Exercise developed and produced by:

Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies

National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism

Office of Justice Programs, National Institutes of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Introduction and Chair

Transcript  [Listen to this talk] [View the slides]

DR. SCHOCH-SPANA: It is my extreme pleasure to introduce Dr. Kathleen Tierney, who's a Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Disaster. Well, then you must be a very important person right now, and I hope the funding is flowing to your University of Disaster. University of Delaware.

I should note that for those of you who aren't disaster chasers, that the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware is the premiere center, and Kathleen brings leadership to that center based on over 20 years of experience in the disaster field, studying social aspects of hazards, disasters and risk, and her publications are multiple. But leading texts include Disasters, Collective Behavior and Social Organization, and Facing the Unexpected - Disaster Preparedness and Response in the United States. Thanks very much, Kathleen.

DR. TIERNEY: Thank you very much, Monica. Well here I am representing the University of Disaster. The title of our panel this afternoon is "Civil society as an asset during a public health emergency", and the panelists that you'll be hearing from after me are Diane Lapson, Ernie Allen and John Clizbe.

We've been asked to deal with questions like these. How can leaders make use of existing networks? Does bioterrorism pose special challenges? And if so, what are they? How can schools, workplaces and other institutions, and I see a typo on there, and other institution be mobilized?

I'm going to start off by talking just a little bit about findings from research on individual group and organizational behavior in major natural and technological disasters. There is a field of social science disaster research that has been in existence for more than 50 years. It is a multi-disciplinary and international group of researchers who look at issues around disaster response and the public involvement in disasters. And based on these findings, I'd like to just talk very briefly and in very general terms about what we know, and what the challenges are then in terms of harnessing the capacity and the social capital of civil society in disasters.

First of all, one thing that we do know is that ordinary community residents play an extremely important role in disasters of all kinds. Whether you're talking about groups of people who come together to sandbag along the Mississippi River in the 1993 midwest floods, whether you're talking about search and rescue following disaster impact in areas of impact and collapsed buildings. The majority of people who are led to safety, who are rescued and pulled out of rubble in disasters, major disasters, are pulled out and rescued by ordinary community residents. And as Lee Clarke said in his presentation this morning, the real first responders are the neighbors, the friends and the co-workers of disaster victims.

We have seen this pattern in disasters worldwide. It has been widely documented, so the first line of defense is the local community resident, followed by emergency workers and followed distantly by outside search and rescue teams that come in to communities. These search and rescue teams perform a very important function of finding in 99 percent of the cases dead bodies rather than living people. They perform a very important function, but the true first responders in search and rescue personnel are local community residents.

Similarly, when disaster victims need to be transported to hospitals and other health care facilities, they don't go in ambulances. They are transported there by local community residents. And people are involved extensively in disaster response, even in the pre-impact period, in the impact period, and in the response and recovery period through volunteer activity, through donations and in other ways.

Secondly, we know from research that altruistic norms and pro social behavior prevail and dominate the social response in disaster situations. People are more caring, more giving, have more of a community spirit, and generally counter-intuitively higher morale in disaster situations than they do during normal times. Anti-social and maladaptive behavior, here we're talking about things like panic, extreme demoralization, helplessness, looting, civil unrest, these kinds of behaviors are vanishingly rare following disasters. This is particularly true of disasters in the U.S.

Another point that we know from extensive research is that ordinary people are very willing to assume risk in disasters in order to help others. People are not risk adverse. Let me give you an example. In 1989, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, October 17th, 1989, magnitude 7.0 earthquake occurred, epicentered near Santa Cruz, California. That earthquake caused widespread damage throughout the San Francisco Bay area. The largest loss of life took place when a double-decker highway structure pancaked and collapsed. This was in the East Bay in Oakland, in fact, in West Oakland. This was a cyprus structure. This is where most of the people were killed in the earthquake. Workers from nearby work places came out and climbed onto those pancaked structures in order to bring people to safety. It was workers in the immediate area, African Americans in West Oakland who did the rescuing from that collapsed cyprus structure, knowing that there could be further collapses and after-shocks at any time, so people are not risk averse.

