Decision making in emergency management: A survey study

The emergency director's (ED) decision making is decisive for the outcome of an emergency operation. Particularly in large-scale operations, the cognitive demands on the ED are severe. Ninety fire chiefs were interviewed about their own accounts of factors affecting the difficulty level of decisions. Types of decisions described as especially hard to make concerned giving priorities in lifesaving operations and evacuations and whether to adopt an offensive or a defensive fire fighting strategy. Perceived stressors related to lack of information in the initial phase of an operation. Emergency management, being a control task, can be analyzed within the framework of distributed dynamic decision making. Interview data confirmed some findings of previous laboratory research of distributed dynamic decision making. Information needs differ according to the decision-maker's position in the distributed system. A model for evaluation of information transmitted to the emergency management system is proposed.