Urban Emergency Management: Planning and Response for the 21st Century

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Chapter 1

Overview of Urban Emergency Management

Abstract

More than 7 billion human beings live on planet Earth, and no location is immune from disaster. Yet when one takes place in a densely populated area, the impact to people and infrastructure is greatly magnified. An initial examination includes disaster causation categories and the phases of emergency management. This chapter will introduce the key concepts and unique challenges of all-hazards emergency management within an urban environment, including a systemic overview, key definitions, and introductions to core concepts.

Keywords

Emergency management; hazard; human-caused disasters; hybrid disasters; mitigation; natural disasters; preparedness; prevention; recovery; response; risk; stakeholders; threat; urban; vulnerability

Introduction

On the evening of October 17, 1989, the weather was clear and seasonable in the San Francisco Bay area. A tangible excitement hung in the air as the two local Major League Baseball franchises—the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s—prepared to face one another in Game 3 of the World Series. Just after 5:00 p.m. local time, as Candlestick Park was still filling with fans, two tectonic plates shifted beneath a peak of the Santa Cruz Mountains known as Loma Prieta, a short distance away.

The significant quake measured 6.9 on the Richter scale, caused significant damage to local infrastructure, and resulted in 63 fatalities. Because of the intense media coverage of the World Series, the earthquake became the first to be covered live on US network television. It also became one of the first large-scale tests for the emerging field of expertise known as emergency management.

The Loma Prieta earthquake, as it came to be known, was far from the most destructive event in modern times. It caused neither the most fatalities nor the greatest financial damage of such events in the latter portion of the 20th century. However, due in large part to its location, timing, and the presence of the world’s media, it represents an excellent point of reference in the development of urban crisis management.

The response and recovery phases of the earthquake took place under national and international scrutiny. In addition to the fatalities, there was damage to infrastructure, including utility, housing, and transportation assets. Difficult urban search-and-rescue operations took place at multiple locations, and the recovery process was both lengthy and costly. The damage to infrastructure helped motivate and accelerate legislation and retrofitting efforts related to seismic standards.

This natural disaster also helps to frame several key questions regarding emergency management in an urban setting. What comprises emergency management? How is the management of crises different in cities as compared to rural or wildland locations? What are the phases or stages of urban emergency management? And what qualities can emergency management offer to the overall goal of public safety?

Context

The Big Picture

As long as there have been human societies, there have been emergencies. And as long as there have been emergencies, there have been individuals who sought to manage them. Human society is essentially built upon the premise that we are stronger in the face of adversity as a group than we are as individuals. Early societies faced many of the same natural and weather-related hazards as we do today. Ancient historical and religious texts refer to plagues, floods, and earthquakes. Fortified cities emerged as protection against primarily human threats, in locations carefully chosen to counter hazards ranging from floods to marauders.

As states and nations took hold, they built increasingly dense and complex infrastructure as new technologies and materials became available. The Industrial Revolution added a new array of technological hazards to which cities had to react and adapt. In a very real sense, emergencies and crisis managers have been marching alongside civilization from the very beginning.

Modern emergency management began to truly emerge in the United States in the civil-defense efforts of the 1950s and 1960s. The threat of a catastrophic nuclear war between world superpowers necessitated an extensive organization to assure effective response and continuity of government. The military has continued as a key contributor to both the form and function of emergency management, with its hierarchal specialization and established chain of command providing a model for human-caused hazards in particular. Natural disasters, such as flooding and wildfires, soon drove the development of more effective crisis-management processes on multiple continents. (An extensive discussion of this period may be found in Chapter 2, Development and History of Emergency Management.)

Emergency managers have learned valuable lessons from related fields. Wildland firefighting can be defined as fire incidents that occur outside of significant human settlement, which have vegetation as their primary fuel source. The methods developed to battle such conflagrations also deserve extensive credit for developing the systems and mechanisms that form the core of modern emergency management. The forest fires endemic to the Western United States are complex and geographically large-scale incidents requiring extensive planning and coordination. The evolution of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) in the United States, and of other incident command systems the world-over, owe much to hard-fought lessons of these fire crews. (Such systems are reviewed in Chapter 6, Incident Command Systems and NIMS.) While wildfires are historically rural events, they have nonetheless informed the management of emergency incidents in the most urban of settings.

The evolution of emergency management can thus be seen as a long and ongoing process, including the adoption and adaptation of the best practices from multiple fields.

The Urban Perspective

Translating lessons such as the Loma Prieta earthquake within the urban environment is still very much a work in progress. For this discussion, the term urban will refer to a geographic area with a comparatively high human population density and significant infrastructure. It is this density and complexity that pose significant challenges to emergency managers. Any large-scale or widespread damage is likely to affect multiple assets and systems.

Such areas may not encompass merely the traditional city boundaries, but also the suburbs in close proximity—including the slums or favelas that now surround city centers on multiple continents. In other words, as cities become denser, so will the terrain in immediate proximity.

By this definition, more than half the world’s population already resides in urban areas. The World Health Organization (WHO) is among those tracking a rapidly urbanizing world. By 2014, WHO calculated that a full 54% of the Earth’s human population lived in cities, and this population is expected to grow at nearly 2% annually through 2025. The presence of large numbers of people, and the systems necessary to support them, presents emergency managers with both unique opportunities and unique challenges.

