by Mark Tallman.
“Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”-Henry Miller
It was unseasonably warm in Boston at half past noon on January 15, 1919. On the North End, just east of where the Charles River Dam stands today, at the current site of a junior athletic field and playground, residents and passersby were witness and victim to a bizarrely tragic scene. A shoddily manufactured storage tank, massive by the standards of the day standing 50 feet high and 90 feet in diameter, rapidly disintegrated. Witnesses described a tremendous rumble and cacophonous popping as the rivets holding the too-thin sheet metal tank sidings gave way with the force of explosive bolts.
The tank was poorly maintained and dangerously overfilled with then-valuable contents: unrefined molasses. For months before the tank blew apart, local residents were openly collecting it by the gallon, as it regularly seeped out through gaps in the sheet metal. The unusually warm weather had followed weeks of colder temperatures during which the tank had been filled past capacity, and this resulted in a rapid expansion of its contents. The tank itself had never been safety tested for leaks before being filled, as was required, and it is also possible that unvented carbon dioxide buildup and metal fatigue further contributed to the rupture.[i]
Like so many non-accidents of its kind, once the preconditions were met and allowed to run their course, there was really no other way it could have turned out. Die cast, cards dealt, Rubicon crossed, choose your preferred metaphor: for those unfortunates nearby, escape must have been daunting, or simply impossible. Once ruptured, the tank released an artificial tsunami of the glue-like sweetener. Survivors described it as a “30 foot wall of goo,”[ii] radiating out in all directions with incredible force. The total volume was estimated at 2.3 million gallons, racing along at 35 miles per hour.[iii] An elevated train track was buckled and nearly knocked to the ground, nearby buildings (including the neighborhood fire station) were ripped from their foundations and torn apart as the dense molasses churned them under. Horses and carriages, vending carts, loose construction materials, and other common ingredients of early 20th century urban life became embedded projectiles, capturing and crushing hapless victims. Most of the victims were local women and children home for the day, and laborers working in the neighborhood.
When the goo settled, it formed a semiliquid film three to four feet deep, covering several city blocks, and survivors described a retching smell that made it difficult to even search for the injured. The Boston Post described the aftermath:
“Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage … Here and there struggled a form—whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was … Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings—men and women—suffered likewise.”[iv]
Of course, search they did: first on scene were over one hundred cadets from a training ship of the Massachusetts Nautical School, docked nearby. Soon Boston Police, Red Cross workers, Army soldiers, Navy sailors, and many members of the public arrived to assist in searching for victims. They worked day and night for four days, and by the time it was all over, found 21 dead, and assisted 150 injured in a makeshift field hospital. The tank was located only 30-40 yards from Boston’s Inner Harbor. This was unfortunate in that a great volume of the deadly mucilage drained into the harbor waters, turning Boston Harbor brown until well into that summer and undoubtedly causing significant environmental damage regardless of whether this was well understood at the time. However, every gallon the harbor absorbed was a gallon that did not candy to death more victims; if the geography were only slightly different, it could have been much worse.
The cleanup took two weeks, with workers describing the horror of pulling out victims who had been sugar glazed to unrecognizability, yet preserved. Bostonians reported that on hot days, the area continued to smell of molasses for decades. Some historians believe that the tank’s owner, Purity Distilling Company, in addition to being guilty of blatant negligence in improperly building and maintaining the tank, also had additional motives: molasses was a vital ingredient in explosives and alcohol distilling. As the need for explosives decreased post-Armistice, Purity Distilling may have been stocking up for maximum profitability on alcohol production before the Volstead Act kicked in.[v] Public outrage against Purity Distilling and its parent company was immediate, resulting in one of America’s first successful class action lawsuits.[vi] The company’s defense elected, with no evidence whatsoever, to blame sabotage by anarchist terrorists for the rupture. This theory was roundly dismissed. It was an early high-profile legal defeat by an American corporation for negligence, but once the plaintiffs were paid, and the media attention died out, the story was predictably forgotten.
It’s easy to dismiss an incident like the Boston Molasses Disaster as not much more than a macabre Wikipedia curiosity. After all, things were different then. Engineers didn’t know as much about how to engineer things. They certainly didn’t have access to anything like the tools they have now. Regulation on heavy industry was incomplete, with corruption and lack of enforcement often undermining what passed for standards.[vii] Much less was known about effective policing, firefighting, or emergency medical support tactics, and American first responders weren’t nearly as well trained, equipped, or organized as they (usually) are now.
And, of course, today we have a plan for that.
If something like The Boston Molasses Disaster happened now in a reasonably large and budgetarily-healthy[viii] American community, dozens of 911 calls would arrive at a local dispatch within seconds, and a heavy response dispatched within a couple minutes. A few minutes after that, the first units to arrive (likely patrol cops), would assess the scene, confirm with dispatch, and set up tactical observation posts (TOPs) to have a good vantage point to report on the scene in real-time. Then they’d begin clearing road and foot traffic corridors to better enable the army of firefighters and emergency medical responders by-then enroute to get in, and walking survivors to get out. (They would most likely encourage self-evacuation verbally, but use little of their time attempting to assist victims themselves). Teams of firefighters and paramedics would arrive, assess the scene, and get to work. The firefighters would begin setting up an Incident Command Post (ICP) near the scene, from which tactical operations would be coordinated. Consistent with the ruthlessly utilitarian efficiencies of medical triage, paramedics and firefighters would pass over some severely injured or hopelessly trapped victims in preference for others that could be assisted with the resources available.
Tens, then dozens, then probably hundreds of self-presenting volunteers would be given a quick familiarization in Urban Search and Rescue by representatives of the Red Cross or Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and then organized into dozens of coordinated operational units able to engage in light urban search and rescue. These volunteer teams would assist full-time heavy search & rescue (SAR) professionals dispatched with all speed from the city, surrounding counties, and surrounding states. They might bring in canine teams, helicopter-mounted forward looking infrared (FLIR) cameras, swiftwater rescue units, and portable ground penetrating radar to search for victims. They’d bring in heavy construction equipment and operators loaned from the city’s Public Works and Road and Bridge Departments, and use heavy-duty extraction tools like the famous and now-obsolete “Jaws of Life” to clear passages and free victims.
As victims are found and extracted, paramedics and emergency medical technicians would descend on them and begin immediate treatment. FEMA and local firefighters would set up mass decontamination tents and showers along the periphery of the scene for victims and responders to get the heavy and possibly toxic goop off their skin. FEMA, the State Office of Emergency Management (OEM), and private insurers would send in damage assessment teams (DATs) to survey damage and disruption to impacted infrastructure and property, and keep records for insurance reimbursement later. Public utilities would send teams to assess damage to the electrical and telecommunications systems in the area and attempt to restore them. Teams would be dispatched from the Federal Environmental Protection Agency and State Office of Environmental Protection[ix] to identify any environmental impacts and determine whether natural water resources had been compromised, and City or County Water Department representatives would test for contamination of municipal water supplies. The city stormwater drainage engineer would survey impacts to the sewer and drainage systems, and recommend actions to prevent flooding as the goop inevitably jams up the city drains.
The local school district would quickly be pressed into service to provide buses and emergency sheltering facilities for the displaced. The Red Cross would provide trained staff who would rapidly dispatch to the school district’s facilities and convert them into fully operating shelters. The State Department of Revenue, Budget Office, or Comptroller might send representatives to oversee the keeping of financial records: from payroll issues like emergency overtime and paying part-time support workers, to detailed invoicing of all requisitions so businesses could be reimbursed for providing useful supplies and services. The county Animal Control or Animal Welfare Office and local non-profits might be dispatched to attempt to rescue domestic animals. The Salvation Army would set up field kitchens and feed first responders and volunteers as they work the scene.[x] Crisis counselors would be dispatched. Logistics officers from FEMA and the State Office of Emergency Management (OEM) would assess the need for supplies for all of the above, procure them from a pre-arranged list of suppliers, and ensure their shipment to where they’d be needed.