We saw this very dramatically in the World Trade Center disaster, where people risked their lives again, and again for their fellow workers. And the most touching example that I found was the man who stayed with his disabled best friend and fellow worker in a wheelchair, and died by the side of that person. People take risks to help others in disasters.

We also know that the roles that are undertaken when people do mobilize following disasters tend to be related to their pre-disaster roles. This includes gender roles, work-related roles, and leadership roles. Contractors, people who work with heavy equipment, these sorts of folks are going to volunteer for search and rescue and debris removal. It's related to their pre-disaster roles.

We know that there's a gender division of labor in terms of how people help, and how people mobilize in disaster situations. Prior leadership roles also carry-over, and we're going to see a good example of that when Diane talks. She was a leader in her apartment complex. She had a leadership position, and that carried over, so we know in some senses that people are going to show up offering expertise that they have.

The desire to provide disaster aid is extremely strong. This is an incredibly robust finding in disaster research. Community residents will respond and they will do so in very large numbers. They may do so in larger numbers than are needed, wanted or requested. Volunteers will converge, donations will converge whether requested, or needed, or wanted. There will be large scale convergence.

The challenge then is for us to be able to plan in ways that enable us to develop the organizational and institutional capacity to incorporate the volunteer sector appropriately and effectively in safety, because they will come. They will not be prevented from coming. They will not be kept out. They will not go away.

How do we meet the challenge? Well, I'm just going to suggest a few ways that we working together need to consider. And I'm going to focus on pre-event planning, what we can do beforehand. And certainly, one of the major things that we're going to want to do is, if I'll borrow a word from Kathleen's presentation this morning, an audit. That is, it's very important in terms of planning to identify roles for volunteers and community groups. What is it that volunteers can do? Recognizing that within our civil society, we have large numbers of people with unique skills that are going to be needed, be they the interpreters, be they the translators, be they the students at the local community college who are taking courses in geographic information science, be they students in a college or a university who are training in the health care professions.

The challenge here then is to identify existing groups, identify networks and professions out there in the community. Are there retired public safety people? Are there retired medical people? What about the medical academy in the community? In other words, identify the needs, the places where volunteers can be used, and link with those groups before the event happens.

Again, many speakers have talked to the importance of making community groups a part of the planning process, and for developing structures to incorporate volunteers into response efforts. There need to be linkages. In other words, there need to be volunteer coordinators identified. There need to be structures in place when people begin to mobilize for utilizing them.

Now I want to -- you know, everybody here has talked about the importance of a collaborative community planning process, and involving the local community. I want to call your attention to something that disturbs me and probably disturbs others of you in this room, and that is that with terrorism and bioterrorism planning, there is beginning to be a tendency towards stovepiping, and toward viewing this as a law enforcement problem, as a command and control problem, and there has been a trend toward greater and greater secrecy in terms of the nature of planning that's going on.

This is a problem if we want to look comprehensively in terms of comprehensive outreach to community-based organizations, and to a wide variety of sectors within the community. This secrecy and this stovepiping is going to be a source of risk for us, is going to compromise our ability to respond.

I think that there is also a need to go on a concerted search, a systematic search to identify best practices with respect to how we work with civil society organizations and institutions. Looking at community-based programs that have been shown to be effective, and one example that I can give here is the concept of the community emergency response teams, which were originally developed in Los Angeles, California by the L.A. Fire Department, community emergency response teams that receive training so that community residents would be able to be on their own, be self sufficient and help one another in the event of a major earthquake.

What local officials out in California had been telling people is be ready in a near catastrophic or a catastrophic earthquake to be on your own for up to 72 hours, and so this community emergency response team concept was developed, and was shown to be effective when an earthquake struck the Los Angeles area in January of 1994, so we need to learn. We don't reinvent the wheel. We go out and we look for things that already work, good models of incorporating the community into planning and response efforts.

And I will just leave you with a couple of parting thoughts. First of all, that these findings are very robust. They have been shown to be consistent across a variety of different societies in many different types of disaster situations. And despite the fact that bioterrorism is different sort of hazard agent, and has its own unique qualities, we should expect more similarities than differences in terms of the way that members of the public will respond to an event threat of that nature. Thank you.

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