Disasterology: May 2024

Jun 01, 2024

This newsletter is a compilation of recent disaster ~things~ that I think are cool, important, or otherwise of interest to people who are intrigued with disaster (broadly defined). There’s a little something for everyone!

Happy Atlantic Hurricane Season to all those who dread it!

Today in the Tortured Emergency Management Department we’re going to learn some emergency management theory. Pull out a pen. Take some notes.

Since the very beginning of disaster research, we’ve been trying to find ways to categorize hazard events (i.e., the bad things that happen). Regular people do this too. You’ll often hear folks distinguish between “natural” and “man-made” hazards. Emergency management researchers don’t tend to use those, though, because we know from the research that a hazard being natural or man-made isn’t the thing that meaningfully distinguishes how we manage it.

Instead, emergency management scholars, for several decades, have circled around the Hazard Event Scale. First fully articulated by Dr. Quarantelli (the father of disaster sociology and prolific producer of emergency management research) the scale distinguishes between three types of events: emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes.

That’s right – not all disasters are disasters. Some are emergencies and some are catastrophes. (If you’ve read my book, you might remember that the three main events I featured – Camp Ellis, an emergency; the Tax Day flood, a disaster, and Katrina, a catastrophe – fell along this spectrum.)

This distinction is extremely important for us in emergency management because the way you manage an emergency is not the same way you manage a disaster, which is not the same way you manage a catastrophe.

We can figure out which category a hazard event falls into by analyzing its impacts, needs, stakeholder involvement, and management approach. Importantly, this is not based on quantifiable figures like death toll or economic losses (sometimes this is a point of contention with other social scientists). It’s more complicated. We’re assessing things like leadership and the behavior of various stakeholders, etc. It takes a little practice but once you’ve analyzed enough events it is quite easy to see where they fall on the scale.

I teach the Hazard Event Scale as the foundational theory in my Intro to Emergency Management class and it’s always my favorite lecture of the semester. At the end I have students call out hazard events and we figure out where they fall on the scale. There is always a fight over 9/11 and, because I’m in Massachusetts, several believe deep in their soul that the Marathon Bombing was a catastrophe (it was not). Getting people riled up about EM theory is the best!

It’s wild how my students have such a clear understanding of why the response to one event will vary compared to another. On the morning the bridge collapsed in Baltimore I asked my Intro students to analyze the event based on what we had learned up to that point in the semester. Without me suggesting it they instinctively used impacts, needs, stakeholder involvement, and management approach to correctly analyze what was happening and conclude it was an emergency. A+.

For U.S. emergency management researchers, the importance of the Hazard Event Scale became particularly clear in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Levee Failure. During Katrina researchers noted that the response was not unfolding in the way that the research would lead them to believe. The reason? Katrina wasn’t a regular old disaster; it was a catastrophe. But the U.S. research was almost entirely based on disasters. Of course, it looked different!

For the Social Science Research Council, Quarantelli laid out the case that Katrina was a catastrophe, not a disaster and that this should guide all research and policy responses to the event. (It… did not… unfortunately.)

Correctly categorizing a hazard event is important for research – specifically when it comes to thinking about the generalizability of findings. This is a huge problem throughout disaster research. Researchers who are unfamiliar with emergency management theory, but study disasters, often produce research that is effectively useless to emergency management because it isn’t grounded in the Hazard Event Scale. They often misunderstand how and why a response has unfolded and come to inaccurate conclusions. And, they often think their findings from one type of event are generalizable to all events! This is a real annoyance for emergency management researchers but this can become extremely harmful on the off chance that those findings make their way out into policy and practice.

When researchers correctly categorize events, it better enables us to use those findings in policy and practice and make our emergency management system more effective.

In this way, the Hazard Event Scale is not just some theoretical exercise – there are very serious practical implications. Funny enough, we’ve long understood emergencies are distinct from disasters. Across all levels of government, our plans, procedures, agency structures, and policies reflect this! This idea of catastrophe, though, has been a real stumbling block. Although FEMA sometimes throws the term around, we do not have meaningful plans, procedures, agency structures, or policies to manage catastrophes. The most obvious evidence of this is the failed responses to the three U.S. catastrophes of this century – Katrina, Maria, and COVID. No good!

[I know some of you want to do a little “But what about Cascadia planning” and I know some people are working hard on that but also PLEASE be serious.]

When COVID began, the US jumped real quickly into the catastrophe category. As time went on and I watched the response unfold, I turned into that gif of the dog quizzically tilting its head. Something was off.

Although COVID had the markers of catastrophe as the existing research would lead us to expect, there were also seemingly fundamental differences that were not reflected in the existing research. I spent a lot of time talking to emergency managers and the thing they kept bringing up was how their responses were being built around waves of impacts.

The way hazard events unfold is so similar from one to the next that in the rare case that something is different it just JUMPS out at you and is impossible to ignore. So, I called up my research partner, Dr. Amanda Savitt, and told her what every disaster researcher loves to hear, “I think Quarantelli missed something”. Then we spent every waking minute for a few years trying to figure this out.

First, we published a piece for the Social Science Research Council, as a nod to Quarantelli’s Katrina article, using the Hazard Event Scale to categorize COVID as a catastrophe.

Then the real work began. We spent a year and a half doing a deep dive through the disaster research from the 1930s through the COVID literature as it was being published in real-time. Throughout nearly a century of work, a dimension related to “time” was often danced around as researchers considered its role in our understanding of disasters. Yet, time’s relationship to the hazard event scale (somehow!!) remained unexplored.

Since we care about this from the perspective of actually managing hazard events, we concluded that in terms of time, it’s the duration of the actual response, that seems to create a meaningful distinction from one event to the next. An event that only has a week-long response is going to look different from an event which requires a two-year response (obviously!!). The impacts, needs, stakeholder involvement, and management approach all differ in a long-duration event as compared to short-duration events.

We also went back over hazard events in the past 20 years and did a little recategorization. Turns out there are short and long-duration events that fit into all three categories (i.e., emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes)! [On a personal note: Oh boy, did my understanding of the BP response, which I’d always thought of as an outlier event, suddenly fall into place. Whew!] It also helped us articulate how events like the Flint Water Crisis fit into an emergency management framework – something many had been struggling to do.

With our new (or updated) Hazard Event Scale in hand, we wrote up a theory article called “Revising emergencies, disasters, & catastrophes: Adding duration to the hazard event classification” which we published in the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters at the end of last year. [If you don’t have access, I’m happy to email you a copy.] Read this if you want all the receipts.

As we were working on this, I used my Intro to Emergency Management classes as guinea pigs and worked out the best way of explaining the duration element. I also used our little game as a test for me. Could they come up with an event that didn’t fit? They haven’t yet!

There are a lot of reasons to be down about emergency management these days but getting to work on this kind of research makes me optimistic about the future of the discipline of emergency management. Even if research funders, universities, state legislatures, many practitioners, and crazy climate deniers on Twitter don’t think studying emergency management is important, this work reveals that it is. There is so much more theory building for us to do in emergency management. Some of us have a very clear understanding for how that work can build a stronger foundation for practice and policy and have a tangible impact on communities across the country. Carry on!

MEME Break

This one is for the disaster researchers.

The End Bits

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In case you signed up for this newsletter without knowing who I am (a bold choice!) you can read my book Disasterology: Dispatches From The Frontlines of The Climate Crisis to catch up! You can read a USA Today review here, order it here, or get it as an audiobook here. You can also find more from me on my blog, listen to this episode of Ologies, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram where I impulsively narrate my every thought.

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