Abstract

The Incident of Sewol Ferry had acted as a wake up call for the National Disaster Management System. For over decades, the Republic of Korea (ROK) had experienced major incidents, such as the Collapse of Sampoong Department Store in 1995 and the recent Sinking of Sewol Ferry in 2014. The Government of ROK had been recognizing the needs to restructure/reform the disaster management strategy and disaster response system, but as seen in the Incident of Sewol Ferry and its aftermath, it still reveals various short comings within the disaster management system. As a means to respond to such disasters in time, this paper states that the most suitable leadership required for the successful disaster management at the field is the vertical leadership. It first summarizes the current disaster management system of ROK, and then compares it to the disaster management system of other nations, particularly the United States and Japan. As the result of this comparison, this paper suggests three possible means of applying vertical leadership to improve ROK’s disaster response system. First, it is important to reduce the power of the control tower and central management system in order to expand and concentrate the power on the field leaders. Second it is important to empower the field leaders with necessary powers to manage the disaster site and manage the nearby resources to respond to the disaster. Lastly, this paper insists that it the government should prepare the disaster management infrastructure such as manuals, communication networks, cooperation system. and others.

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