Challenging the Four Pillars of Emergency Management Paradigm

Victor Lake Skyline (photo by V.A. McMillan, 2021)

 It has been too long since I posted here...so, let me correct that.

In school I have been bumping into a re-occurring paradigm - the emergency management pillars. Most agencies have adopted and seem comfortable with four pillars supporting emergency management and if presented graphically, would look something like this:

The Four Pillars of Emergency Management

Now, this is my blog and not an academic paper and this affords me the privilege to present my ideas in a manner not accepted by academia. So, whether this post is construed as an editorial or an opinion piece, I do not much care what label it wears, I just want to share my idea and maybe it will generate some discussion to build upon.

As a thinker and hopefully a future emergency planner, I see the emergency management planning function to be its own separate pillar, not some function contained within the preparedness function. The preparedness function has its own purpose and focus, which goes beyond planning, I will explain that shortly. So, let me rock the boat and shake up the emergency management community by suggesting the need for a paradigm shift away from the four pillars of emergency management and join me to embrace the five pillars of emergency management:

The Five Pillars of Emergency Management

This post will capture a high-level overview of the Five Pillars of Emergency Management and the emergency management cycle. I am trying to determine whether this is important enough to be the focus of my capstone project for school or whether exploring this topic on my blog will address this topic adequately. 

The five pillars:

• Prevention / Mitigation
• Planning
• Preparedness
• Response
• Recovery 

 These pillars support the successful application of emergency management to minimize the impacts of natural disasters or manmade crises on a community and speed the recovery of the community to return to a state as good as or better than the condition before the disaster event. If the emergency management process is embraced by the members of the community, in theory, in time the community will become resilient to future disaster events. 

The five pillars are applied in an ever-improving cycle:

The Five Pillar Emergency Management Cycle

The starting point for community emergency management planning is the PREVENTION stage. The prevention stage is based on a theoretical foundation. This foundation is built using research of similar communities - what disasters events have they endured? Could they occur here? If they did occur here, what would we need to plan for before they occurred to protect our residents, our structures, and infrastructure? What about the local environment? Can our plans protect the environment, too? One tool to assist during the prevention stage is to conduct a community threat hazard identification risk vulnerability assessment (THRVA). This captures the current conditions in the community and help prioritize which events would be more likely to occur and which events, if they did occur would be most harmful. With this specific information in hand, it is time to move to the next stage - planning.

The PLANNING stage is where you take all the information and research gathered in the previous stage and you work to develop the various plans for your community - emergency response plans, business continuity plans, and appropriate contingency plans in the event the other plans fail. Planning takes an entire team collaborating together to produce useful finished documents. However, plans that are not exercised or worse just sit on a shelf will never benefit the community. 

PREPAREDNESS is the stage where plans get exercised, staff and community members get trained, gaps are discovered, and needed resources are identified and replacements are stockpiled, if necessary. After training personnel, and then exercising the plans, a formal debriefing occurs to capture lessons learned, gaps in the plans or resources required, as well as, what worked well. The feedback from debrief begins a new cycle of planning, followed by exercising. This is a continuous process of improvement to ensure the community survives a disaster event with the least number of injuries or destruction. 

The RESPONSE stage is when an actual event triggers to use of the plans - emergency response plans, business continuity plans, or contingency plans. This is where plans meet the real test, this is where failure means people get hurt or killed, structures get damaged or destroyed, and your infrastructure that connects your community together and with others is rendered inoperative, at least for a short while. The response stage concludes with at least one major debriefing for responding personnel. In communities that value a robust emergency management program, will want to follow these responder debriefings with community debriefings to get feedback from residents of the community on what worked well, what did not work well, and areas where things could have worked better if...

There will be a shift in focus as the response stage is concluding, and operations transition to the RECOVERY stage. The recovery stage generally begins with cleaning up debris, making assessments of damages, and modifying recovery plans to meet the needs of the actual event that has impacted the community. The recovery stage can have three sub-stages to address the needs in the short-term/immediate, the midterm, and the long-term. Infrastructure usually takes until the long-term to be fully restored to pre-disaster capacity. Like the response stage, the recovery stage will host a number of debriefings to capture valuable feedback about what worked, what didn't, and what could work better if... 

Now, we start a new cycle with the MITIGATION stage. Now that a disaster event has actually occurred and the response and recovery stages have been debriefed, now you have the material to work with to develop mitigations to prevent or at least minimize future impacts to the community.  Once this mitigation information has been captured and written out it is time to begin a new period of planning, followed by preparedness - where the new plans are trained and exercised. 

In a nutshell, that captures the high-level ideas of the Five Pillars of Emergency Management and the Emergency Management Cycle. If this is chosen as my capstone project, this position will be researched to an academic level with a literature review to determine if this concept has already been suggested - successfully or not by others; as well as, what support the Four Pillars of Emergency Management is actually built upon. 

I will post an update in September 2022, once my capstone project has been submitted and graded. No matter what topic I select, it will be of interest to at least some of the visitors of this blog. 

Thank you for reading.

V.A.M.