Emergency Management Organizations Research Articles

Covid Cats and Pandemic Puppies: The Altered Realm of Veterinary Care for Companion Animals during a Global Pandemic

ABSTRACT The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada and the US significantly impacted the myriad relationships that exist amongst human and non-human animals. This article highlights the tolls that the virus and lockdown measures took (and continue to take) on companion animals and the veterinary professionals who care for them. Veterinary medicine scrambled quickly to adapt to new parameters of care using pandemic protocols, radically transforming the amount and quality of care for companion animals, and the work lives of those who provide it. Changes in clinic protocols, patient admissions and discharges, deliveries, shipments, appointment scheduling and duration, and the availability of food, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment all impacted the lives of non-human animals, and the work lives of those providing veterinary care . The authors employed mixed methods research, combining ethnographic data with secondary source data analysis to illuminate the new realities of labor and interspecies care work in the lockdown-induced anthropause. The findings are relevant to veterinary professionals, researchers, companion animal guardians, animal welfare advocates, and possibly emergency management organizations in prepareding for future catastrophic events.

Recognizing and mitigating against COVID-19 consequence management impacts in emergency management organizations.

Disasters should no longer be considered along a linear timeline, where response follows preparedness, recovery follows response, and mitigation follows recovery-even if those disaster cycle phases overlap. The spiral aspects of these disaster cycle phases require communities to be in the response phase at the same time as the recovery and also mitigation phases. Emergency management (EM) organizations should use COVID-19 as the basis for a new normal as to their own continuity of operations and government. Their current model for staffing and supporting incident management is not sustainable for a long-term pandemic. The approach to any EM's organizational response to COVID-19-and the "reset/restart" of any suspended internal actions and activities-should be consistently applied across the board through all missions, all lines of service, etc., and conducted along a standardized project-management approach, with Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely (SMART) goals assigned, tracked, and reported in summary and detail by utilizing a stalwart construct from emergency management through planning, organizing, equipping, training, and exercising. The EM organization's role in their community, conducted through their people, products, and services-the tactical objectives and missions which that EM organization performs, will need to continue to adapt, not only for existing missions but also for new ones created by this pandemic as well.

Cultural Safety in Emergency Support Services

Wildfire and flood events of recent years, including this year, have stretched and tested British Columbia’s Emergency Support Services (ESS) system, a provincial program designed by Emergency Management BC (EMBC) to support evacuees. After action reviews from the 2017 and 2018 wildfire and flood seasons, demonstrate ESS approaches fell short of providing fully adequate support to Indigenous communities. Building upon a Master’s thesis which was designed using Indigenous research methodologies and action research engagement principles, I asked the question: “How might emergency management practitioners braid cultural safety and a respect, honouring and celebration of Indigenous traditional knowledge, and community-based practices into ESS training and practices?” This article offers a summary of findings and recommendations for practical application for communities and emergency management organizations across the country. The findings include:
 Finding 1 was a theme related to the context and the current state of emergency services evacuations in 2020. This included the social and historical contexts, jurisdiction, and roles and responsibilities.
 Finding 2 focused on the participants’ perspectives of a definition of ‘Cultural Safety,’ which included the identification of specific competencies, a focus on trust-based relationships, and a connection to land.
 Finding 3 focused on the evacuation and registration process, including keeping families together, the use of community ‘navigators,’ (key individuals with knowledge of community protocol trusted by the community), and suggestions for reception centres in the process of registering evacuees.
 Finding 4 was about providing appropriate supports and services to evacuate communities, including providing traditional food, appropriate accommodation, transportation, language, culture and cultural protocols, and including pets.
 Finding 5 encompassed knowledge and training required for ESS professionals engaged in evacuation of communities. This included content for culturally relevant ESS training, which need to be codesigned and led by indigenous cultural navigators, as well as incorporating evaluation and public education.
 Finding 6 is on the theme of Planning and Preparedness, and includes subtopics of relationships, professional capacity, emergency and evacuation plans, personal preparedness and responder self-care and wellness.

