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Systems Failure in Disasters

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Avoidable Deaths

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Environmental Science ((BRIEFSENVIRONMENTAL))

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Abstract

This chapter explains why deaths in disasters occur by taking two overarching perspectives: risk and vulnerability. Risk or the traditional perspective gives the advantage of understanding the dynamics of geohazards and their effect on humans. Vulnerability perspective on the other hand, helps in explaining why some groups of people are more vulnerable to disasters than others due to their class, gender, age, and race identities. This chapter also adds on an additional perspective to explain deaths in disasters. This is a complex perspective. In this perspective, deaths occur due to the vulnerabilities that exist in the seams of disaster management system. This system is a conglomeration of different professional groupings and actors designed for specific tasks and goals. It is also a system that is highly reliant on technology. As such, loose coordination and communication between actors can lead disaster management system to fail. To showcase, how the disaster management system can fail to save lives, an analytical tool for systems failure is presented with its three inter-connected components: coordination, communication and world views.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Sendai Framework for Action defines hazard as “A potentially damaging physical event, phenomenon […] that may cause the loss of life or injury, property damage […]” (UN 2015: 3/25).

  2. 2.

    The 16 natural hazards are: cloudburst, cold wave, drought, dust storm, earthquake , flash flood, gale, hailstorm, heat wave, lightning , snowfall, squall, thunderstorm (Kapur 2010).

  3. 3.

    “Organisations are social designs directed at practice” (Wenger 1998: 241). In other words, organisations are combination of institutions (social design) and constellation of practices by different actors which gives life to the organisation (Wenger 1998).

  4. 4.

    Actors are “the agents who carry out or cause to be carried out the main activities of the system, especially its main transformation” (Checkland 1981: 224). There are also victims or beneficiaries in these soft systems. In this study, they are the vulnerable groups of men, women and children who are indirectly involved in this research.

  5. 5.

    Systems thinking can be understood in terms of ‘three tightly interrelated discourses: general systems theory (GST), cybernetics and complexity (Midgley 2003: xxii). These theories emerged in the mid and late twentieth century. All the three discourses are highly interlinked and favour mathematics and modelling as their systems language (Checkland 1981; Midgley 2003). As a result, organisational and management theorists have applied only a ‘partial systems approach’ because of the nuances and dynamics that underpin a human system (for detailed discussion see Kast and Ronsezweig 1972; Midgley 2003; Mingers 1980).

    As an alternative to the aforementioned theories, Checkland (1981, 1985) conceives systems as one of two types: hard and soft. A hard system is a ‘goal seeking’ engineered system. Checkland (1981, 1985) views general systems theory and cybernetics as hard systems. Hard systems have quantifiable and measurable attributes (Checkland 1981, 1985; Waring 1989). Soft systems, on the other hand, are not goal seeking engineered system, rather they deal with ‘soft’ problems in social systems where goals are often obscured, ambiguous or non-existent (Checkland 1981, 1985). Soft systems deal with the complex problems of an ill-structured and poorly understood real world.

  6. 6.

    Max Weber’s interpretive social science became popular with the emergence of phenomenological sociology in the 1960s. Phenomenology like positivism is also a philosophy , which was made popular by Edmund Husserl in the early part of twentieth Century (McNeill and Chapman 1985). For Husserl, ‘the basic reality lies in our thinking’ and ‘the everyday we take as given is in fact constructed through human activity’ (Checkland 1981: 274). Alfred Schutz also applied Husserl’s idea of phenomenology to the study of social life or Lebenswelt (lived-in-reality) (McNeill and Chapman 1985). According to Checkland (1981) Vicker’s appreciative system is based upon Schutz’s Lebenswelt.

  7. 7.

    Risky enterprises include nuclear power plants, chemical plants, the energy sector and the mass transportation sector (including road, rail, sea and air).

  8. 8.

    According to Reason (1990: 17), the term error can only be “meaningfully applied to planned actions that fail to achieve their desired consequences without intervention of some chance or unforeseeable agency”.