The news media would arrive- first in the form of citizens themselves who would stream footage to local and national media from their mobile devices, then probably a couple local trucks at first. Eventually, a convoy of major network and cable news vehicles would appear, their crews jostling for position outside the security cordon. Producers would leverage every trick to set up the most eye-catching shot, the kind of shot that implies access, like the audience is right there, practically in danger itself. The news correspondents and TV personalities would begin eating broadcast time first by reporting on the known situation, and when they run out of substantive facts, seamlessly transition to speculating wildly and inviting rolodex experts to do the same.
Our fourth estate would be handled by a designated Public Information Officer (PIO), who would ensure that the quasi-Orwellian Department of Homeland Security communications slogan “many voices, one message” is strictly adhered to by the management of responding agencies. The message would be sanitized for public exposure, then harmonized across any public sector staff the media would want to talk to. With everyone else repeating the same lines, the PIO would then become the primary face of public response to the disaster; responsible for press conferences and media comment until later in the process when some higher official can make more definitive (i.e. better scripted and spun) statements. The whole time, all the responders will be using the same standardized language, same terminology, same lexicon of gloriously obscure acronyms. This would all be outlined in the Emergency Communications Plan (ECP).
This common lexicon and communication protocol is now mandated under NIMS and NICS, the “National Incident Management System” and “National Incident Command System,” respectively,[xi] and is among the most constructive post-9/11 reforms to American emergency response. During a proper disaster or critical incident involving multiple responding agencies, the firefighters, cops, and all other first responders must drop their beloved but idiosyncratic “10-codes” and stick to federally-mandated plain language. Because the 10-codes were never standardized between jurisdictions and agencies, the pride that local first responders once had in memorizing and using them is counterproductive to any situation in which they must interact with outside agencies using different radio protocols. This new standard means that whenever a train derails and spews radioactive toxic magma gases, or whatever, all over the nearest day care center, the responding cops can just describe it over the radio like a normal person, rather than cloak it in unnecessary and confusing radio code officiousness. Of course, all of this efficient standardized communication requires hand-held and vehicle-based radios. If the radio systems of the various responding agencies are incompatible (and this is still an occasional and rather embarrassing problem in many American cities and states), the local Office of Emergency Management would flip the switch on an expensive but essential piece of telecommunications equipment that receives radio signals in all frequencies and rebroadcasts them in real-time to any other frequency, making radios never designed to talk to each other do precisely that, as if by some taxpayer sorcery.
And amid this swirl of coordinated yet strangely organic activity, an observer safely on a hill overlooking the scene might just feel like they’re seeing something extraordinary. Terrible yes, at its core. But reassuring too, in that the appearance of an army of humans methodically approaching the danger and working systematically to minimize its harms cannot but reassure that we are not entirely alone in extremity. Besides armed conflict, it’s probably the closest human beings get to true collective cooperation, and on refreshingly better ethical ground. Each of us an ant rallying to protect the colony- roles already known, no committees, no debate, a clear chain of command with defined ranks, roles, and specializations, all interacting systematically and with considerable determination to save human beings. There cannot help but be reassurance in the fundamental message that society deems its citizens worthy of some concerted effort. There is a legitimizing value in using the awe-inspiring but too-often destructive powers of the modern state to accomplish an unambiguously humanitarian objective.
Perhaps most importantly, in observing this massive demonstration of public response, the observer might almost start to feel like things are under control. There is something necessarily humbling in the efficient dispassion of the protocols. Something about the marshaling of resources as if attacking an enemy on the public’s behalf, in the simultaneously intimidating and reassuring appearance of authority and order amid chaos. Sirens and floodlights and vehicles and uniforms and that yellow tape from TV. The procedure. The systematicity of it all. The rendering of danger and human tragedy into just another technical challenge- catastrophe subsumed into the all-encompassing banality of modern bureaucracy. This is not coincidental. The language, the acronyms, the procedures, the plans, the public image, possibly the entire culture of emergency management is ultimately about order: imposing and demonstrating order in the midst of chaos. It feels both real and illusory because it is.