Examining the effects of enterprise social media on operational and social performance during environmental disruption

Building on resource-based, dynamic capabilities and knowledge-based views, we examine how enterprise social media (ESM) usage leads to organisational decision-making effectiveness, and consequently improves organisational (operational and social) performance during environmental disruption. We also investigate the mediating roles of organisational agility, ESM infrastructure and knowledge sharing on the relationship between ESM usage and decision-making effectiveness. To empirically test this model, data was collected through a survey from the employees of public/private emergency and disaster management organisations during COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh. The results confirm that ESM usage indirectly affects decision-making effectiveness, which ultimately improves organisations’ operational and social performance. Organisational agility and ESM infrastructure are strong mediators of the link between ESM usage and decision-making effectiveness, while the mediating effect of knowledge sharing through ESM is weaker. In addition to presenting theoretical rationale and empirical evidence, the study enables us to outline policy guidelines for social media managers of disaster management organisations, who must develop ESM strategies in order to boost operational and social performance. This study makes a preliminary attempt to empirically investigate ESM's innovative usage in emergency and disaster management situations.

A cadre of professionals: Credentialing emergency managers to meet the disaster challenges of the future.

This paper underscores the need for the emergency management field to professionalize further and mentions how this could be accomplished through direct state licensing, Associate Emergency Manager and/or Certified Emergency Manager credentialing, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Independent Study courses, or other state certifications such as the Illinois Professional Emergency Manager credential, in that particular state and as found in other states. This paper identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and then reviews Drabek's recommendations on how emergency managers may hone their professionalism through the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and abilities. The authors of this work add professional experience and in-person training to this list and discuss the implications of findings for research and practice by identifying several questions that will need to be addressed in the future. The overall recommendation of our article is that more efforts will be required to understand professionalism through research activities and collaboration across all types of emergency management organizations at the local, state, and federal levels-especially if we ever truly expect to enter licensing like professions such as medicine, law, engineering, accountancy, and teaching.

More than technology: Experiences of Virtual Emergency Operations Centers (VEOCs) during the COVID-19 pandemic response in Canada.

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated emergency management offices and organizations across Canada to activate their Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in a virtual capacity due to government restrictions limiting in-person activities and with the goal of reducing the spread of the virus. The aim of this exploratory research paper is to document the personal experiences of Canadian emergency management professionals working in a Virtual EOC (VEOC) environment during the COVID-19 response, including challenges and benefits they experienced, as well as lessons identified. Based on a sample of 81 emergency management professionals and using an inductive coding approach, the survey results illustrate both technological and nontechnological challenges and benefits. The findings highlight the need to incorporate three main elements into VEOC planning and operations: technology, processes, and people.

Research status and hotspot analysis of literature metrology in artificial intelligence field

It is of great significance to describe the innovation track of emergency management digital research through metrology for better grasping the theoretical system and subject frontier, and promoting the practice of emergency management digital. In this paper, artificial intelligence (AI) papers published in the world from 2010 to 2019 in the SCI database of Web of Science are taken as the research object to explore the influence of countries in the field of AI research and the current hot areas, so as to provide data support and decision-making reference for AI policy making. It is found that in the process of the development of the digitalization of emergency management from scratch, a novel and complete research system has been formed, which takes the digitalization of emergency management technology as the core and takes the digitalization of emergency management organization, the digitalization of emergency management environment and the digitalization of emergency management objects as the foundation. Further studies have found that digital frontier including emergency management in large data, mobile Internet, Internet of things, technology innovation, and AI as the representative of volunteers to digital citizens in emergency management, digital and digital community, represented by the main body of innovation, and to no one digital dynamic emergency management and the digitization of emergency management as a representative of management innovation. Finally, the study concludes that the digital integration of emergency management consists of two parts: risk information and emergency response.

A Hybrid Approach of VIKOR and Bi-Objective Decision Model for Emergency Shelter Location–Allocation to Respond to Earthquakes

Earthquakes have catastrophic effects on the affected population, especially in undeveloped countries or regions. Minimizing the impact and consequences of earthquakes involves many decisions and disaster relief operations that should be optimized. A critical disaster management problem is to construct shelters with reasonable capacity in the right locations, allocate evacuees, and provide relief materials to them within a reasonable period. This study proposes a bi-objective hierarchical model with two stages, namely, the temporary shelter stage and the short-term shelter stage. The proposed objectives at different stages are to minimize the evacuation time, maximize the suitability based on qualitative factors, and minimize the number of sites while considering the demand, capacity, utilization, and budget constraints. The performance evaluation of the emergency shelter was carried out by fuzzy-VIKOR, and the most ideal location of the shelter was determined through multiple standards. Emergency management organizations can benefit from the collective expertise of multiple decision-makers because the proposed method uses their knowledge to automate the location and allocation process of shelters. In the case of Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, the results of using this hybrid approach provide the government with a range of options. This method can realize the trade-off between efficiency and cost in the emergency shelter location and material distribution, and realize reliable solutions in disaster emergencies.

