Abstract
The connection between “schools” of study focusing on crises and on natural disasters is explored. After considering the rise of separate schools, the article notes significant attempts to integrate them and suggests that, while natural disasters and other big crises have much in common, there are still some important differences that need to be taken into account in designing relevant management systems. Drawing particularly on Australian wildfire experience, the article then looks more briefly at the question of political leadership in disaster situations, and at serious problems that often occur in the reporting of those situations.
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Notes
In the 1990s I had a fairly brief involvement in a project to record the history of a remarkable peak body of Australian NGOs active in disaster relief activity in the Pacific region and operating with a progressively reducing measure of government support (Britton et al. 1998).
For just a few examples of their work, see Dynes 1970; Quarantelli 1954, 1978, 1998a; Quarantelli and Dynes 1970. For a list of their publications up to 1994, see Dynes and Tierney 1994: bibliography. There were connected economic studies, as eg Dacy and Kunreuther 1969. The early organization and history, drawn from relevant US literature and visits to DRC, is summarised in Wettenhall 1975: chs 1,2.
IJMED has been published quarterly since 1983. It was preceded by an earlier series entitled Mass Emergencies running from 1975, together with a newsletter entitled Unscheduled Events.
As one of the leaders of the about-to-emerge “crisis school” pointed out, “for a considerable period of time, crisis used to be the pet concept of experts in international relations” (Rosenthal 1998b: 228).
Rosenthal was to explain later that the mission was to explore “the concept of crisis, which links threat, uncertainty, urgency and stress, [with “crisis”] particularly useful as the common denominator for a wide variety of phenomena, one of which is disaster” (Rosenthal 1998b: 227; see also Rosenthal et al. 1989). It may be that the sociological flavour of the natural disaster school deterred others involved in developing emergency management policies and structures from taking much account of it. Thus it was asserted in the 1980s, in a special issue of Public Administration Review on emergency management, that little research existed on proper policy and administration in the crisis/emergency management field (Mushkatel and Weschler 1985: 45); and see the Korean study by Kim and Lee (2001: 503).
Towards the close of the 20th century, a series of ‘major failures in high risk technologies embedded in complex organizations’ (Shrivastava 1988: 283; see also Shrivastava 1987)—notably the cases of Three Mile Island, Bhopal and Chernobol—produced strong interest in the sub-field of ‘industrial disasters’, and Quarantelli (1988) was soon demonstrating the relevance of findings in natural disaster research to that sub-field.
There is a mass of evidence in the literature coming from the natural disaster school to support these propositions.
The notion of a disaster time-scale (warning-threat-impact-inventory-rescue-remedy-recovery: see Dynes 1970) was another of the important contributions of the DRC. I found it extremely helpful in my researches into the administrative impact of the Tasmanian firestorm.
It is suggested that this was abundantly confirmed by the ongoing dramas surrounding Hurricane Katrina, which have been the subject of numerous reviews and much analysis.
The notion of an “unknowable world” comes from Stacey 1992.
In a broader discussion of “damning” and “blaming” strategies, Brändström and Kuipers (2003: 279) observed that “critical events in the public domain ... generate negative emotions, insecurity and questioning about responsibility”, and that consequential inquiry activity has two dimensions—discovering the truth about what happened and allocating responsibility—and that the latter involves blame assignment.
Its principal author, former ombudsman Ron McLeod, was appointed to the Victorian royal commission established in February 2009 to inquire into the circumstances of the new firestorm. The royal commission is the strongest and most independent form of public inquiry available in Australian governance, and a classic earlier example inquired into another major firestorm that took 71 lives in south-eastern Australia in the 1938–39 summer (Stretton 1939).
The coroner’s role has traditionally been to establish the identities of those who have died in accidents, crimes and so on and to report on the causes of death in each case, so freeing up the clearing of estates. The position is familiar in many government systems owing something to the British model; the “medical examiner” found in some other systems performs a similar role. In most Australian states, however, the role had evolved by the time of the 2003 Canberra firestorm to the extent that the coroner could conduct a much wider-ranging inquiry and comment on many facets of the administrative process involved in death-causing events (Freckelton 1999; Freckelton and Ranson 2006).
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Appendix: Disaster is no one’s fault
Appendix: Disaster is no one’s fault
Only in the minds of poets and hymn-writers are floods cleansing. In real life, they are filthy, opening sewers, contaminating water supplies and spreading disease.
It is understandable that victims should cast round for someone to blame. There may have been avoidable errors. Warnings were slow in coming; housing has encrusted the flood plain as the result of over-crowding. But such building is not new: many of the afflicted towns are ancient settlements.
No one can have failed to spot the heavy rains. We are surely not so debilitated that we refuse to take precautions until instructed to do so. Within hours, fire crews were out, lifeboats were plying the newly navigable streets and RAF helicopters were winching people to safety...
[None of this has] stopped journalists and politicians from trying to identify a villain, the better to sustain the belief that we always ought to be in control of events, and that disasters must be therefore someone’s fault (Daily Telegraph 2007).
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Wettenhall, R. Crises and Natural Disasters: a Review of Two Schools of Study Drawing on Australian Wildfire Experience. Public Organ Rev 9, 247–261 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-009-0084-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-009-0084-9