Overseeing the scene in its entirety would be an Emergency Manager (EM), supported by an emergency management staff. Emergency managers are an eclectic lot, and they occupy a strange niche in public service: they are neither first responders nor elected officials, and sometimes lack the on-the-ground credibility of the former, and the political or social clout of the latter. An emergency manager’s scope of authority and political power in a city, state, or even the federal bureaucratic hierarchy under standard operating procedures (SOPs) is somewhere between the semi-retired functionary that procures equipment for the custodial staff, and the lady who manages parking enforcement. But when an emergency scenario reaches a certain level of complexity, when it scales beyond the ability of local first responders to handle it with in-house resources; and most especially, when a state of emergency or disaster is legally declared by elected officials, the authority of the emergency manager to coordinate and command the response between an alphabet soup of responding agencies goes virtually unquestioned.
The emergency manager probably had a plan for this. She (or to be a little more accurate in current economic circumstances, her interns) may even have written an addendum to the county or state emergency operations plan (EOP) specifically to address the improbable, yet non-trivial impacts, of some entropic cascade of industrial negligence or malicious troublemaking resulting in a tidal wave of sweetener, or whatever, burying some significant portion of her jurisdiction. The responders at the on-scene incident command post would report on the situation in real-time to the emergency operations center (EOC), a (usually) well-protected permanent facility somewhere else in the county or state. This EOC is where the emergency management staff would spend much of their time for the duration: in a hermetically-sealed control room, monitoring and tracking the scenario on computer screens, consulting the plan and sending commands via phone and mouse click. It’s quiet there. Often underground. Fluorescent lights and no windows. From this un-place, catastrophe feels like a video game played by earnest polo-shirted interns.
They are the makers and keepers of the plan, and the planners enthusiastically wrote it to reflect a perfectly brutal utilitarianism. Most of the significant natural, accidental, or intentional hazards that stand a remote possibility of occurring in the emergency manager’s jurisdiction have already been planned for, casualty projections and all. The full range of foreseeable consequences of the hazard has been forecasted, with the primary undecided variables being severity and timing. Important resources, places with special needs populations, critical infrastructure and services, population centers, supply chains, sites of cultural importance, all are identified and mapped out, with addenda on what kind of damage various kinds of foreseeable disasters on the list could cause them. The least-worst compromises can then be made. Emergency management involves strategic trades: if a blizzard, or flood, or whatever cuts off power and road access in a wide area, only a certain number of helicopter sorties and snowcat trips can be arranged per day, and there is only so much you can fit on them. Emergency operations are jarring not only because they involve large, dramatic, and dangerous situations, but also because they rapidly pull away the sense of leisure and complacent plenty that has come to define modernity, and replaces it with urgent choices determined by the starkest scarcities. If thousands of cattle are freezing to death because ranch owners are out of fuel for the backup generators that heat their barns, Ol’ Bessy is in for a cold night. If the hospital is out of backup fuel but so is the fire department, the fire department gets fuel and the hospital’s ventilators may have to go quiet. This is not intended to be callous. (And would be extremely rare, since this is one of the last tradeoffs an Emergency Planner would ever want to leave himself vulnerable enough to make). But the logic holds: if first responders have no fuel, they can’t bring resources to the hospital, or the ranch, or anywhere else, as those resources become available later, and they can’t continue to respond to the situation as it develops. When cops arrive at a disaster scene and ignore the injured so they can clear traffic ingresses, it is not because they are remiss in their duties, they are in fact performing them.
Responses to these situations have been computer modeled and statistically analyzed. Responders have trained and exercised according to these analyses, which indicate that more lives will be saved if cops spend their time clearing space for firefighters and paramedics in a mass-casualty incident, rather than attempting to perform the firefighters’ and paramedics’ functions. If the scenario were different, a school shooting for example, the first cop on scene would immediately rush in and perform the function of a cop, stepping over wounded students in a single-minded effort to rapidly engage the shooter rather than wait for backup. This is because the analyses in those cases now indicate that the sooner an active shooter is challenged, the less people will die.[xii] The numbers don’t lie. At least we don’t think they do. In plan we trust.