Organizational Disaster Communication Ecology: Examining Interagency Coordination on Social Media During the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Interagency coordination is crucial for effective multiagency disaster management. Viewing government and emergency management organizations as vital components of citizens’ disaster communication ecology, this study examines how a group of Texas-based public health departments and emergency management offices engaged in interagency coordination during different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. By analyzing coronavirus-related agency tweets between early February and the end of August 2020, the study assesses two types of interagency coordination: (1) content-level coordination in the form of semantic similarity among the selected public agencies serving different jurisdictions and (2) relational-level coordination in terms of referencing common stakeholders through retweeting coronavirus-related information. Using a granular, four-stage construct of a crisis, results identify stage-based variation with regard to peer-to-peer and federal-to-local coordination. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications for communication ecology and disaster management.

Strategy of establishing the super network emergency plan system in coastal cities of China

To make the emergency plan system more feasible and make up for the deficiency of current emergency management organization, a super network structure model of the emergency plan system of coastal cities based on risk scenarios, emergency tasks, emergency resources and emergency capabilities is proposed. Firstly, according to the requirements of the super network structure and the key influencing factors of the emergency plan system in coastal cities, four types of core elements, namely risk scenarios, emergency tasks, emergency resources and emergency capabilities, are proposed. Secondly, the paper defined the relationship of similar core elements and heterogeneous core elements and established a super network structure of coastal city emergency plan system, which consists of four types of core elements and multi-nodes participating in super edge. Thirdly, in order to measure the feasibility of the emergency plan system, the comprehensive index evaluation method of feasibility is proposed by integrating three indicators: node correlation degree, emergency plan system coordination ability and emergency plan system similarity. Finally, the case application shows that the super network model provides an effective method for establishing emergency plan system of coastal cities in China.

Forecasting the impacts of severe weather

National meteorological and hydrological services provide severe weather warning information to inform decision-making by emergency management organisations. Such information also helps communities to take defensive and mitigating actions prior to and during severe weather events. Globally, warning information issued by meteorological and hydrological services varies widely. This can range from solely hazard-based to impact-based forecasting encompassing the exposure and vulnerability of communities to severe weather. The most advanced of these systems explicitly and quantitatively model the impacts of hazards on affected assets or infrastructure such as vehicle traffic or housing. Incorporating impact information into severe weather warnings contextualises and personalises the warning information, increasing the likelihood that individuals and communities will take preparatory action. However, providing useful and detailed impact information remains a challenge. This paper reviews a selection of current severe weather warnings and impact forecasting capabilities globally and highlights uncertainties that limit the forecasting and modelling of multi-hazard events.

Information management and the return-entry process: Examining information needs, sources, and strategies after Superstorm Sandy

The effective management of disasters requires timely and accurate information. Both emergency management (EM) organizations and the public are involved in information management activities during and after a disaster where they seek information from various sources to reduce disaster-related uncertainties. While studies have focused on information needs and source reliance behaviors of EM organizations amid a disaster, the information management behaviors of the organizations during return-entry phase has gained little scholarly attention. This study examines the information management strategies of local EM organizations while managing the initial return-entry movement following Superstorm Sandy. Using a qualitative research design, the researchers conducted semi-structured telephone interviews with 25 EM officials from New Jersey. The data analysis yielded five themes that highlight the information management strategies of the EM organizations – information needs, information sources, information seeking behavior, information exchange, and applying information for return-entry decisions. This paper discusses these findings and provides proactive strategies to gather and manage information to facilitate return-entry decision-making and risk communication in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

Organizational culture on the Facebook page of an emergency management agency: a thematic analysis

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to identify organizational cultural factors and overarching themes on emergency management evident across the Facebook page of an emergency management organization. This study also aims to understand the dimensions of social capital that influence the reputation of emergency management organization using the lens of organizational culture.Design/methodology/approachThe organizational cultural factors defined in the literature were used to classify content posted by the organization during a six-month period. The posts were read and analyzed thematically to determine the overarching themes evident across the collected posts. The dimensions of social capital defined in the literature were used to determine its influence on the reputation of an emergency management organization.FindingsThe organizational cultural factors that emerged from the analysis are openness and future orientation without any evidence on risk-taking and flexibility. An analysis of cultural factors indicates that organizational culture facilitates knowledge exchange and knowledge combination. The key themes embedded in the organization's posts are emergency preparedness, communication devices for emergency management, coordination and admiration. The dimensions of social capital that influenced the reputation of emergency management organization were group characteristics, volunteerism, generalized norms and togetherness. Though previous studies have found the influence of culture on social capital, this study extends those findings by identifying the dimensions of culture (i.e. openness and future orientation) that reflects the social capital dimensions (i.e. generalized norms and group characteristics) in an organizational setting.Research limitations/implicationsThis study contributes to theory on the identification of cultural factors from content posted by emergency management organizations on a public social networking site (SNS). The organization benefited in terms of its reputation through the dimensions of social capital which are group characteristics, volunteerism, generalized norms and togetherness. One of the organizational reputation dimensions that was evident in this study was moral reputation which is a contribution of this study.Practical implicationsAmong the guiding principles of Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, three guiding principles were evident in the posts of the emergency management organization. These principles which represent the practical implications of this study are disaster risk reduction through cooperation, inclusiveness of minority community members and implementing cost-effective and sustainable development policies for future through investment.Originality/valuePrevious studies have examined organizational culture in general, but to date there has been very little research into determining cultural factors that facilitate knowledge exchange and knowledge combination. This is also a unique study which identified the dimensions of social capital and organizational reputation in emergency management.

Civil society mobilisation after Cyclone Tracy, Darwin 1974

ABSTRACT Major disasters challenge or exceed the capacity of the official emergency management sector to provide needed rescue services, support and relief. Emergency services in most jurisdictions do not have the surge capacity for unusual or extreme events without drawing on other jurisdictions or local people from outside the formal emergency management organisations. In such circumstances, those in the affected area need to organise themselves and make maximum use of local resources to cope with the immediate aftermath of impact. To find the required surge capacity, this suggests a whole of society response with the official system working with the capacities of people, commerce and organisations outside the emergency sector. An example is provided by the destruction of the northern Australian capital city of Darwin by Cyclone Tracy in December 1974. Informal volunteering and emergent leadership in Darwin and across Australia were critical to the immediate response and relief. Volunteering was widespread and worked well alongside official emergency management. With today’s information and communication technologies and a strong national resilience narrative, we would expect to do at least as well. However, governments now exercise much more control over civil society. We examine the implications for surge capacity and adaptability.

LoRaMoto: A communication system to provide safety awareness among civilians after an earthquake

Civilians in areas hit by earthquakes become in particular concerned about the safety of family and friends. However, outages in communications networks following these events limit their capacity to get information. So, people drive their cars to check on their loved ones, risking their own lives and hindering the activities of first response organizations. This article proposes LoRaMoto, a communications system that allows civilians to exchange information about their status with others without hampering the first responders and minimizing their exposure to hazards. Furthermore, the information exchanged can be aggregated to support the operations of emergency management. LoRaMoto extends the LoRaWAN architecture and implements a packet-forwarding mechanism between the end nodes of the system. This helps overcome potential infrastructure blackouts after an earthquake, so it provides safety awareness information when it is most needed. We evaluated the system performance and capacity of this system by simulating its use in a realistic environment, testing a baseline configuration, and exploring several modifications to better understand its scalability and its portability to other emergency environments. The simulation results show how the LoRaMoto system can meet the communication needs of civilians, and also keep first response and emergency management organizations informed.

Navigating authority and legitimacy when ‘outsider’ volunteers co-produce emergency management services

ABSTRACT This paper examines the thorny issue of authority and legitimacy in relation to ‘outsider’ emergency volunteering within the context of the community resilience policy agenda. Outsider emergency volunteering is any volunteering that: (a) aims to assist communities in any aspect of disaster preparedness, response, relief and recovery, and (b) is not registered with or under the direction of a formally recognised emergency management organisation (EMO). Hence, it does not have clear grounds to establish its authority and legitimacy within the formal authorising environment of the emergency management sector. The paper draws on co-production theory to examine how three important challenges for establishing authority and legitimacy were navigated in four Australian cases of co-production involving outsider emergency volunteering. Given the rise of resilience in disaster policy and the changing nature of volunteering in modern society, the very formalised and defined foundations of authority and legitimacy in emergency management will need to soften and expand to become more networked and distributed. The four cases described here shed some light on what softer and expanded foundations for authority and legitimacy can look like and the processes that can support them in the emergency management context.

