Thread by @m_older

Some people have asked about it, and also I think it will be good prep for my defense, so I'm going to live-tweet my dissertation.

(I'm pretty tired and jetlagged, so I may not be able to finish tonight, but I'll try to pick up the same thread later as needed)

If I'm going to talk about my thesis in a non-timelimited environment (unlike the 20 minutes I have to present it on Thursday) I'm going to start with the origin story.

(side note: I have to think a little about how best to use those 20 minutes, because I have to present my thesis, but I'm also speaking primarily to six people who have read it, probably very carefully. How to keep them interested...?)

Anyway, I had been working in humanitarian aid and development for some years, and I was taking some time off from salaried employment to write novels and consult, and I was hired to go to Japan to respond to the 2011 tsunami.

(That hiring is a story in itself, mostly about the nuclear accident and the limited information about it, which later fit in nicely with everything I learned about Beck's risk society, but that's not what the dissertation is about)

I was seconded to a small Japanese NGO, one that worked internationally as well as nationally. At the beginning we did a lot of going around to different places to figure out what they needed and what we could do.

A lot of disaster responses start out that way. You would think it would be easy, in a situation where people have lost everything, to just GIVE THEM STUFF, but it isn't.

In most of the responses I'd worked on, the way people dealt with this difficulty was with coordination meetings, organized by the UN, including all the NGOs that showed up, trying to sort out who would do what where.

Coordination meetings are was usually chaotic and always annoying, but it serves as an attempt to coordinate and it's probably better than nothing. But In Japan, the UN wasn't coordinating.

In Japan, the government was managing the response. There were some coordination meetings - I went to one in Tokyo, but it was less about coordination than the government passing along information.

And anyway there weren't very many NGOs to coordinate with. In the West Sumatra earthquake response in 2009, there had to be dozens of NGOs at every meeting. In Japan, we probably saw 5 or 6 over the entire period we were there in the area we were working.

It was really different from the other responses I'd worked on - In Sri Lanka, in Indonesia, in Uganda, in Sudan. I found that fascinating.

I was in the process of learning - sometimes through trainings, more often through doing - about disaster response as it's practiced by the humanitarian community. Lots of norms, lots of efforts at documentation and improvement and working groups and learning and standardizing.

What I observed and interacted with in Japan was a totally different way of doing disaster response. I found that really interesting. I was particularly interested by the situation of local government officials.

These local officials (mostly men, Japan had worse gender balance in the response than Darfur) had no training, had little guidance or help, were traumatized themselves, got no breaks, and were expected to take the lead on response in their areas.

It was kind of horrifying to me, really. Disaster response is hard. But at least my colleagues and I had signed up for it, were being paid for it, had some idea what we were doing, and knew we would eventually leave for R&R/break. Some orgs give R&R EVERY 2 WEEKS for disasters.

Some of the local officials I met were doing extraordinary work and it was crushing them, some were riding the wave of adrenaline and purpose and camaraderie and it was holding them together, some were doing a crappy job because they had no idea how to do it differently

We think that the international community manages disasters when the government can't, but this made me question whether any government can.

That took a while, I'm glad I got it out of my system #onhere before the actual 20 minute defense presentation.

I will continue with the actual dissertation live-tweet, but later - now I have to try to figure out where to buy a set of cheap champagne glasses in Paris

This update brought to you by being jetlagged, random hunger in the middle of the night, and a banana.

So I knew I wanted to do my dissertation on how governments (as opposed to NGOs) do disaster response, and I knew I wanted it to be developed governments.

If you study, for example, the Haiti earthquake response, it's too easy for people to say, oh, it's failed state with no money, that's why things went wrong. I wanted to look at how things went wrong in the richest, most technologically advanced countries,

in part because i had a sense from my own professional experience that organization was far more important than money in disaster response.

if you have money but no organization, not only is it difficult to get anything done, but you're likely to do harm. If you have no money but you manage to organize, you can accomplish things.

Since I was so interested in organization, I was very fortunate to be able to pursue my doctorate at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations @CSO_SciencesPo cso.edu/home.asp

I decided to work on the Japan tsunami (2011) and Hurricane Katrina (2005). I knew I wanted to focus on local government, as the actors that bore the brunt of the disaster. My initial plan was to look at relationships across the different levels of government.

