis communications, and so not only disseminate information during a disaster but more mundanely conduct training exercises that test communication protocols and technologies with specialists. Not only do DEM professionals need to stay on top of current communication technologies, but they must also maintain ongoing relationships with a wide variety of service-providers and representatives of various city agencies that may be called into action. DEM officials are also responsible for informing elected officials and escorting VIPs at a disaster site, such as the mayor, premier, city council members, or an MP. This means that they have to deal with political chicanery before, during, and after a catastrophe.

My main point is that the scope of “anything that’s outside the yellow tape” is growing. Among the many ominous trends of the early twenty-first century has been the increasing number of large-scale disasters. In general, environmental, organizational, and technological disasters have grown more costly around the globe, impact larger numbers of people, and visit their most disruptive and tragic consequences on the poorest and most marginalized human populations.11See Damon P. Coppola, Introduction to International Disaster Management, Third Edition (Waltham, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2015), 18-30; and IPCC, “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: A Special Report of Working Groups I & II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” (Cambridge, 2012). Extreme weather events—hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, flooding, ice storms, wild fires—have become the numbingly familiar signs of chaotic global climate trends. These events are only getting more common, complex, and destructive as we careen toward the kinds of critical ecological tipping points that environmental activists have been warning us about for well over three decades.22See John Bellamy Foster, “The Great Capitalist Climacteric: Marxism and System Change Not Climate Change,” Monthly Review 67, no. 6 (2015): 1–18. To deal effectively with this rather dire state of affairs, the field of DEM has started to shift from short-term recovery and toward programs rooted in “adaptive resilience."33See Kathleen Tierney, The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). On the face of it, then, it might not seem too difficult to move beyond “resiliency” and toward engendering more sustainable forms of living that address the structural conditions producing such unequal exposure to risk in the first place.

The problem is that DEM has long been hemmed in by formal governance procedures and reporting mechanisms that define success as returning communities to their pre-disaster situation. A tightly scoped managerial approach to disaster relief grew from mid-twentieth century civil defense efforts. Shortly after World War II and with the onset of the Cold War, Canada and the United States built programs focused on protecting their civilian populations from possible air raids and nuclear attack. This history rooted the profession of DEM in a “command and control” foundation that has proven difficult to shift. In the post-9/11 era of security concerns, all major municipalities in Canada and the United States are mandated to keep emergency plans updated and assign a coordinator in charge of their execution. In practice, this means that every mid-sized and larger city in North America has a designated office of disaster and emergency management with a professional staff focused on mobilizing managerial expertise toward reducing the economic, human, infrastructural, and bio-physical costs of a broad variety of attacks, be they conflict-based, extreme weather events, or health, industrial, and technological catastrophes.44See Thomas A. Birkland, Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change after Catastrophic Events (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006); Scott Gabriel Knowles, The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); and Jennifer Wilson and Arthur Oyola-Yemaiel, “The Evolution of Emergency Management and the Advancement towards a Profession in the United States and Florida,” Safety Science 39 (2001): 117–131. Every municipality also has to conduct at least one full-scale annual exercise that trains key staff across municipal agencies in emergency response. Emergency management offices are typically accountable to the fire or police chief, who maintains disaster recovery systems and is accountable to the mayor’s office, who is accountable to state or provincial government, who is accountable to their federal governments—all of whom are (ideally and in the abstract, at least) accountable to voting publics. At the same time, DEM has become highly professionalized over the last two decades, with the rapid growth of degree and certification programs, membership associations, local, national, and international conferences, and various modes for disseminating professional knowledge.

In order to shift DEM from managing events to building more resilient, just, and sustainable systems, provincial and municipal mandates could include expectations that critical, local activist, and subaltern perspectives are voiced at the planning tables of government offices of emergency management. Similarly, DEM educators can draw from a much broader array of critical theoretical perspectives that connect the longue durée of colonial and post-colonial disregard for Indigenous knowledge, entrenched organizational interests, a pro-growth urban power elite, regulatory capture, corporate power, disaster capitalism, and structural inequalities to the social and economic production of disaster vulnerability.55For overviews, see Amitai Etzioni, “The Capture Theory of Regulations—Revisited,” Society 46 (2009): 319–323; William Freudenberg, Robert Gramling, Shirley Laska, and Kai Erikson, Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow (Washington: Island Press, 2009), especially chapter 4; John Hannigan, Environmental Sociology, Third Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 143–153; Antony Loewenstein, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe (London: Verso Books, 2015); Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017); and Tierney, The Social Roots of Risk, chapter 5. However, more pressing than better critical theorizing: DEM professionals, along with policymakers at all levels of government, should develop long-term climate adaptation plans that account for subaltern knowledge and vulnerable populations in their proposals and training exercises. Disaster planning needs the direct input of Indigenous community leaders, environmental justice activists, critical-thinking artists, members of underserved communities such as homeless and under-housed populations, skeptics of pro-growth development schemes, and other marginalized dreamers, who, I believe, are best equipped to envision better ways of collective living precisely because the status quo has largely failed them. These are the voices who will propose better ways to live with all tomorrows’ catastrophes. We’d better engage their expertise.