The Noggin Blog

According to CNBC reporting, the average number of yearly billion-dollar disasters totalled 15 events from 2016 to 2018. The average yearly total for the previous 38 years: 6.2 events. And this year’s disaster season, with its deadly storms, heatwaves, and, of course, wildfires, is all but certainly trending in the wrong direction.

Last Friday’s (March 15) horrific attacks at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch already rank as the deadliest mass shooting incident in New Zealand history. Fifty people were killed, and scores injured in an act of terror unprecedented in the island nation.   

Been managing volunteers, especially disaster response volunteers, for the last few decades? Then, you’ve probably noticed a shift. There’re fewer long-term volunteers; new volunteers are harder to come by than ever; and your base of existing volunteers is serving historically short stints.

By now, the case for interoperability, especially the efficient transfer of relevant data between agencies – otherwise known as interoperability in information management – is clear. Just take a look at many post-emergency, after-action reports; most cite a lack of interagency cooperation as contributory to mission setbacks, or even failures. Of course, one of the best examples in recent memory: poor interagency cooperation between New York City responders during 11 September.

When it comes to disaster response, full-time staff usually gets heavy reinforcement from volunteers. Indeed, in the event of an emergency, volunteers, especially spontaneous, converging volunteers, are often the first on the field, providing much-needed first responder support, including search and rescue, first aid, damage and need assessment. It’s also not uncommon that volunteers numerically dominate the response effort. In Australia, for instance, rural fire services often average career staff to volunteer ratios that easily exceed 1:130.

Resources and capabilities go hand in hand. Your team’s capabilities prove the crucial variable to success in the field. In other words, managing one (resources) without considering the other (capabilities) is a surefire way to undermine the success of your mission.

To be successful, incident managers need to get materials, supplies, technologies, and especially responders to the emergency site as quickly and efficiently as possible. But those same managers will tell you that getting resources to the right place at the right time is only half the battle. Attention also needs to be paid to ensuring the productivity of those resources once they reach the disaster. Here, however, managers and dispatchers confront capability roadblocks to effective resource management.

Resource management is all about getting the right people and things to the right places at the right time. Officially, it’s the organizational function dedicated to coordinating and overseeing tools, processes, and systems that help provide managers with appropriate resources in an appropriate timeframe.

When it comes to incident and emergency response, effectively managing resources couldn’t be more important. Resources, i.e. materials, supplies, facilities, technologies, even people, are assets in every sense of the word. But they don’t get the job done in isolation. That’s where capabilities come in.

If you take a bird’s eye view, the state of volunteerism seems pretty healthy. The volunteer rate in the U.S., for instance, stands at around 63 million people, roughly a quarter of the total population. And that’s only a few basis points down from the 29 percent that government statisticians recorded when they first started tracking rates of volunteerism back in the early 2000s. The importance of those volunteers to the health of the economy (not to mention the mission of their nonprofit organizations) can’t be overstated either. Some estimates show that volunteers contribute upwards of $150 billion in services.

Photo by MONUSCO/Sylvain Liechti  [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons