Joining the Bandwagon: The American Red Cross Embraces the “Disaster Cycle” and Resilience

Though I may gaze upon the Red Cross, as an organization, with some degree of amusement and cynicism, it does not lessen my support (best provided from the safety of a volunteer position) of its humanitarian mission….

If you haven’t heard, the American Red Cross is currently “re-engineering” its Disaster Services.  This initiative should not be confused with the national “restructuring” that occurred throughout 2011 (in Texas, this restructuring consolidated the 8-10 existing Texas ARC Regions into four regions, each one larger than many states…on the very day the change took effect, mother nature celebrated the change with the start of the worst wildfires in Texas’ history). For some staff members, who have once again seen their job eliminated or merged into another position, resulting once again in the need to re-apply for their job, the end result of the two efforts has been similar.  With all of the recent restructuring/reorganizing/re-engineering, who could blame staff members for wondering if they should just plan on re-applying for their job every two years…  

In the brave new world of ARC Disaster Services, organization of services will be based upon the completely useful, but totally artificial, concept of the “disaster cycle.” So there will be Preparedness, Response, and Recovery functions, plus many of the old functions (logistics…operations management)  that don’t fit so neatly under just one of the three phases, all packaged under the new title of Disaster Cycle Management.   I did not realize there was a critical shortage of terminology in the field.  Emergency Management, Comprehensive Emergency Management, Integrated Emergency Management, Integrated Disaster Risk Management, Disaster Management, Disaster Risk Reduction, Disaster Services, and other terms weren’t sufficient?   Now Disaster Cycle Management arrives to crash the party.  The term makes me think of disaster management and washing machines.   Needlessly coining new terminology is almost more than I can take, but….I think I can live with it.

Community resilience is also making its way into the language of ARC, and the staff member whom I serve as a Volunteer Partner, will soon sit in the newly created position of Regional Manager, Individual and Community Preparedness and Resilience. It worries me to see the concept of resilience appearing as a form of job title, when neither researchers nor practitioners are quite sure exactly what resilience is or is not, and how can it be quantified meaningfully.   And operationalization and quantification of resilience as a performance goal is what I fear ARC will do.  ARC likes to quantify and demystify the abstract…disaster magnitudes, for example,  are categorized into tiers based on ARC financial  expenditures for the disaster.  This makes sense.  

Sometimes, however, attempts at quantification to improve performance can interfere with the performance it was meant to improve.  In ARC Disaster Assessment, for example, one particular measure of good performance has been the percentage difference between our PDA (preliminary damage assessment) and the final damage totals (what we call the Detailed Damage Assessment).  Discrepancies exceeding a particular threshold (I seem to recall it being somewhere around 2-5%) is unacceptable.  

Adherence to this goal is so ingrained into DA Managers, that I have seen how concerned people appear to become if new information from the field results in substantial increases to the PDA total.  Such was the case during the 2011 Texas wildfires, when a DA field team spoke to a member of one town’s city council, which lead to the discovery of 80-100 destroyed homes that neither the city, county, state, nor local media were reporting.  As the person who was checking and rechecking damage estimates several times a day, as well as locating potential damage locations for DA teams to check, I could almost hear someone above me in the hierarchy asking, “Well…how do you miss 80-100 homes in your PDA????”  It really isn’t that difficult when you have multiple, rapidly changing, wildfires across something like 10,000 square miles.  One could even point out that wildfires (and perhaps river flooding as well) are, almost by nature, an expanding, evolving, type of disaster unlike the “over-and-done-with” destruction of most earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes. 

Last year I also had a heated argument with a DA Manager during the April DFW tornado outbreak.   As I was unable to serve as DA Manager for the entire operation, I was asked to serve in that capacity, and assist in planning and maintaining situation awareness until the manager arrived later in the evening.  I would then hand over to him and he could hit the ground running.   I had spent the day of the outbreak, and most of the night, gathering damage reports from local media sources, confirming, and mapping known areas of damage, with the expectation DA teams would be going into the field first thing in the morning.  I discovered the next morning that this did not happen. The DA Manager  told me damage estimates from city and county officials are not acceptable sources for PDA damage numbers–they must come from DA field teams.  He preferred to spend nearly two days having DA teams go out to do a PDA survey, even when the general boundaries of the damage area were known.  He would then have those same teams go back to the same areas to begin the detailed assessment.  This makes little sense to me, as it wastes our most valuable resource: the time of the volunteers.  The entirety of the DDA could have been completed in 1-3 days, depending on how many teams were assigned.  The sooner the DDA is completed, the sooner the client caseworkers will have the information they need to assist disaster victims, and the sooner the damage assessment side of the operation can wrap-up and go home.

That is when I learned to tell myself, “However the Manager wants it done is the way it is going to get done.”

Of course, when damage is spread across vast distances, or information about possible damage locations and severity is lacking, then good PDA and needs assessment methodology is essential (and which there does not seem to be much written about–a side project I may undertake when I start a PhD program is to work on investigating the accuracy of different geographic sampling methods in estimating needs and damages in large-scale disasters).  The PDA is important, as these initial estimates will be used to scale the ARC response…though it is not the only information used.  In terms of process, a PDA/DDA percent discrepancy isn’t nearly as important as whether it adversely affected ARC response; what was the cause (or causes) of the discrepancy; and whether or not, or to what extent, the cause of the discrepancy is a DA performance failure that can and should be corrected.

A Preliminary Damage Assessment (in terms of ARC) is supposed to be exactly that….PRELIMINARY–it may change..it probably will change….that is the nature and the fog of disaster.  Whether it is damage assessments or resiliency indicators, when we are not careful, we unwittingly create systems that lead staff to serve not the actual process for which they are responsible, but instead some possibly arbitrary, or poorly constructed, marker of  performance of the process.

In the case of community resilience, if ARC does decide to create performance measures, I do hope someone checks that whatever measures are chosen actually do correlate to some degree with measures of community disaster recovery and long-term risk reduction.