How do you view emergency management? Are you the kind that thinks if it is not written in a FEMA document then it is not worthy of being emergency management? Do you think that emergency management has boundaries it should not cross for political reasons? Do you think some issues are just too big or too difficult to be addressed by emergency management? Are you focused only on traditional emergency management issues of natural hazards? I hope the answer to all of the above is no. An emphatic no would be the best response.
I like to address emergency management holistically. What does that mean? Well according to the online Merriam Webster Dictionary, holistic is “relating to or concerned with wholes or with complete systems rather than with the analysis of, treatment of, or dissection into parts”. So instead of saying to myself, “we have a problem with healthcare preparedness, I had better find a health care emergency manager to address this,” or instead of saying, “that active shooter in school sounds like a homeland security or police problem not an emergency management issue,” I prefer to say, “I will do my best to help out, and if I can’t, I know someone, or can find someone, that can.” During this process I will educate myself on whatever the issue is so I am more aware of it in case it is brought to the table again.
Just because I have never fought a fire does not mean I am a clueless lump of flesh in a conversation about firefighting. After a period of time around first responders, you get a sense of what needs to be accomplished in order to perform certain jobs. For example, I know as a matter of common sense that water works on a lot of fires (not all mind you). I can use common sense in deducing that a larger hose may be better than a smaller hose if the volume of water is high. So in the absence of trained fire fighters, I assume I can mitigate some of the problem by applying a garden hose and fire extinguisher on a house fire (assume it is mine) while waiting for the bigger hoses, trained personnel and larger volumes of water.
This is a simplistic example of the heuristic method. Heuristic refers to “experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery that gives a solution which is not guaranteed to be optimal. Where the exhaustive search is impractical, heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution via mental shortcuts to ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, stereotyping or common sense.”
So can you use heuristic methods to try and solve issues outside the normal emergency management problem set? I hope the answer to this question is yes. An emphatic yes would be the best response.
I see emergency management in everything. I see poverty and economic development as emergency management issues, as well as volunteer recruitment, training and use as an emergency management issue.
I see business continuity as an emergency management issue. Case management, exercise design and execution (for all types of organizations), public health, animal issues, all fall under my holistic version of emergency management, and I am not an expert in any one of these areas.
What I have done is develop knowledge of who the experts are and brought them together into a community-based disaster coalition (following my interpretation of the FEMA whole community concept).
I have served on a homeless coalition. If we lower the poverty level, more people can afford to put gas in their cars to evacuate, more people can mitigate their homes, more people can purchase the NOAA radio and more people can buy a disaster kit.
I am a member of the Community Health Improvement Committee. If we can decrease the number of traffic accidents, teen pregnancies and limit alcohol use among teens, we will have a safer community that is more attractive to businesses.
I promote business continuity initiatives though I am not trained in business continuity. But using heuristic methods, I know that businesses need customers and electricity and employees and the ability to make money even during/after a disaster, and I know the county wants the tax base returned to normal as well (after all, that is how I get paid).
Look around and see what else you can do in your community, you do not have to be an expert, you just need to care enough to do whatever it takes to make your jurisdiction the best it can be.