The US has a (somewhat convoluted) federal system, with a lot of power devolved to the states, and some to localities. Japan is much more centralized (also in some convoluted ways). I wanted to look at the impacts of these differences on disaster response at the local level.

Field research: I spent 7 weeks in Japan in 2013, and another 2 weeks in 2015, and interviewed around 40 people. I spent around 5 weeks in Louisiana and Mississippi on 2 trips, in 2013 and 2014, and interviewed nearly 40 people there, in DC, and by phone.

These were semi-structured interviews. Most of the interviews in Japan were conducted in Japanese; I sometimes had Japanese friends present but never used an interpreter. I recorded the interviews as well as taking notes, and transcribed.

(The transcription in Japanese was so difficult, but very good for my Japanese. I had those transcriptions checked by native speakers.)

I did interviews with a wide range of people, including academics, volunteers, NGO workers, consultants, and many of them didn't make it into the thesis, although some did. The core of my research are the interviews I had with local, meso- and national government officials.

Some of these interviews I got through friends or the "snowball" method (you ask your interviewee who else you should talk to) but a significant number came from walking into government buildings and asking to talk to someone about the disaster.

Most of my interviewees were incredibly generous with their time and insights. One of the most difficult parts of the research for me, though, was how many of them were traumatized - something which was obvious in the way they talked about their experiences.

Partway through a friend of mine who is a psychologist told me I was suffering from second-hand trauma, which rang very true. It was also hard because from NGO work I was used to at least trying to help, asking people questions with something to offer.

I also did documentary research, collecting evaluations, reports, and other documentation of the events.

I also of course read a lot of the academic and "grey" (practitioner or journalistic) literature about the two disasters. I can't say all, because Katrina has been written about SO MUCH.

So I did all this data collection, came back and looked at it and thought it over and talked about it a lot with my advisor (this is iterative, not linear, as you can see from my field research dates)

One thing that struck me fairly quickly was that the difference in macro-government structure (federal vs centralized) did not have the sort of clear impacts I had expected.

(it also struck me that those structures are incredibly complex and becoming expert in them in the US and Japan would be a lot of work - although as you know if you've read my fiction, they continue to fascinate me.)

In fact, I saw a lot of striking *similarities* across the two countries. Sometimes the quotes between a Japanese official and a US official were almost identical, mutatis mutandis. Often it was larger issues that played out in the same way.

Where there were differences, they were the *opposite* of what I had expected. The federal US has a much more standardized disaster response protocol than the centralized and famously standardization-oriented Japan.

Specifically, the US has a single emergency management agency - FEMA - a standardized EM structure - Incident Command System en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_… - and standard sectoral breakdowns with the Emergency Support Functions.

In Japan, prefectures and municipalities have complete discretion on the latter two and there's no real equivalent to the former, although there is a cabinet level disaster mitigation office and the military was very involved in the response, while the US active duty cannot be

Anyway, one of the similarities that was very apparent to me was that in most locations in both countries, when all the plans and procedures fell apart, local actors rebuilt new, often complex organizations.

They didn't just hand-to-mouth things; for the most part, in most cases, they developed elaborate structures to manage what they were facing - and, symbolically, to reimpose some sort of order on their suddenly chaotic world.

I started reading literature on temporary organizations and emergent organizations and the focus of my dissertation shifted to: how does organization re-emerge within government after catastrophic failure? What does that tell us about the relationship of the State with disasters?

And now I'm going to try to get some sleep. I'm not sure whether I'll finish this thread before I defend tomorrow afternoon 😬 but if not I'll continue after.

One thing I remembered that I want to emphasize about the field work before I go on into the theory: LOGISTICS. I was bouncing around Japan and LA-MS, making one-night hotel reservations and organizing my travel around the availability and location of informants.

I was well served by having traveled solo a lot, usually without much of a plan, but doing that while dealing with scheduling interviews, on a budget, was a lot of work and a particular skillset that's not mentioned much in academia but is really important.

In studying temporary and ephemeral organizations, I read a lot of literature. Lundin and Söderholm's (1995) survey and theory of temporary organizations in the private sector was very useful.

I also extensively use Lanzara's (1983) description of emergent organizations after an Italian earthquake. But I found something of a gap. Lanzara describes spontaneous informal organizations, often explicitly in opposition to the State.

There was little about emergence WITHIN the State (or other formal organizations). The private sector work discusses temporary organizations like consultancy project teams, or construction or theater work where the specific team varies from instance to instance.

Lundin and Söderholm theorize difference between
permanent and temporary:
goals tasks
survival time limits
staff team
development transition

Thinking about my cases, I began to see the government as the permanent organization par excellence - not literally permanent, but permanent in aspiration - with disaster response structures as temporary, expectedly limited, organizations spun off from it.

This is interesting to me because of what it tells us about how government sees its relationship to disasters. OTOH, government does not think the permanent structures are best adapted to dealing with disasters.

OTOH, temporary organizations provide some cover for governments: they are still part of the State, fulfilling the disaster responsibility, but if something goes wrong it is easy to blame them as someone separate entities from the political administration.

These temporary organizations are designed to be able to deal with catastrophes, designed to be (variously or simultaneously) flexible, decisive, etc. But, as we see from my cases and many others, they often fail. Sometimes disasters are too much for our plans.

To describe what happens then, I use the work of Weick (1993), who uses the term "cosmology episode" for when something is so drastic and dire that it undermines worldview and leaves people grasping to interpret their situations.

I think there's some analogy for this in an event from earlier this week. We all KNOW that old building can burn and that nothing is permanent, but Notre Dame is such a cultural landmark for many of us that we still found it hard to believe it was happening.

For most of us that's a very minor example, but perhaps a taste of what people experience when there's suddenly a storm surge twice what they've ever seen in their hometown AND the State structures that keep order have been disrupted at the same time.

It's part of the problem with the assumption of permanence.

So cosmology episodes at the cognitive level, along with communication cuts and infrastructure destruction at the physical level, meant that the planned temporary organizations often could not function and collapsed. But the actors involved in them, though reeling, still felt

that their job and responsibility was to respond to the disaster as the government, and many of them did, sometimes briefly individually and then gradually either building up new, emergent organizations or rebuilding the planned temporary org, often with some adjustments.

That process, and the re-enveloping of these emergent organizations into the permanent and its history of itself after the crisis was over, is the subject of my dissertation.

I look at it through three objects or components of the response, each a chapter: crisis management centers; operational teams, specifically in shelter and logistics; and evaluation reports.

Although I have two disaster cases, taking place in different countries, I don't attempt a point-for-point comparison between the two countries. Instead, I use the many sub-cases - local and meso-governments I researched in each country - to trace how the response evolved under

many different circumstances. In some areas the differences between localities in the same country tell us a lot, or the difference between local and meso (that's state/prefecture); in other areas the country comparison is more useful.

So let's begin with the crisis management centers. They are in many ways the image we all have of disaster management: a large room with a lot of people, probably most of them men, working urgently, maybe a little yelling, possibly some large screen TVs showing maps 'n' stuff

But they are relatively new, and derive from past emergence. Older disaster literature (eg Dynes (1970) Hawkes and Thompson (1962)) identify precisely this area of inter-organizational coordination as an area of emergence, because there was nothing formal there yet.

Now, in contrast, CMCs are extensively planned and structured, they often have their own rooms or even dedicated buildings, they conduct simulations and exercises. On several occasions informants offered me unprompted tours of these sites; they are a source of pride.

They also, as we see in our cases and many others, sometimes fail.

A few of the CMCs in my cases failed really comprehensively, and took days or weeks to reconstitute, but many of them started to rebuild structures almost immediately.

To analyze how they did that, I needed to think about what CMCs do in practical terms. For many of the cases, they started by implementing operational tasks which was not at all what they were supposed to be doing and showed the level of disruption.

The process of pulling back from that and re-establishing the division of labor and distinction between those doing the work and those supervising the work was part of their way of re-establishing normalcy.

So what are they supposed to do? mainly: coordination; definition of the scope of the disaster response; planning and feedback; communications with other levels of government; and decision-making.

The primary mechanism that I found them to use in doing this was the coordination meeting. This was incredibly uniform across the cases, and was used by the CMCs in a multitude of ways.

Many of the first meetings had very little substance, as there was almost no information yet. But they both brought people together and excluded some, drawing the lines of who, and thereby what sectors, would be included at this stage.

I have to go buy champagne glasses and, eventually, champagne, and I probably won't be able to finish this before the defense, but it's been really helpful and I appreciate all the responses, so I'll continue the thread later 😉

update: found champagne glasses for 2 euros each, which is great because I really prefer not to buy disposable plastic shit when I can avoid it.

Well, that was intense! But good

Part of the way through I started to feel like it was, in part, an exercise in taking criticism straight to the face - which is a useful skill for an academic (or pretty much anyone). But they said lots of good things too, and the deliberations were very quick, and

I am now a docteur de sociologie!

and I have an agenda of articles to write from the dissertation

So I'll continue this thread - but first I have to judge a short story contest, figure out the itinerary to the airport tomorrow, and probably sleep.

If anyone's wondering why I've kept my first name in there it's because my mother, @DVOlder, is also Doctora Older.

I have a few minutes now, so where was I? 🤔 oh yes, coordination meetings in the CMCs.

One CMC function these interacted with was defining the scope of the disaster. Each country had a different division of sectors in the response, and both different again from the international cluster system division

Because "disaster response" is an enormous, amorphous task, the division of sectors can have a powerful effect on how people think about the disaster and the problem of resolving it.

As I mentioned before, in the US these sectors are pretty much fixed as the Emergency Support Functions, and no one really messed with these, although at least one locality added a few. Some flexibility was included by changing what sectors attended meetings as priorities evolved

In Japan, the sectors - the entire organigram of the CMC, really - was decided by each jurisdiction independently. There were similarities because of cultural ideas about what "should" be included in any organization (ie 事務) but a lot of differences. And

many of these Japanese organigrams/sectoral breakdowns changed SIGNIFICANTLY over the course of the response, to match the organizational needs as they became understood.

Another thing the coordination meetings did was planning and feedback. This was their most obvious function, and where coordination really happened.

(It occurs to me that I have to update all my bios and I'm not sure if it's cool to just mention being a PhD out of the blue on a non-academic bio so I'm going to sit with that for a while)

So coordination meetings do planning and feedback, which means essentially they go around the room and everyone says what they did that [day] and what they're planning to do the next [day].

Coordination happens when other people in the room are all "oh, we [have what you need/need what you have]". It's an interesting decentralized method that doesn't assume any 1 person/group has a complete overview, and very similar to int'l cluster coordination.

Interestingly, while this mechanism was almost universal, it was also the site of one of the few clear-cut cultural differences btwn Japan and US. Several different US responders told me about working to make the meetings more efficient, paring down the time.

In Japan, no one seemed terribly worried about this, and one Japanese NPO rep who attended a lot of meetings told me about people being asked to report back and there being these long awkward silences when they had nothing to say, which reminded me of teaching English in Japan.

Also, while the US at the state level in MS strove to have federal and state reps sitting together at meetings, in Japan at least in Sendai there were prefectural meetings that nat'l staff attended and then went to their own nat'l staff-in-the-prefecture meeting to report on it.

Besides meetings, CMCs were, in theory, sites of communication between levels of government: collecting all the information or information needs at one level, and transmitting to another. In practice this worked out poorly.

Most communications fell apart in the disaster. Now, I don't go into this overmuch in my dissertation. 1 juror comment was to emphasize more the role of technological failure, while I kind of folded it in as part of the cosmology episode: cell phones don't work! how? impossible!

But I like the comment because it's an important point in terms of our relationship with technology. As someone accustomed to responding to disasters in places where stable communications are usually not taken for granted in non-disaster times,

I was struck by how many of the evaluations, reports, even literature on the reports blamed response failures on comms failures and implied that once we get technology that doesn't break in the disaster/interoperable comms/etc, responses will be much better.

Yes, communications are enormously important. But emphasizing communications technology over organization or experience or knowledge or planning is, based on my experience, not a useful construction.

Back to my dissertation: after communications fell apart, CMCs mostly improvised convoluted ways of managing them. 1 EM in Japan told of having to download instructions onto a USB from the single satellite-uplink computer, then return documents the same way.

(reminds me of when I was in Darfur setting up a new office with no RBGAN and had to send USBs via the once-a-week helicopter)

In Mississippi, an EM recalled how a ham operator scaled a 40-foot tower during still-strong winds to straighten an antenna and reopen comms.

But what was also really interesting was that even as normal communications started to come back online, they weren't always being used in normal ways. In Japan it was particularly notable how many local govt people told me they were speaking directly to national govt, v unusual

(@dicksamuelsMIT has great work on Japanese intergovernmental relationships, as well as on the specific disruptions, and continuations, after the tsunami)

The final CMC function I looked at was decision-making. While most CMCs were seen as decision-making locales, the way it happened varied a lot. Some focused on joint-decision making; some were more top-down.

1 fairly consistent thing was that the role of the executive (elected or appointed head of the jurisdiction during non-emergency time) tended to be ambiguous in planning, allowing for a lot of variation based on personalities. This could have a large impact on the response.

I've skipped a lot of the details and examples (probably diss will be available online at some point, idk but will update), but the macro conclusion from this section is that CMC-based actors did a lot of organizational emergence in part as a way of trying to find normalcy

To quote from the end of that chapter in my diss:

Up next: operational teams! but first I have to go do some remunerated or at least remuneration-adjacent work for a bit.

Interlude: I have written all the thank you notes to the jury (email versions, paper yet tbdone) except the one to my advisor and I don't know what to say.

When we were prepping for the defense he asked me how I first got in touch with him (I cold-emailed a shit-ton of professors at a few schools and one of them, WHO ENDED UP BEING ON MY JURY, referred me to him) so I've been reading the initial chain of emails between us.

and......this doctorate was a totally absurd thing for me to decide to do. which it is obvious from the email chain he fully realized. but he took a chance on me anyway.

absurd as in (and this is for everyone out there considering a phd): I had been out of school for some 8 years. I had never done sociology or political science academically. I was randomly applying to a school in a different country and language.

it is really amazing looking back that I talked my way into this.

or rather, found someone who was open to it.

and let me emphasize, again for those who are thinking about this from non-traditional tracks: I must have emailed a dozen, twenty profs. Out of nowhere. Getting their names from the uni web sites, reading about their interests.

I had written a proposal which I sent; my (future) advisor had some concerns about it and so I rewrote it.

Then he was like, "could you come to Paris to discuss?" I couldn't understand why we couldn't do it on skype, but I travelled almost nonstop for my job at the time and hadn't taken any vacation, so I was able to do it on miles.

It was only afterwards that I realized the reason he wanted to talk in person was because it wasn't so much to discuss the project as it was AN INTERVIEW. a job interview, basically.

Anyway, he took me on. I worked really hard. I ALSO incidentally wrote three novels when I was SUPPOSED to be writing my dissertation and only told him about them when they were successively about to come out.

And now, not only have I gone through an intense defense and been named a doctor, but more importantly I've written some things that, maybe, haven't been written about before and I've definitely found a new method for expressing stuff I've learned.

And I can't figure out how to write the thank you note for this.

I would say jetlag is making my eyes water but no, we're all about radical vulnerability on this website. *bawls in docteur*

Okay! Chapter 3: Operational Teams

(to close out that last bit, which probably should have been a separate thread, my advisor sent me back a very nice response to my thank you note ☺️ he suggested we switch to first-name basis, and also told me to send him article drafts soon)

(the first-name thing is kind of cool because when I started, another student told me advisor always addresses students as "vous" until they defend and then "tu," and I figured in English first names was the equivalent, so I was very careful to always address him as "Professor")

If CMCs are the brain/nervous center of the response, operational teams are the arms and legs; or, to use a different analogy, if CMCs are legislature/executive branch, operational teams are post office, IRS, libraries, DOT - quotidien functions of government people interact with

I looked at teams in two sectors specifically: shelter, meaning immediate shelter that people evacuated to; and logistics, including procurement, transportation, warehousing, and distribution.

I had a fairly loose framework for examining each of these, based on common steps to organizational development that I found in the data: defining the task; breaking down the task; and sharing the task with other actors.

Defining the task sounds obvious, but it's not. Let's say your job is to "deliver water to people affected." Do you deliver to everyone or just evacuees? how much water per day? drinking and bathing? do people need containers? how do you distribute it?

and that's JUST water. If it's food, you have lots of decisions about what kind of food, how to make sure it's not expired, what about people who can't eat certain food? If you don't have enough is it 1 meal/day for everyone, or prioritize some or?

and if you have to deal with essential goods, what's essential for people who've lost everything? blankets, soap, clothes? and this is where inclusive perspectives really matter. WHAT ABOUT MENSTRUAL PRODUCTS? WHAT ABOUT DIAPERS? BOTTLES? TOYS? CRUTCHES? BANDAGES?

How do you make sure people who can't carry much get enough water per day?