As urban development pushes deeper into previously rural or wildland terrain across multiple continents, the lines defining what makes up urban, suburban, and rural landscapes continue to blur. A changing climate will only exacerbate such changes, bringing hazards across boundaries which were previously clear delineations.

To summarize, the key traits that may serve to differentiate urban emergency management from the more generalized field are:

• Higher population density

• More diverse population and linguistics

• Higher infrastructure density and complexity

• Higher property values per square mile/kilometer

• Higher likelihood of cascading impacts

• Greater number of responding agencies and organizations

• Higher concentration and shorter response time of media

Ultimately, an urban emergency manager is going to be dealing with a higher number of potential cascading impacts, and a shorter timeframe before such impacts degrade critical infrastructure or threaten the lives of civilians. Large-scale emergencies in public areas will quickly attract the attention of opinion-shaping stakeholders, including politicians and the media. Extensive attention will be given to these factors later in the text.

Hazard, Threat, Risk, and Vulnerability

One of the most important differentiations in emergency management is that of hazards, risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. These factors may overlap and be the source of some confusion, but they nonetheless provide an important foundation for further discussion.

Hazard may be defined as a source or cause of potential harm or injury. Threat is an identified source of potential harm or injury, often implied to be manmade or intentional. Risk is the probability of harm or injury occurring. A vulnerability is an oversight or weakness which can be the method or avenue via which a hazard or threat causes actual damage or injury.

These concepts are certainly interrelated, and an example may help clarify the subtle differences. If a storm threatens a coastal town, wind and water are clear hazards. The failure of existing locks and levees may be additional threats. Vulnerabilities may include the susceptibility of infrastructure to damage, or a lack of redundant systems. Risk is the resulting probability of actual harm, injury, or death occurring when all factors are taken into consideration.

None of these factors exist in a vacuum, or independently of one another. In a traditional scientific sense, the concepts of hazard, threat, and vulnerability are all potential energy—possibilities waiting to happen. Risk is kinetic energy, the presumption of a given action or series of events being in motion.

While formulas vary somewhat, risk is often represented as the sum total of an asset’s value combined with its threats and vulnerabilities. In other words, without any threats or vulnerabilities, there can be no risk. Chapter 5, Assessing Risk in Urban Areas, provides extensive information on this process.

Natural, Human-Caused, and Hybrid Disasters

One of the most important differentiators within emergency management is the issue of core causation. As human beings, we like to put things into nice, neat buckets or categories.

The two major classifications commonly used to discuss and categorize disasters are natural and human-caused (sometimes referred to as manmade). As with any such broad categorization, they should be viewed as useful but limited generalizations.

A natural disaster is a crisis that is primarily caused by hazards that exist in, or are a result of, the natural environment. More specific types would include floods, earthquakes, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis. The earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004 would be a powerful example of a natural disaster.

Human-caused or manmade disasters are increasingly commonplace. As the name implies, such crises are primarily the result of human intervention or error. Types would include technological and infrastructure failures, acts of terrorism, and structure fires. The aviation-borne terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 would be an example of a human-caused disaster.

In recent decades, many disasters have defied easy categorization as purely natural or manmade in causation. Hybrid disasters are those that contain key elements of both natural and human elements, resulting in heightened risk or vulnerability. Types would include the impact of climate change on global weather patterns, or cascading events beginning in either the natural or manmade realm and spilling into the other. The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that befell Fukushima, Japan in March of 2011 provides an example of a modern hybrid disaster.

Emergency managers in urban environment must be prepared for an expanding range of threats, and of hazard types. Further discussion and analysis of all three causative factor types may be found in Chapter 3, Natural Hazards and the Urban Environment, and Chapter 4, Human-Caused Hazards and Hybrid Hazards.

Phases of Emergency Management

A phased approach is one of the keys to effectively managing a crisis. While the onset of a given disaster can appear sudden, it is important to recognize that the highly visible response to an emergency situation is but one step in a continuous and ongoing process. Life-safety efforts will be underway before, during, and after a disaster.

This emergency-management cycle now includes five phases or functions: prevention, preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery (Fig. 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Modern emergency management now encompasses five major phases, including prevention, preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery.

A key factor of this cycle is that it must be viewed as a continuum, with no defined beginning or ending point. It is also crucial to understand that phases may overlap or take place simultaneously. For example, prior to a disaster, preparedness and prevention efforts may be running in parallel. Immediately following a disaster, both response and recovery efforts may be ongoing.

Each phase will receive its own detailed analysis in a later chapter, yet a brief, introductory overview is worthwhile.

Prevention

The most newly recognized phase of emergency management is prevention. While each of the other phases presumes that a disaster will or has taken place, the concept of prevention acknowledges that some crises can be completely avoided. The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recognizes prevention as one of its five core mission areas, defining it as encompassing the capabilities necessary to avoid, prevent, or stop a disaster from occurring. Such a capability would be largely focused on efforts to avoid technological or human-caused disasters, which are particularly common in urban areas.

Preparedness

The emergency-management phase of preparedness—aligned with resilience and the protection mission area identified by FEMA—takes place largely prior to the onset of a disaster and includes training and planning for individuals and organizations. For this reason, it requires extensive participation by outside groups, and not merely emergency managers themselves. Such a capability applies to natural, human-caused, and hybrid disasters, and can have a significant effect on the impact or severity of a given