The Tail of the Response

Local officials provide an update on Hurricane Michael's impending landfall from the Bay County Emergency Operations Center | 10 October 2018 | Source: Dolores Hinckley, WUFT News

Since well before dawn, first responders from across the nation have been rushing into a devastated landscape, in a desperate bid to reach stranded survivors. In just a few hours, a monster has transformed the lush cypress and pine forests, the quaint beach towns and family-friendly attractions of the Panhandle. Michael has propelled people out of their orderly and familiar reality into a new one that is anything but. This 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 world Michael left behind is fundamentally different, unearthly and strange….it is a parallel universe.

The scene in Mexico Beach, FL | Source: Associated Press

The most important work, by far, in the parallel universe is done by those police officers and firefighters and rescue workers all across the disaster zone. This is known as the tactical level, or “teeth,” of the response. As a disaster expert, though, my thoughts, along with those of my colleagues around the country and the world, are with the men and women gathered in and around operations centers, supporting the teeth of the response with critical information and resources and solving the problems that the tactical-level can’t solve on the ground. From the outside, the EOC—the “tail” of the response—looks boring. But that tail work can have a profound effect on outcomes in the field.

The local EOC is the epicenter of every catastrophe, and in these early days, they are the busiest places on earth. Already they have been working non-stop for nearly a week, with no rest anywhere in sight. Indeed the hard part starts now. On Wednesday two reporters from the local public radio station moved into a local EOC near Panama City, Florida. You can read their updates here:

https://www.wuft.org/news/2018/10/10/first-person-inside-panama-city-as-hurricane-michael-makes-landfall-as-category-4/

At 1:04pm local time yesterday, as the eyewall of Hurricane Michael made landfall just outside the walls of the Bay County Emergency Operations Center, cell and internet service went down. Nobody has heard from them since.

Congressman Neal Dunn receiving a briefing from NWS and BCEM staff | 09 October 2018 | Source: Bay County Emergency Services Facebook site

Many of us have been there before.  In addition to supporting the Harris County Texas emergency operations center during Hurricane Ike in 2007 and Hurricane Harvey last year, I managed the New York City emergency operations center during Hurricanes Irene and Sandy. As the saying goes: “I’m no smarter than anyone else, I’ve just had a lot more practice”.

But every disaster is different and Michael will be no exception. To our shores he has brought his unique arsenal of impacts, specifically designed to disrupt critical infrastructure—power, water, food, medicine, sanitation, housing, you name it—in unique and unprecedented ways.

And while many in the media focus on Michael’s affect on those coastal cities, disaster experts must worry more about the inland areas, where even a massive response will be hindered by poor infrastructure and challenging geography.

Today these poor, rural communities remained largely cut off; thousands of children and families are being impacted in the same way at the same time. As the fabric of society unravels, their comfort and sense of order evaporates. Fear seeps in to replace the destroyed rhythm of daily life. Many are doing what people always do in these situations: nothing. They are hunkered down, trapped in the parallel universe, trying to distract themselves until someone comes along to help them.

The emergency manager has the hardest job in the world, because it’s not enough for them to do a lot of things very quickly. Because human needs cannot wait, they have to be able to do everything all at once.  Now that Michael has surged in, they must now surge. They need to get big enough fast enough to manage the tsunami of issues that are emerging now in its early hours.

These professionals know that success or failure is determined by what they do and don’t do in the first hours of the crisis. Many have learned the hard way that excuses are worthless—and that because there can be no excuse for failure, failure cannot be an option.

But here’s the problem. They can’t do it alone. 

FEMA and the President tell us that local governments ‘own the job’ and that they are leaning forward to ‘support’ them with anything they might need. But the locals are getting crushed. They don’t have the bandwidth to even get a good picture of what is happening across their devastated regions, much less to manage a massive influx of aid. The reality is that nobody at the local level can come close to doing what is needed right now.

They need help. 

This kind of help can only come by pulling people and teams away from their day jobs in other governments, the private sector, and nonprofit and faith-based organizations and bringing them together with a unity of purpose into one incident organization to collaborate, innovate, solve problems, make decisions, and act in the moment.

Over the coming days and weeks dozens, perhaps hundreds, of teams are needed to focus on different aspects of the disaster—search and rescue, damage assessment, evacuation, sheltering, logistics, debris removal, disaster assistance, fatality management, feeding, and on and on.

People think that government has some innate ability to respond to disasters. Nothing could be further from the truth. Governments are slow-moving creatures of habit, ill-suited to the demands of the parallel universe. The emergency manager is the antidote.  She creates an instant bureaucracy that supercharges the government-led response.

Right now, emergency managers are working non-stop to beg, borrow and steal everything they need to get the job done. And we must help them. Because Michael is not a local disaster, it is not a statewide disaster, it is a national disaster, with all of us inside her parallel universe. We’re duty-bound to assist our fellow human beings in their time of greatest need, with dignity and respect.

Kelly R McKinney is the former Deputy Commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management. From 2013 to 2016 he was the Chief Disaster Officer for 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 in July by Post Hill Press.