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Disasters are among the crises that can test the decision making skill of elected and appointed public officials from planning through response and recovery. The COVID-19 crisis, a public health emergency rather than one with immediate damage to the built environment, has affected many aspects of community life. Experiences in responding to the pandemic will likely stimulate fresh planning initiatives for public health emergencies. How then should emergency planners approach planning and response tasks? The All-Hazards approach has been a mainstay of both research and policymaking for over 40 years, but it has come under recent criticism. In this paper, we consider if the All-Hazards approach to disaster management is still viable. Comparing the management needs that emerged in the pandemic with those of disasters from more familiar hazard agents, we conclude that the All-Hazards approach is valid and can continue to guide policymakers in their hazard and disaster management activities.Los desastres se encuentran entre las crisis que pueden poner a prueba la capacidad de toma de decisiones de los funcionarios públicos electos y designados desde la planificación hasta la respuesta y la recuperación. La crisis de COVID‐19, una emergencia de salud pública en lugar de una con daños inmediatos al entorno construido, ha afectado muchos aspectos de la vida comunitaria. Las experiencias en la respuesta a la pandemia probablemente estimularán nuevas iniciativas de planificación para emergencias de salud pública. Entonces, ¿cómo deben abordar los planificadores de emergencias las tareas de planificación y respuesta? El enfoque todos los peligros ha sido un pilar de la investigación y la formulación de políticas durante más de 40 años, pero ha sido objeto de críticas recientes. En este documento, consideramos si el enfoque de todos los peligros para la gestión de desastres sigue siendo viable. Al comparar las necesidades de gestión que surgieron en la pandemia con las de los desastres de agentes de peligro más familiares, llegamos a la conclusión de que el enfoque de todos los peligros es válido y puede seguir guiando a los responsables de la formulación de políticas en sus actividades de gestión de peligros y desastres.在各类危机中，灾害能检验经过选举和任命的公共官员在规划、响应和恢复过程中的决策技能。新冠肺炎（COVID‐19）危机是一场公共卫生紧急事件，不是一次对建成环境造成直接损害的灾害，它已影响了社区生活的多个方面。大流行的响应经验将有可能激励全新的规划倡议，以应对公共卫生紧急事件。应急规划者则应如何处理规划和响应任务？全灾害管理模式（All‐Hazards approach）在过去40年里一直是研究和决策的支柱，但最近却遭到了批判。本文中，我们考量了全灾害管理模式是否仍然有效。通过将大流行的管理需求和“由更熟悉的灾害因素造成的灾害”的管理需求进行比较，我们的结论认为，全灾害管理模式仍然成立，并且能继续指导决策者进行灾害管理活动。.

Objective: The emergency operations center (EOC) is an essential component of modern emergency management. Traditionally understood as a place where officials communicate with the public, support coordination, manage operations, craft policy, gather information, and host visitors; there has been little recent research on their structure, operations, or work procedures. EOCs may in fact be, as we argue here, places where emergency managers come to find workarounds, delegate tasks, and find new sources of expertise in order to make sense, make meaning, and make decisions. However, despite their status as a symbol of emergency management and recipients of large amounts of funding, there has been relatively little scientific research into the EOC. With this paper, we synthesize the existing research and propose a variety of research questions to accelerate the process of inquiry into the EOC.Design: Informed by an extensive literature review, this article presents a comprehensive look at the existing state of knowledge surrounding EOCs.Interventions: Research questions to support investigation of the EOC are suggested.Conclusions: The EOC is an underexplored setting ripe for development and discovery by researchers and emergency managers seeking to influence the field of emergency management.

Community resilience is a community’s ability to maintain functioning (ie, delivery of services) during and after a disaster event. The Composite of Post-Event Well-Being (COPEWELL) is a system dynamics model of community resilience that predicts a community’s disaster-specific functioning over time. We explored COPEWELL’s usefulness as a practice-based tool for understanding community resilience and to engage partners in identifying resilience-strengthening strategies. In 2014, along with academic partners, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene organized an interdisciplinary work group that used COPEWELL to advance cross-sector engagement, design approaches to understand and strengthen community resilience, and identify local data to explore COPEWELL implementation at neighborhood levels. The authors conducted participant interviews and collected shared experiences to capture information on lessons learned. The COPEWELL model led to an improved understanding of community resilience among agency members and community partners. Integration and enhanced alignment of efforts among preparedness, disaster resilience, and community development emerged. The work group identified strategies to strengthen resilience. Searches of neighborhood-level data sets and mapping helped prioritize communities that are vulnerable to disasters (eg, medically vulnerable, socially isolated, low income). These actions increased understanding of available data, identified data gaps, and generated ideas for future data collection. The COPEWELL model can be used to drive an understanding of resilience, identify key geographic areas at risk during and after a disaster, spur efforts to build on local metrics, and result in innovative interventions that integrate and align efforts among emergency preparedness, community development, and broader public health initiatives.

The Disaster Research Center (DRC) was founded in 1963 to help American government decision makers understand how citizens would respond in times of crisis. Since then, DRC personnel have embarked upon some 700 quick-response deployments to better understand the social and physical aspects of disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. This research has taken DRC faculty and students around the world, from New York City, conducting research that explored and documented the city's response to and recovery from 9/11, to the Kathmandu Valley to better understand mothering during disaster evacuation after the 2015 Nepal Earthquake. Relevant to the academy, practitioners, and the public, DRC is available to lend its expertise to answer the most pressing questions in disaster science.