The people who work in emergency management are abundantly aware that emergency scenarios can’t be modeled in every detail, or sometimes at all. They also freely acknowledge that some scenarios fall outside of all capabilities regardless of the plan. So they plan for everything they are mandated to plan for, and then plan some more for whatever else they can think of. They do this while acknowledging more openly than most public servants that they themselves are ultimately incapable of protecting the public, or even keeping the machinery of the state itself fully functional in the face of truly catastrophic events. They know that things can spiral out of control despite fine effort and a beautifully crafted plan. They take their cues from Clausewitz[xiii] whether they know it or not.
Emergency managers tend to be a standard deviation from the people they interact with in the course of their work. Emergency management as a profession emerged from the Cold War era Civil Defense System,[xiv] a Strangelove fantasy never quite taken seriously by the wise even in its time. It fell out of favor (and funding) by the late 1960s as the concept of mutually-assured destruction supplanted any fantasy of preparing to win nuclear war. It wasn’t until some abysmally disorganized responses to natural disasters in the late 1960s and early 70s that FEMA was chartered and emergency management redefined as a legitimate and necessary civilian specialty, something that could save lives and serve the public without having to prioritize having enough Spam™ around to outlast the Soviets in nuclear winter.
As a result of its political neglect until relatively recently, emergency management has been inherited by a surprisingly diverse cross section of people: some political appointees,[xv] some military, law enforcement, and firefighting veterans, some veterans of the old civil defense system, some poorly prepared city planners doing mandated double duty, and all being slowly but surely replaced by earnest young people with masters degrees and a science-heavy outlook. Your local emergency manager could be a nice sixty-five-year-old lady who got into the business because her husband was a firefighter in the 1970s and the department asked the wives if they’d like to volunteer with civil defense. When civil defense graduated into emergency management, these volunteers became some of the first real paid specialists in the field. Or, your emergency manager could be a mid-career cop who reluctantly took the job to fulfill a mandate that his jurisdiction have an emergency manager. He could be a mid-career military veteran drawn to the strategic outlook and logistical complexity of the field. She could be a former corporate security or “business continuity” professional from the private sector well versed in the formulae by which different emergency and security procedures are evaluated for return on investment. Now that emergency management and homeland security[xvi] are fields offered within higher education, she could be a young graduate with a master’s degree in public administration and a certification in homeland security, who has virtually no hands-on experience in emergency response, but mastery of the analytical methods, sophisticated software, and other technical tools of the quickly-evolving trade. As a field, it’s far from monolithic, but if there’s a single identifiable trend, it’s an increasing focus on systematizing every known form of misadventure.
I was at a conference organized by my emergency management and security consulting company. The ostensible purpose was to get the state’s emergency planners in a room with the state’s utility and energy executives to discuss the new Energy Assurance Plan, which is basically an emergency plan for the energy sector. It had lots of information about how the government and private companies should respond to a massive failure of the power grid. Facilitating this gathering of public and private sectors required the enticement of moderately good catering, but given the salaries of energy executives and that their participation was voluntary, we considered it a steal. The businesspeople were, for the most part, dressed in stylish business attire: men in dark pinstripes, wingtips and cufflinks and so forth, ladies in sleek suits, all clutching briefcases and tablets. In contrast, the emergency managers appeared a motley crew: some attired in cargo pants and polo tees with their emergency management logos (this being the informal uniform of emergency management in the US), others, generally of more managerial rank, sporting suits and blazers you could tell they weren’t accustomed to wearing often. Instead of briefcases, some had backpacks. They carried mobile devices and tablets, but also legal pads on which to keep backup notes, as emergency managers tend to expect anything technological to fail at some point. The beards and flannels were definitely all on one side of the room. In the internal culture of emergency management, there is a premium on the practical. Looking like a lobbyist gets you no particular respect. This is cargo pant and fanny pack country: the uniform of disaster nerds.
It was pre-meeting coffee and networking time, and while comparing every day carry items with another young colleague, I was conversing here and there with whoever was around. I ended up talking to a high-ranking emergency manager from the state government. He’s a smart guy, and I and asked him what scenarios his office had been planning for lately.
