get fierce

On a brilliant crystal blue morning in September 2001, I emerged from a subway station at the corner of Church and Chambers streets, as I had nearly every day for ten years, into a world that was utterly unfamiliar. Instead of hustle and movement, cars and people were stopped, frozen in place. Everybody was looking up. So I looked up too. American Airlines Flight 11 - a Boeing 767 jet that had departed Logan Airport 50 mins earlier en route to Los Angeles with a crew of 11 and 76 passengers - had crashed into the World Trade Center. Although burning inside, the smoke and flames were not yet outside. Just a gigantic black gash across the 89th floor of the northern face of the tower.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. It felt unreal, like being in a movie

As emergency managers, most of us have experienced the first minutes of a major disaster

If you cast your mind back to that time, what do you remember about it?

Did you get a strange feeling, something like a plunge into chaos?

Some people talk about a sense that they are looking down at themselves from above

But that was just your mind, adapting to the change

Because, as I learned on that day - and have relearned over and over in the eighteen years since - in the early hours of a major disaster, everything is different

parallel universe

It could be anything

—widespread and all-encompassing, like a tropical cyclone packing 230 km/ h winds slamming into a coastal town

—or focused and devastating, like cold-blooded men with assault rifles attacking a shopping mall on a busy afternoon

But when it happens, we are cast out of our orderly and familiar reality into a new one that is anything but

That new reality is not just a variation on the theme of everyday life

It is not just some fast-moving time—one end of the spectrum, with daily life being the other

The disaster is fundamentally different, alien, and abhorrent…

It is a parallel universe

Unlike our ordered and (sometimes) rational world, in the parallel universe, chaos and confusion reign

The normal rules of logic, even basic ones like cause and effect, don’t apply

The instant you enter it, an electric charge will strike deep into the most ancient and primitive part of your brain

The amygdala, commonly referred to as the lizard brain, is where your primal instinct to fight, take flight, or freeze resides

In the old days, when your ancestors were lizards, their survival instinct would suppress all other thinking in times like this to focus on fighting or fleeing

This is good when your best option is to run away but bad for nearly everything else

A cocktail of hormones - dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol - will surge through your body

And your prefrontal cortex, responsible for higher-level thinking, will begin to shut down

So just when you need your wits the most, they will abandon you

That is why you will begin to behave strangely

You will start to rely more on your feelings than on the reality that is before your eyes

You will ignore stressful thoughts and hard facts and reassure yourself by explaining away the danger

You will fall back into old routines, trying to solve problems in familiar ways, sometimes again and again, regardless of the results

You might just act as though nothing is happening

But this would not be a good move and is likely to result in suboptimal outcomes

Because in the parallel universe, doing something is always better than doing nothing

the emotional basement

You will be hit by a wave of agonizing thoughts and painful emotions

The crisis will take over the voice in your head: “You can’t handle this,” it will say “No way can you figure this one out”

Leonard Marcus and Eric McNulty at Harvard call this amygdala-controlled state the “emotional basement”

As you stumble around in your dark and musty emotional basement, you will be overcome with a jumble of negative emotions: grief, fear, anger, regret, hate…

You will grieve for so many things, starting with lost loved ones and extending all the way to lost time with your friends and family

You will fear the ordeal

Because you will know that the problems are coming, hard and fast

Some you will be able to solve, but not all—at least not immediately

These will burn white hot in your lap until they are resolved

You will fear the work, because you will know that you won’t be working like you worked yesterday or had planned to work tomorrow

You will be working twice as hard, possibly harder than you have ever worked in your life

You will feel anger and regret for things you did or didn’t do that supposedly put you into this situation

(for instance, “why didn’t I go to law school like Mom told me?”)

You will hate your life

You will hate the world and everything in it

As an emergency manager, this will be your moment of truth

The fateful moment when you must decide to engage or to disengage

Do you step down and fade into the background? Or do you step up?

In the absence of complete information, in the presence of dozens of unanswered questions, in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, in the presence of danger and risk, you must turn and face the dragon

murphy’s addendum

"Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth" American boxer Mike Tyson

As you sit here today, you’re pretty confident

You know a crisis is coming and that you will have to face it

That’s your job

You’ve been in tough spots before and you’re pretty sure you’re up to the challenge

That’s what we plan for

With a little luck and a lot of hard work, you’ll get through it

But, once inside the parallel universe, that confidence will be shattered

—when those things that always worked for you stop working and the people who were always there for you are gone

The first moments of a crisis are like stepping into a boxing ring and realizing that you need to punch way about your weight

…reliable information sources suddenly become unreliable as you get strange reports from the field…your need for people, vehicles, supplies, equipment and expertise far exceed what you can get your hands on…people at all levels of your organization who thought they knew how to work together are suddenly unable to communicate...

You think that you’re ready for the crisis

But when it comes, it will wipe your mind clean and you will forget everything.

know the enemy

Right about now, you may be thinking 

Isn’t this a happy message? What the hell am I supposed to do?

Well, the first thing you must do is recognize

That you own the disaster

And it is your job to provide effectiveness

To commit and deliver, for every type of disaster

And that the single best way to get better at 'working the job' is to work the job

Stop spending so much time trying to predict the future, searching for bugs in the software or targets that need hardening, and spend more time learning how reconfigure yourself to confront the unknown in a complex environment

It’s true that coaches sit around with their teams, talking about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. But eventually they put on the pads and play some football

So when you’re not actually “working the job”, your Job 1 must be to “Get to StartEx”

Your core mission must be to put your team into focused, realistic, well-crafted and well-executed exercises 

immunize by immersion

You must immerse yourself in the emergency manager's unique style of immunotherapy

Just as vaccinations inject a small dose of disease to motivate bodies to resist its stronger form, you must inject disaster into your days to increase your ability to face the rigors of the parallel universe

Only by plunging yourself into stressful scenarios can you build your ability to confront the unknown in a complex environment

get fierce

There are no rules in the parallel universe

There are only questions with no answers

Who’s in charge?

Where is the cavalry?

Who will help the seniors, the individuals with disabilities, the children and families who are trapped inside the parallel universe?

Who is working across thousands of kilometers of affected area to rescue people from collapsed buildings, pump out the water, get power and cell phone service back, and clear the streets?

Who is providing shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for millions more?

You need to have the answers

You need to know what will happen, who is going to do it, and where you are going to get all of the stuff you will need

Because the nature of the catastrophe is that it will start suddenly and with great intensity, with the biggest problems and greatest needs coming in its earliest hours

These early hours—the so-called golden hours—will be a time of maximum chaos

The actions you take then will determine your fate

There can be no timidity then

You must show ferocity, an intense focus; a quiet aggressiveness and heartfelt and powerful intensity 

Emergency managers are usually the nicest people in the room, we have a reputation for that

But that’s in the normal world 

In the normal world, everybody loves the nice emergency manager 

But in the parallel universe, you owe it to the people you serve to be the fierce one

Kelly R McKinney is the Senior Director of Emergency Management + Enterprise Resilience for NYU Langone Health. He is the former Deputy Commissioner for Preparedness at the New York City Office of Emergency Management and Chief Disaster Officer at the American Red Cross in Greater New York. He is the author of “Moment of Truth: The Nature of Catastrophes and How to Prepare for Them” that was released last July by Post Hill Press