The way tasks are broken down into components and assigned to different actors within the incipient organization is fascinating in terms of organizational development. Different groups break the same task down in different ways, or include/exclude different components of it.

What parts of the task are shared with other actors is telling, for my purposes, in terms of *what the State considers to be its responsibilities to people affected by disaster*. What is "okay" to share with another actor and what "should" be done by the State?

Importantly, and as with the CMC framework, none of these are exclusive or strictly consecutive; more likely to be iterative. Figuring out what to share with another actor might be the way an organization defines a task; breaking down the task may show gaps that need to be shared

The shelter sector was where I found the most differences between Japan and the US responses. I posit that this has to do with the way responsibility for the sector was assigned and interpreted.

In the US, "Shelter and Mass Care" is the only ESF jointly led by FEMA and the American Red Cross. There's no specification of how that partnership works/should work.

This situation was particularly bad in the Katrina case because the ARC (with some justification) refused to put their volunteers in flood zones. Municipalities, meanwhile, wanted to get people to evacuate but also felt pressure to have something in town.

Municipalities - remember, we're talking about small counties with a lot of demands on their budget and not so many evacuation-level emergencies - expected help from ARC, so might not have done so much training/prep.

NOLA is, of course, a special case on the shelter. They USED to use schools as shelters but, perhaps because of liability? decided to shift to a MASSIVE shelter in the form of the now infamous Superdome.

Do NOT get me started on stadiums.

The city tried to designate the Superdome as a "special needs shelter" only, and only opened up as a "last resort shelter" very late. They say this was to encourage people to evacuate, but non-car evacuation was also very poorly planned/supported.

(the car-based evacuation is generally considered to have been innovative for the time (counterflow) and been fairly well executed. Again, importance of inclusiveness)

To me this is a place where the government tried to limit its responsibility for emergency management. After all, who is to say whether it's the government's responsibility that we have a means of evacuation or our own? To have a shelter or not?

Nobody knows. It's undefined. And whether you want the government to do more or less - and I'll be happy to debate that point - clarity beforehand is better than not, for everyone. This is a major theme for me and I'll come back to it on other examples.

One more point on the Superdome before I move on: NOLA rightly gets a lot of blame for their handling of it, but I learned (from a FOOTNOTE in one of the Fed reports) that the city asked for Federal funding for study on improving Superdome as shelter and was denied.

In Japan, by contrast, it was very clear that responsibility for managing shelter sat with local governments. There were plans and designated shelters stocked with food. But the simulations the plans were based on underestimated the size and impact.

Some designated shelters were destroyed. Plans fell apart because there were more displaced people than expected, and more other demands on local officials. Food stocks were used up in a day or two and people ended up staying for months.

So while most local governments sent staff to at least some shelters, there were many shelters that no one got to. There were also many non-designated shelters, places people found to stay in, and it took govt a while to get a handle on those (that happened in US too).

I interviewed two people who became shelter leaders at two different shelters in different prefectures (although adjoining localities). 1 was a retired civil servant who evacuated himself; the other was principal of the school that became the shelter.

Independent of each other, they each set up incredibly detailed systems for managing their impromptu, traumatized, resource-scarce communities.

They set up representative committees to facilitate communication between leadership and everyone else in the building (each shelters held ~800-1000 people). They set up task groups to clean, fetch water, dig latrines, cook food, distribute food, wash dishes.

One of these places produced a hand-written document with procedures and rules on it, developed badges that outsiders (mainly journalists, but I experienced this when I was working there as NGO) needed to be on premises to keep them from bothering the people living there.

The two leaders drew on their experiences working in bureaucracy to build these systems. 1 of them mentioned learning about the need for organization from watching TV coverage of the Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) quake.

If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, this is what you want to do. You want to organize. Give people jobs. Give them a voice. Let them help, and keep them busy. Listen. Take care of vulnerable people. Count yourselves, figure out what you need and how much.

It is not a Japanese trait. I've seen it all over the world. I found an article from the Disaster Research Group detailing similar behavior among a group of people stranded at a rest stop on the PA turnpike in 1958 (Fritz et al 1958 available here jumpjet.info/Emergency-Prep…)

My 1st experience of it was a few days after 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. I was working for a local NGO & we drove around Trinco trying to figure out what to do. 1 shelter, people we talked to disagreed about needs and numbers. Another told us clearly who was there what was needed.