  9. 9.

    According to Checkland (1981: 110), natural systems are: “Physical systems [which] apparently make up the universe. These range from the subatomic systems of atomic nuclei as described by physics and the living systems observed on earth to galactic systems at the other extreme. All these are natural systems, systems whose origin is in the origin of the universe […]”.

  10. 10.

    Human systems are part of social systems. According to Vickers’s (1983: 216), human systems are relationship maintaining systems that come “into being by their actions and their experiences”. These systems are highly political, another man-made element (Tanaka 2015; Vickers 1983). They are also by far the most complex systems (Vickers 1983).

  11. 11.

    Engineered systems, on the other hand are technological systems. Examples include forecasting and early warning systems and structural mitigation measures . Technological systems are constructed by humans through science (Waring 1989), but technology cannot exist on its own. Both human activity and engineered systems exist in conjunction with each other. Emery (1993) explains this phenomenon as socio-technical systems . Socio-technical systems comprise the ‘technological’, which is the work and procedural activities that are undertaken, and the ‘social’, which relates to the “social structure consisting of the occupational roles that have been institutionalized in its use” (Emery 1993: 296).

  12. 12.

    Climatic hazards include flood, cyclone , drought and localised storms (Burton et al. 1993).

  13. 13.

    Tropical storms are “heavy rains followed by tropical storms. They are also one of the most common causes of floods . Storms form over the warm waters of the tropics. These storms are full of moisture. Under the right conditions these giant storms move towards the land, causing a heavy rainfall. This heavy precipitation causes the streams and rivers to overflow leading to inland floods […]. Coastal flooding usually occurs as a result of severe storms, either tropical or winter. Ocean waves intensify on the open ocean, and these storms make surface water much choppier and fierce than normal. Raging winds can create huge waves that crash on unprotected beaches” (Modh 2010: 6).

  14. 14.

    Death is defined as ‘number of people who lost their life because of the event happened’ (Integrated Research on Disaster Risk 2015: 9). ‘The number of deaths is the sum of direct and the indirect deaths. The number of delayed indirect deaths is generally excluded. The number of deaths does not include missing persons’ (Integrated Research on Disaster Risk 2015: 9).

  15. 15.

    Mitigation is understood as “The lessening or limitation of the adverse impacts of hazards and related disasters ” (UNISDR 2009a: 19); preparedness is understood as “The knowledge and capacities developed by governments, professional response and recovery organizations, communities and individuals to effectively anticipate, respond to, and recover from, the impacts of likely, imminent or current hazard events or conditions” (UNISDR 2009a: 21); recovery as “The restoration, and improvement where appropriate, of facilities, livelihoods and living conditions of disaster-affected communities , including efforts to reduce disaster risk factors” (UNISDR 2009a: 23); and response [our emphasis] as “The provision of emergency services and public assistance during or immediately after a disaster in order to save lives, reduce health impacts, ensure public safety and meet the basic subsistence needs of the people affected” (UNISDR 2009a: 24).

  16. 16.

    The author is inspired by Hayek’s idea of inter-temporal discoordination (Garrison and Kirzner 1987). Whilst exploring the coordination problem, he emphasised looking at inter-temporal discoordination of economic activities in crisis . This was because it is not possible to track the myriad economic activities that individuals and organisations undertake in everyday life.

  17. 17.

    UNISDR (2009a) defines early warning systems (EWSs) as: “The set of capacities needed to generate and disseminate timely and meaningful warning information to enable individuals, communities and organizations threatened by a hazard to prepare and to act appropriately and in sufficient time to reduce the possibility of harm or loss”.

  18. 18.

    According to Alberts and Hayes (2003), information age is the successor to industrial and post-industrial ages.

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  1. University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Nibedita S. Ray-Bennett

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Ray-Bennett, N.S. (2018). Systems Failure in Disasters. In: Avoidable Deaths . SpringerBriefs in Environmental Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66951-9_2

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