Bushfire investigations in Australia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the process of collective leadership in emergency management organisations. More specifically, the authors investigate the conditions that enable or prevent collective leadership amongst key actors in the emergency management network in bushfire investigations. We also examine how chief investigators facilitate the conditions to effectively distribute leadership and the role of social networks within this process.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative case study approach was undertaken, and 18 semi-structured interviews were carried out with chief investigators, 6 at each of three agencies in Australia. A framework for understanding collective leadership (Friedrich et al., 2016) was used to examine key leadership constructs, baseline leadership and outcomes relative to bushfire investigations.FindingsFindings demonstrate that there is no evidence of collective leadership at the network level of bushfire investigations. There is mixed evidence of collective leadership within bushfire investigation departments, with the Arson Squad being the only government agency to engage in collective leadership. The authors found evidence that government bureaucracy and mandated protocols inhibited the ability of formal leaders to distribute leadership, gauge a clear understanding of the level of skill and expertise amongst chief investigators and poor communication that inhibited knowledge of investigations.Research limitations/implicationsThe study was limited to three bushfire investigative agencies. A future study will be carried out with other stakeholders, such as fire investigators and firefighters in the field.Practical implicationsFor the government, emergency management agencies and other stakeholders, a key enabler of collective leadership within the emergency management network is the presence of a formal leader within a network. That leader has the authority and political ability to distribute leadership to other experts.Social implicationsThe paper contributes to developing a better understanding of the efficacy and challenges associated with the application of collective leadership theory in a complex government bureaucracy. There are positive implications for the safety of firefighters, the protection of the broader community, their properties and livestock.Originality/valueThe authors address the lack of literature on effective leadership processes amongst emergency management agencies. The paper contributes to extending collective leadership theory by unpacking the processes through which leadership is distributed to team members and the role of institutions (i.e. fire investigation bureaucracy) on social networks within this integrative process. The authors provide new insights into the practice of collective leadership in complex bureaucratic organisations.

The Subseasonal Experiment (SubX): A Multimodel Subseasonal Prediction Experiment

AbstractThe Subseasonal Experiment (SubX) is a multimodel subseasonal prediction experiment designed around operational requirements with the goal of improving subseasonal forecasts. Seven global models have produced 17 years of retrospective (re)forecasts and more than a year of weekly real-time forecasts. The reforecasts and forecasts are archived at the Data Library of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia University, providing a comprehensive database for research on subseasonal to seasonal predictability and predictions. The SubX models show skill for temperature and precipitation 3 weeks ahead of time in specific regions. The SubX multimodel ensemble mean is more skillful than any individual model overall. Skill in simulating the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), two sources of subseasonal predictability, is also evaluated, with skillful predictions of the MJO 4 weeks in advance and of the NAO 2 weeks in advance. SubX is also able to make useful contributions to operational forecast guidance at the Climate Prediction Center. Additionally, SubX provides information on the potential for extreme precipitation associated with tropical cyclones, which can help emergency management and aid organizations to plan for disasters.

Are fire services ‘extremely gendered’ organizations? Examining the Country Fire Authority (CFA) in Australia

Emergency management organizations often have military‐based histories and continue to maintain militaristic styles of operation. Similar to the military, these organizations tend to be male dominated and culturally masculinized. The militarization and masculinization of rural fire services in Australia are generally unrecognized but highly important elements defining these organizations, and the example of the Country Fire Authority (CFA) is considered here. Using a cultural artefacts approach, historical and contemporary elements of the CFA's structure and practice are analysed using the concept of an ‘extremely gendered’ organization, with a focus on how the CFA is structurally and culturally gendered. We argue there is value in expanding the notion of ‘extremely gendered’ institutions beyond the military, to include other militarized organizations. Doing so not only helps to better understand and address resistance to change and gender equality measures, it also draws attention to the important role that such organizations play in the greater patriarchal order.

Repertoires of collaboration: incorporation of social media help requests into the common operating picture

ABSTRACTDisasters present us with dynamic and emergent multi-stakeholder scenarios. Complex decision-making is supported by Emergency Management Organisation (EMO) ‘command and control’ disaster response systems that if pushed to failure, present problems in the development and monitoring of situational awareness. Nowhere is this more evident than when the general public use social media platforms to report crisis incidents when the official emergency management hotline (e.g. Triple Zero (000) in Australia) is overwhelmed or not available. This causes a number of issues for EMO as it is difficult to verify and determine the accuracy and veracity of social media posts and how to best incorporate the information within them into situational awareness for the assessment of and response to, an emergency incident. This paper analyses interview data from five Australian EMO that outlines and discusses these issues in detail. As a result of this analysis, we suggest that developing a supplementary ‘repertoires of collaboration’ approach to incorporating social media posts into the development of situational awareness during a disaster event, would help improve disaster response outcomes. We then recommend a way forward through the application of the Negotiated Arrangements for the Common Operating Picture (COP) in Extreme Events framework.