Highly Reliable Crisis and Disaster Systems

Martha Grabowski
LeMoyne College

Crisis and disaster systems share a number of daunting requirements. First, they must help people maintain awareness of cues that warn of both rare and recurring events; they must monitor the environment constantly; they must provide sophisticated forecast and analysis nearly instantaneously and on demand; and when events occur, they must provide clear and timely warnings and decision-making guidance to very different constituencies, including unsuspecting members of the public and trained disaster and emergency managers. After an event, they must provide post-event monitoring, assessment and analysis as well as information to the evacuated and those managing the evacuation about when it is safe to return; and in a perfect world, they would provide the keys to organizational learning, feedback and improvement. Meeting these requirements is a tall order for events that occur with some frequency, such as hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, debilitating snow and ice storms, and floods; they are even more challenging for infrequent and highly variable catastrophic hazards such as large-scale sandstorms or tsunamis. In all cases, however, the distributed systems and people that comprise disaster planning, notification, response and mitigation must be integrated, collaborative and highly reliable. In this talk, we present a vision of highly reliable crisis and disaster systems that draws on work in organizational theory, learning organizations and resilient systems, and discuss challenges associated with that vision in an era of dwindling resources, increasing system complexity, and societal transformations.

Martha Grabowski is Professor and Director of the Information Systems program in the Business Department at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York, and Research Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Professor Grabowski is Vice Chair of the U.S. National Academies’ Ocean Studies Board committee assessing the United States’ tsunami preparedness; she is also the past Chair of the National Research Council’s Transportation Research Board (TRB)/Marine Board, a member of the TRB Executive Board, and a member of the American Bureau of Shipping.