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Article Excerpt
After major disasters, blue-ribbon commissions often investigate why government officials were unable to "connect the dots" and intervene to stop the calamity, but they typically fail to take the next step: building a mitigation capacity to reduce future disaster losses and turn catastrophes into lesser scale events. Pearl Harbor, The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, Hurricane Andrew, September 11, and, most recently, Hurricane Katrina (among others) spawned investigations into the purported failures of administrators and elected leaders to recognize clues to impending disasters. Each of these cases provides a lesson first identified by Roberta Wohlstetter in her path-breaking Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision: we cannot expect even skilled, technically competent, and well-intentioned organizations to be able to prevent every surprise attack. (1) In the case of natural events, we dare not even attempt interdiction (cloud-seeding notwithstanding), because most natural hazards are part of socio-natural processes that cannot be halted without causing greater calamity. If preventing all disaster is impossible, reducing the damage caused by disasters through improved mitigation capacity is the next most desirable goal. To improve mitigation will not be easy, because doing so requires revising current understandings about what constitutes security from disaster, reorganizing homeland security agencies, and making the politically sensitive argument that not all disasters can be prevented.
Mitigation activities decrease the damage disasters cause to lives and property by anticipating hazards and making communities more resistant to their effects. These steps range from low-cost and relatively simple actions such as relocating electrical outlets to more-complex measures that require coordinated action among public agencies, private individuals, and nonprofits, such as buying low-lying land and preventing construction on it or strengthening building codes so that structures better resist the effects of earthquakes, tornadoes, or bombs. (2) A variety of means promote mitigation, such as hardening structures, building redundancy, and de-centralizing essential networks and services.
If not all disasters can be prevented, mitigation is a crucial but neglected part of preparing for disasters. Thus, mitigation is different from preparing to respond, which includes training and funding for equipment and personnel who go to a disaster site after an event. In addition, many activities that are casually referred to as prevention are actually mitigation efforts. For example, many fire and flood "prevention" programs reduce the effects of an event rather than preventing it from occurring. Prevention refers to measures that stop an event from occurring, as when law enforcement agencies apprehend potential terrorists.
Mitigation is one of a number of strategies that make up disaster preparedness, but the federal government's current policy documents governing emergency management, primarily the National Incident Management System and Homeland Security Presidential Directives 7 and 8, do not mention mitigation. Instead of "mitigation," this guidance, created in the wake of September 11, uses the terms preparedness, prevention, protection, response, and recovery to frame emergency management.
Preparedness is a capacious term, referring to "the existence of plans, procedures, policies, training and equipment necessary at the Federal, State, and local level to maximize the ability to prevent, respond to, and recover from major events." (3) Prevention, in the government's language, is more narrowly defined as "actions taken to avoid an incident or to intervene to stop an incident." (4) These include steps taken to interdict terrorist attacks, but their relevance for natural and industrial disasters is unclear. Some natural events cannot be prevented, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, some forest fires, and the rainfall and winds that may lead to flooding. The terms response and recovery are relatively straightforward. Response activities address the short-term, direct effects of an event, and recovery activities are directed at the long-term effects in order to restore a community to a state close to its condition before the event. Each of these categories of action can reduce the damage caused by disasters, but none of them equals mitigation.
DISASTER PREPAREDNESS
Disasters are of at least three types. (5) Natural disasters are precipitated by a meteorological or geological event such as a hurricane or an earthquake, although they become disasters only when they inflict damage on the built or lived environment. (6) To employ a cliche by way of analogy, if a typhoon occurs in the middle of the ocean, does anyone hear it? Human actions influence the course of disasters by, for example, building in a low-lying area or by removing forests for agricultural purposes and thereby hastening drought.
Technological disasters often occur when complex systems fail. The largest such failures include the Bhopal chemical plant accident of 1984, the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident in 1986, and the Challenger explosion of 1986. (7) Another form of disaster, which includes terrorist attacks, is a deliberate attempt to cause harm to lives and property.
These three forms of disasters share enough in their consequences and in their timelines to be addressed under a single umbrella, whether emergency management or homeland security. Despite the connotation of surprise suggested by the term, disasters are rarely exogenous shocks that catch a community completely unaware. A threatened attack, a record of poor industrial safety, or a history of flooding typically presage an event. The term disaster most accurately describes a cycle, beginning with human development of the natural environment, including the event, and lasting through a period of rebuilding and adjustment following the episode. Emergency managers typically refer to these periods as preparedness, response, and recovery. (8)
The way in which federal emergency management institutions have grown over time, however, has led to a system that favors response and, to some extent, recovery, over prevention and especially mitigation. The federal government has intervened in major disasters since the early days of the Republic, but usually only in an ad hoc fashion, providing relief after a major catastrophe. (9) Requests for aid from localities directly affected by a disaster and from neighboring regions, combined with the spectacle of a major catastrophe, put pressure on the federal government to act to relieve suffering and restore order to disaster-stricken communities. As a result, in recent decades, the national government has played a greater role in policy domains such as emergency management that were once the sole responsibility of states and localities. Disaster organizations at all levels of government have added more programs to aid response than to provide mitigation. National granting programs, such as the Emergency Management Performance Grant program, provide states and localities with resources to purchase response equipment but not to invest in activities to reduce the consequences of disasters.
The nation engages in limited activities under the name of "mitigation," but these are uncoordinated and minor compared to investments in other types of emergency management support. Through the Department of Homeland Security, the federal government provides grants to states and localities for mitigating the effects of disasters through exercises, although this is essentially preparing to respond, rather than strengthening structures or dispersing materials in order to make sites less vulnerable to disaster. The Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies build structures to reduce the effects of flooding but, as Hurricane Katrina showed, some...
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