While the All-Hazards approach has been a fixture in disaster management in the United States for approximately three decades, discussion continues regarding the appropriateness of including public health emergencies under the All-Hazards umbrella. Drawing on the disaster and public health literatures, we examine previous research in three areas of relevance to these events: convergence, risk and crisis communication, and providing medical services. Although events often include characteristics unique to each particular hazard, the literature demonstrates that there are sufficient similarities in these areas to advocate for the continued utility of the All-Hazards approach. Convergence of people, material, and information often follow both disasters and public health emergencies, and present similar challenges and opportunities as a result. Crisis risk communication for these events rests on similar underlying theories, and presents similar challenges for practitioners, imposing similar demands on the medical system, both increasing needs for medical services and compromising the system's ability to provide services to meet those needs. Research is needed to explore further parallels between hazards, particularly in mitigation and recovery and in other national contexts. Future work should include direct, empirical comparisons across event types, and include other kinds of environmental or public health hazards.

The genesis of this book was the 50th Anniversary Workshop and Celebration of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware in 2014. In marking that milestone in the history of the center, we wanted a workshop in which participants would reflect on what is known about disaster science—much of which is owed to DRC, to its long lineage of intellectual descendants, and to their scholarly cousins in a variety of fields. We wanted to assess where that knowledge is uncertain, where new or reinforced knowledge is needed, and also to think about the state of practice. For this collection, authors were explicitly encouraged to be provocative; to be iconoclastic; to be speculative; to try as best possible to bring in new ideas or different approaches to familiar themes. In this first chapter, we consider some of today’s pressing environmental challenges and the associated research needs, moving from there to introduce the chapters and their overall contributions to this volume.

This paper examines the relationship of risk and power through a critical analysis of Crew Endurance Management, an initiative directed at enhancing maritime safety and efficiency. The paper argues that the initiative applies rhetorics of choice and self‐discipline to unite morality with risk, thus casting merchant mariners as risk objects in the shipping industry. This objectification relies on differentials in power rooted in differentially‐valued discourses that delegitimize some kinds of expertise. At the same time, deploying alternative rhetorics keyed to the anxieties of other levels of society allows risk objects to resist their objectification by shifting the relevant social scale for considering risk. The paper concludes by suggesting that imperatives for both productivity and safety will expand the workspace by expanding, through emphasis on personal choices, the environment in which workers must be concerned about risk reduction.

Today, university educators are confronting unparalleled challenges regarding declining state education budgets. Meanwhile, an ethos of corporate social responsibility has taken hold in some sectors, where companies define themselves as members and participants in a community, able to offer something besides financial transactions. Engagement and support of educational programs and institutions is an example of one such kind of involvement. This chapter details such collaborations between Grainger corporation, NC4, ESi Acquisition Inc. and the University of North Texas's Emergency Administration and Planning program. The generosity of these private companies helped the program open an Emergency Operations Center training lab on campus to facilitate hands-on decision support systems training, and enhance creativity and problem solving skills in a simulated environment for emergency management students. Such public-private partnerships and outreach efforts to enhance disaster management training and educational experiences of students have the potential to make a real and lasting difference to all players involved.

This paper explores the provision of disaster-related behavioural and mental health (DBH) services as a problem of institutional collective action in the United States. This study reviews the challenges that providers have in surmounting multi-organizational disconnects, unstable professional legitimacy, ambiguous information, and shifting disaster needs in developing a system for delivering DBH services. Based on the adaptive governance framework, it argues that existing protocols such as the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and Incident Command System (ICS) may be helpful in advancing collective action, but that real progress will depend on a recognition of norms, expectations, and credentials across many spheres-in other words, on the ability of responders to continuously adjust their procedures and administrative boundaries for behavioural health institutions.

In this chapter, we examine community innovation. We begin first by conceptualizing community and innovation as they relate to hazard and disaster. We identify the difficulties inherent in the terms community, innovation, and community innovation, presenting some working concepts that seem to align best with overall disaster research experience. We examine the characteristics of communities that make innovation both necessary and difficult, using examples of innovations drawn from the United States and internationally. This discussion will point toward some directions for future research, including an understanding of community that might be suitable for newer, complex, and diffuse hazards – such as bioterrorism, cyberterrorism, and slow onset hazards related to climate change. The discussion will also point to some needed reorientations in policy that might proceed from either subsequent or existing research.

The World Trade Center disaster generated many of the features seen in other disasters in the U.S., including post-disaster convergence. We conceptualize emergency management activities as taking place within a multilocational “response milieu,” and we suggest that the study of convergence should focus on the negotiated legitimacy of people in and wishing to enter it. We discuss the five types of personal convergers and how the access of each of these groups to the response milieu was related to their legitimation status. We then identify two additional forms of convergence: supporters or fans, and those who came to mourn or to memorialize. We conclude by discussing implications for policy.

The objective of this paper is to present an institutional view of disasters derived in part from the results of a recent study of hospitals in the United States. It is offered in the hope that a focus on institution will help resolve the present lack of fit between, on the one hand, the increasing complexity of the new hazards and on the other, existing conceptualizations in the social sciences of disasters and emergency management that privilege the community. The paper uses information from 76 participants in 13 focus groups in acute-care hospital organizations in California, Tennessee, and New York to illustrate the argument for institutions. The implications of these findings for an institutional conceptualization of disasters are discussed.