“Well, of course there’s the chemical weapons storage site up north. They’ve been saying they’re going to permanently dispose of that junk every few years since the 80s, but they never got it done, so it just sits there being dangerous. Of course DOD keeps it pretty secure, but the longer it sits the more likely there’s gonna be a problem at some point.”
“So what kind of stuff do they keep there?” I asked.
“Chemicals!” interjected his hard drinking yet highly competent partyboy assistant. “Stuff that’ll make you shit from all the wrong places!”
The boss continued drily, “nerve agents, yeah, pretty nasty stuff.”
“Do you guys have a plan specifically for an emergency with that facility?” I asked, knowing already, but wanting to hear the answer.
“Yeah!” said the assistant, “we’ve got a plan, and a bunch of MOPP suits in reserve for cleanup crews, and basically if it got bad enough we could just call the Air National Guard and have them burn the place up with incendiary munitions! Kind of like Chernobyl, but backwards!”
The boss shushed his assistant with a silent but sarcastic expression, then continued with characteristic understatement. “It’s nothing like Chernobyl, and yes, we’re pretty comprehensively planned out on that one. DOD is on the issue too. We shouldn’t have to blow it up. I mean really, that would be such an unlikely scenario…. ”
“So what’s the latest plan you guys are working on?”
“Well, you know the Yellowstone Supercaldera?”
“Umm, you mean the civilization-ending supervolcano scenario where the State of Wyoming blows up and the entire mountain and central time zones get buried in five to ten feet of ash, half of North America become refugees, and hundreds of millions starve and become embroiled in a violent Mad Max post-apocalypse as global agriculture, finance, and governance all collapse?”
“Yeah that.”
“That?”
“Yeah, we’re working on it.”
And this is the problem with emergency management, if it is, in fact, a problem. The statistics say that a certain number of industrial facilities will blow to bloody hell with some workers inside, or spill toxic chemicals, or contaminate groundwater every year. A certain number of oil facilities and transports will spill crude into the oceans. The projections clearly indicate that a great deal of coastal residences, businesses, and land are at risk from rising sea levels, and extreme weather will increase in many areas due to global climate change. A certain (thankfully small) number of extremists or psychologically unstable people will shoot up or bomb innocents. Hurricanes and tornados will blow, earthquakes will shake, wildfires will burn, trains will derail, bridges will fail. Telecom systems and the power grid will be interrupted at inopportune times. Planes will crash, radioactive materials will be released, the networks that manage important systems may be dangerously hacked. A heretofore uncatalogued asteroid may strike and end the whole science experiment. None of these things is likely. In fact, they all range between rare to vanishingly improbable at any given time, but empirical data indicate that all of these things will, at some point, occur.
In spite of this, many industrial facilities will remain insufficiently regulated, and many private sector companies will probably continue to be exempt from the Clean Water Act and other kinds of safety and environmental guidelines. The federal government will continue to insure and encourage coastal investments despite the risk because the political costs of not doing so are unacceptable. States will continue to overbuild in wildland-urban interfaces with insufficient forest management and not enough firefighting resources to properly protect the development, so people will be at risk from wildfires. Guns and bomb materials will continue to be accessible for use in senseless violence undertaken by a small number of malcontents who we will, of course, allow to wield perversely disproportionate influence on our politics.
Unless a budgetary miracle happens, road, rail, and bridge infrastructure will continue to be insufficiently maintained, putting people at risk. Radioactive materials will continue to be stored ad hoc all over the place with insufficient security because nobody wants to accept the risk of shipping it over the decrepit rail system to more permanent and secure storage facilities. The computer networks that run everything we rely on will continue to be vulnerable to malfeasance, partially due to governments’ desire to preserve their own abilities to spy on the global public. None of these fundamental risks are addressed by the art and science of emergency management, but it is emergency managers who are charged with cleaning up after them. Emergency management is without a doubt noble, and necessary. But the problems that lead to, or exacerbate human disaster, won’t be solved simply by designing ever more efficient responses. They will be solved by evolving a more forward-thinking, cooperative, and sustainable way of interacting with our environment, and each other. It’s an easy fatalism that interprets disaster as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of modernity. But until that better way comes along, the profession of emergency management must perpetuate an illusion: that the incredibly complex and interdependent systems which support and constitute modern life, are basically under control. They comfort us with this illusion, while regularly combating the results of its untruth.
