In 1917, a collision between two ships in Halifax Harbor resulted in the largest human-made explosion before the bombing of Hiroshima. SSMont Blanc was loaded with munitions, and when the Imo collided with it, the resulting explosion destroyed 22 percent of the city, killed 1,963 people, and injured 9,000.1 In 1920, Samuel Prince published a sociological analysis of the response. His was one of the first explorations of disaster and community recovery and set the tone for the modernist view of disaster response, relief, and recovery.2 The Halifax Explosion was a maritime disaster that devastated a coastal community, and on the 100th anniversary this essay takes stock of the prevailing and emergent views of disaster response, relief, and recovery.
It is variously claimed that the frequency of disasters is increasing, that this is happening naturally, or that there is some inherent process of disaster creation that is rapidly accelerating.3 Alarming suggestions are made that rapid technological revolution, globalization with attendant interconnectedness of events, increasing terrorist and subversive activities, climate change causing new weather patterns, increasing mobility of humans heightening the risk of mass epidemics, and exponential population growth resulting in use of marginal land have all contributed to the growing number of disasters and crises.4 No longer, it is claimed, can organizations and governments hope for stable and predictable patterns of continuity.5
These claims often begin arguments for an increased need for organizations and experts able to understand and manage these events. In other words,
Understanding that response organizations are structured this way, it then seems reasonable to suggest that the disaster management system did exactly what it was expected to do. In this light, the much-discussed failure of the response to Katrina can therefore be recast as a success. It is the logical outcome of a bureaucratic, rational approach to the management of a chaotic and ambiguous environment.9 In the Katrina disaster, FEMA behaved as it was
In contrast, other organizational structures may have resulted in a different outcome. For example, the loosely integrated regional structure of the US Coast Guard is an alternative model for disaster response. In the Katrina response, individual responders and ships from the Coast Guard worked more independently than other response agencies. Rather than waiting for orders from the top, Coast Guard responders were given leave to search and rescue on their own. This example is sometimes cited as being one of the few success stories in the Katrina response.10 The Coast Guard model’s organic structure is ideal for chaotic environments as it exhibited elements of an adhocracy and a divisional structure. Decentralization allowed for greater decision-making ability in those closer to the problems. The Coast Guard empowered individual employees to make decisions based on the environment in which they were operating. This is an example of what Bigley and Roberts call the incident command system (ICS) of team response to crises.11 Under ICS, the team is formed dynamically and rapidly. Technical competence is a factor in disaster team selection as individuals need to be qualified to perform their specific team task. However, consideration is not given to the level of an individual’s potential fit on a team. Teams formed using ICS methodology seem to have high levels of performance, as measured by their ability to solve complex tasks. The combination of a hierarchical structure and flexible individual roles within that structure contribute to performance. Thus, taking a contingency approach to organizational design, such as the Coast Guard model, would enable organizations to make decisions in an uncertain environment.
Humans, throughout their history, have faced disasters such as Katrina. It is not surprising then that much of the organizing behavior for disaster response is deeply rooted in our human past and has evolved into an ability to
Therefore, disasters have become institutionalized: they have been removed from the personal and made organizational. Why did this happen? Perhaps, as Rebecca Solnit reflects on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, disaster affords people the opportunity to be free: free from institutions, free from laws that assume that society tends to disorder in the absence of rules.17 In disaster, Solnit argues, people see the unimportance of organization. This may be why order is often imposed violently in the face of mass informal organizing in the aftermath of disaster. For example, in post-earthquake San Francisco, military authorities who were put in charge of keeping order perceived their job “as saving the city from the people, rather than saving the people from the material
How then has the approach to disaster response and recovery changed since the Halifax Explosion? At one end of the spectrum, in 1917 disasters were viewed as exceptional events beyond the daily societal background noise of tragedies and avoidable mortality. A disaster was an abnormal and easily recognizable event that resulted in a temporary setback to progress. After almost 100 years of experience, we now recognize that disaster responses can be categorized into informal, emergent, and co-ordinated responses.19 The latter two are centered within organizational structures, while the former is characteristic of citizen or individual responses. Since 1917, the management of disaster by organizations has evolved into an all-hazards approach; that is, while each has unique features, it is believed that the effects and impact are similar and require a standard arsenal of response activities including search and rescue, evacuation, and relief. However, disaster is now more and more enmeshed within political and economic systems, to the point where it becomes impossible to distinguish disaster from everyday existence. Disaster scholars now recognize the tension between emergent versus organizational responses to crisis, so that a managed, organized response should not impede improvisation.
J. Scanlon, “Rewriting a Living Legend: Researching the 1917 Halifax Explosion,” International Journal of Disasters and Mass Emergencies 15, no. 1 (1997): 147–198.
S. Prince, “Catastrophe and Social Change, Based upon a Sociological Study of the Halifax Disaster” (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1920).
G. Bankoff, “Rendering the World Unsafe: ‘Vulnerability’ as Western Discourse,” Disasters 25, no. 1 (2001): 19–35.
D. Alexander, “Globalization of Disaster: Trends, Problems and Dilemmas,” Journal of International Affairs 59, no. 2 (2006): 1–22.
A. Farazmand, “Introduction: Crisis and Emergency Management,” in Handbook of Crisis and Emergency Management, ed., A. Farazmand (New York: Marcel Dekker, 2001), 1–10.
A. Rostis and J. Helms-Mills, “A Pedagogy of the Repressed? Critical Management Education and the Teaching Case Study,” International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy 4, no. 2 (2010): 212–223.
Government of the United States, The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned (Washington, DC: The White House, 2006), https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-lessons-learned/index.html.
Id.
M. Takeda and M. Helms, “Bureaucracy, Meet Catastrophe: Analysis of Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts and their Implications for Emergency Response Governance,” International Journal of Public Sector Management 19, no. 4 (2006): 397–411.
A. Ripley, “How the Coast Guard Gets It Right,” Time (23 October 2005).
G.A. Bigley and K.H. Roberts, “The Incident Command System: High-Reliability Organizing for Complex and Volatile Task Environments,” The Academy of Management Journal 44, no. 6 (2001): 1281–1299.
A. Kirschenbaum, Chaos Organization and Disaster Management (New York: Marcel Dekker, 2004).
M. Foucault, Security, Territory, and Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978 (New York: Picador USA, 2009).
F. Furedi, “From the Narrative of the Blitz to the Rhetoric of Vulnerability,” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (2007): 235–254.
Id.
Kirschenbaum, supra note 12.
R. Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters (New York: Viking, 2009).
Id., 34.
E. Quarantelli and R. Dynes, “Response to Social Crisis and Disaster,” Annual Review of Sociology 3 (1977): 23–49.