Organizing response to extreme emergencies

How can people and organizations best respond to emergency events that explode significantly beyond the boundaries of what they had generally anticipated and prepared for – or even imagined? What forms of organizations are likely to cope best with such events – and what procedures and practices will aid them in doing so? Obviously, by definition extreme events – events that are in scope or scale or type beyond the range of ordinary experience and expectations – will occur only relatively rarely (and very rarely for a particular emergency organization). Nonetheless, when they do occur, they tend to be of defining importance to the people and institutions that are thrust into them and that must find their way through them. September 11, 2001 in Manhattan and at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004; Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of the US in 2005; major earthquakes like the ones in Pakistan in 2005, Wenchuan in 2008, Haiti in 2010, Chile in 2010, and Christchurch in 2010 – these and other catastrophic events catapult people and response agencies into a new, unfamiliar, and largely unexplored dimension.

The horrific events of Black Saturday (February 7, 2009) in Victoria, Australia, culminating in the appalling loss of 173 lives, constitute just such an extreme event. A large, complex, tragic event of this sort commands attention and demands consideration of the lessons that can reasonably be drawn in the hope that similar tragedies can be avoided in the future. Unfortunately, the scale and complexity of this event also imply that it will be difficult to extract the right lessons, because its precipitating causes and consequences are so numerous and so deeply intertwined.

This paper examines the challenges of designing response organizations (and collections of such organizations) in ways that will enhance their ability to cope effectively with extreme situations.