There's some evidence that this happened to a limited degree at the Superdome and the Convention Center too, but I could only find second-hand anecdotes, I wasn't able to talk to anyone directly involved. Probably hampered by a) size (Superdome probably got up to 10k, maybe more)

and b) there wasn't exactly a leadership vacuum, because the govt was there but not really managing things, which seems to complicate emergence more than not there at all.

Particularly at the Superdome, most of the govt people there seem to either have been medical/care related (because remember, it was supposed to be primarily a special needs shelter) or medical.

Sorry, that last should be "or military". Because there were a lot of military and police at US shelters; I wrote a separate article about it: revue-rita.com/traitdunion9/s…

Things played out much more similarly across the two countries in the logistics sector. Both had a lot of difficulty: with distributions, with warehousing, with transport. But perhaps the most challenging problem for both was something known as material convergence.

And when I say known, this is something that has been identified in disaster studies for at least 60 years (Fritz and Mathewson, 1957). It refers to the flood of unsolicited donations following a well-publicized disaster. GIVE CASH TO REPUTABLE LOCAL OR INT'L ORGS.

The people I talked to remembered seemingly endless work of receiving, sorting, sometimes cleaning, all sorts of goods that didn't match the needs. Some told me they STILL had leftovers stored somewhere, years later. GIVE CASH TO REPUTABLE LOCAL, OR IF YOU CAN'T FIND THOSE, INT'L

This was very similar across countries and indeed logistics researcher Holguín-Veras and his team found it elsewhere too (and have written about it in multiple papers

Despite this being well-known to disaster studies (and to int'l NGOs, who mostly refuse in-kind except in bulk amounts from companies and even then will have separate team to deal with it), the gov't staff I talked to in both countries were taken by surprise.

Most of them had never done logistics before, let alone disaster logistics. There were a lot of problems.

FEMA had such difficulties with logistics (finding trucks, hiring trucks, tracking deliveries, etc) that about a week into Katrina they sub-contracted the whole shebang to the DoD.

In Japan, Holguín-Veras et al. (2012) found that post-disaster humanitarian logistics “was not adequately discussed in the response plans: in some cases it was not mentioned at all; in another ‘...it was just one line in the plan’” (7).

They argue that Japan's logistics were largely saved by the intervention of large national logistics and trucking companies, who stepped up to volunteer or provide at-cost services (more on that in a bit).

In both countries there was a fair amount of improvisation in the face of logistics failures. In the US, as FEMA's national system stalled, MS FEMA officials connected with Florida EMs to draw from their stockpiles (they knew each other from previous year's FL hurricanes)

In Japan, one prefecture changed its goods procurement/transport structure 3 times in the first month - not just adding/subtracting staff, but spinning off subgroups etc

People I interviewed who had been working on the local end of logistics - receiving, storing, distributing - talked about the extreme physical exhaustion of the first week or two.

So many things coming in, and most of the time they had no idea what they were getting until the truck pulled up and they opened it. Then they had to lift it off, put it somewhere, and figure out what to do with this random shipment from some well-meaning person or company.

"Just give it to people" okay, but if you have 500 people living in a shelter and you get 100 blankets, what do you do? What if it's warm that day but might be cold again soon but no one has anywhere to keep stuff, including shelter itself?

Not to mention finding the truck to take it to the shelter, or picking which shelter, and what about the people not living in shelters but they also need food and batteries because all the shops are closed?

The interesting thing to me is that a lot of these on-the-ground, totally untrained and inexperienced workers had to make these decisions themselves.

In Japan, I talked to a man who had worked superhard on all the physical stuff. Then the military came to help to do the physical labor but the warehouse was still a mess. Then a logistics company donated some expert time and they put together a system.

But the local govt guy still saw a role for himself in that system in terms of managing decisions. He decided that nothing should go to a shelter until there were enough units for everyone. He rotated food so that one shelter would get bread in the morning, rice in afternoon etc

In the US, I talked to a woman, a retiree, who ran a Point of Distribution. She said that she heard horror stories about PoDs turned people away if they weren't from that county, but she decided early on she wouldn't do that

But it varied from place to place, which means this fundamental decision about the government's role in disaster was being made in an ad hoc way.

In an adjoining county I learned when they got a set of donate items they let people have them "first come first serve".

These people on the ground were getting stuck with difficult decisions because the government as a whole either had not determined its principles with regards to response or had not transmitted those principles effectively.