And they have a plan, because somebody has to.
[i]Puleo, Stephen. Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. Beacon Press 2004
[ii] “12 Killed When Tank of Molasses Exploded.” New York Times Jan 16, 1919
[iii] Ferris Jabr. “The Science of the Great Molasses Flood.” Scientific American July 17, 2013
[iv] Boston Post
[v] Puleo, Stephen. Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. Beacon Press 2004
[vi] Ibid.
[viii]I am aware that “budgetarily healthy” is both arbitrarily-defined AND less common than it used to be in the United States. Within the fields of Emergency Management, Law Enforcement, and National Security, the issue is not so much that the national security establishment won’t ensure funding for security-related programs (they most certainly will), but that these programs have for too long been corporate giveaways in which underfunded fire districts and police departments can get generous grants for exotic “Homeland Security” related items like dosimeters and bomb-resistant vehicles, but can’t afford or get grants for basic (and lower-markup) items like uniforms and radios.
[ix] The naming of State-level offices in charge of environmental protection appears to vary widely by locale, and I may be reading into this unnecessarily, but the naming differences do seem to imply differing attitudes toward the environment and the role of humans in it, at least as of the time the office was named. For example, Delaware’s Office is the bland yet vaguely authoritarian-sounding “Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control,” while Indiana has a more laissez faire sounding “Department of Environmental Management,” Minnesota has the very direct but possibly outdated “Pollution Control Agency,” and Texas has the “Commission on Environmental Quality,” which is actually one of the largest state environmental agencies in the country, but sounds like an ad hoc tribunal.
[x]Incidentally, the Salvation Army is the preferred food-provider at large-scale incidents. The Red Cross specializes in sheltering, and so really only provides small snacks, whereas the Salvation Army considers food to be one of its primary specialties in disaster scenarios, and has an efficient system to build and supply full scale expedient field kitchens in disaster zones serving a variety of proper meals to responders and victims at the scene.
[xi] United States Department of Homeland Security. “National Incident Management System,” Dec 2008
http://www.fema.gov/pdf/emergency/nims/NIMS_core.pdf
[xii] Ron Borsch. “The Stopwatch of Death.” PoliceOne Magazine Aug 31, 2007
http://www.policeone.com/police-products/police-technology/emergency-response/articles/1349058-the-stopwatch-of-death
[xiii] “The Book of War: Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War,’ and Karl von Clausewitz’s ‘On War.'” Edited by Caleb Carr, Modern Library 2000
The famous quote I’m referring to here is “No plan survives contact with the enemy,” which is attributed to Clausewitz because it is contained in his works, but in truth may have been coined by his contemporary Helmuth von Moltke.
[xiv] Sylves, Richard. Disaster Policy and Politics: Emergency Management and Homeland Security. CQ Press 2008
[xv] Most emergency managers are well-qualified, with an academic or professional background in the field, or both. Few are direct political appointees with little experience in the field, but the widespread public impression that this is the case after the handling of Hurricane Katrina has been detrimental to the public standing of the field, and frustrating to its professionals. This problem is parallel to the complaint among career diplomats that the highest-ranking diplomats at many embassies are big-contributing political appointees with little background in diplomacy, or knowledge of the countries they’re posted to.
[xvi]I teach “Homeland Security.” I enjoy doing so, and consider the civilian study of security issues to be both essential and beneficial. But I still don’t know precisely what it is supposed to be as a field. The post 9/11 language invoking “Homeland,” a word which was barely in the American lexicon before then, still leaves me with a skeptical taste in my mouth, and in truth the field simply merges multiple discrete disciplines like criminal justice/criminology, industrial engineering, social science, law, military science, GIS, public administration, international security, etc… into a semi-coherent program of study intended to prepare civilians to make wise decisions with our ploddingly powerful national security apparatus.