Re: Ontology of disaster management

----------
SUMMARY

Gavin's right, though Quentin's point about the irony
of an "ontology of chaos" can't be ignored, and
suggests more compromises to accomodate long-term data
integrity and management needs to gain more management
compliance, cooperation and perspective.  These are
three different problems.  It's a very social problem:

An ontology that describes situations in which it is
not possible to manage at all, will be difficult to 
convince long-term managers to impose or even use.

Thus:

A "Disaster Management" ontology that tries to deal
only with the narrow slice of time and narrow range of
issues involved in a specifically "disaster" scale or
"relief" or "response" time frame, will badly fail.  I
believe the vision of how this ontology should work in
practice will strongly resemble what Gavin outlines -
and that this is almost exactly the model that the UN
Resilient Communities and Cities Initiative pursues. 

However, everything is negotiable.  The reasonable
constraints applied by citizens on data gathering and
lifestyle inhibitions of risk reduction and also on
expenditures to prepare for low-probability
high-impact scenarios cannot simply be ignored. 
Neither can the need to align long-term and short-term
efforts.

Thus:

Any ontology must work well enough for Response and
Recovery - this is non-negotiable.  However, it works
better if it has already been coordinated with longer
term needs and embodies principled compromises - that
make no one completely happy.

Improvements to coordination between the phases will
be more likely to reduce risk than accomodating any
one phase so far that it reduces compliance in others.

As Gavin Treadgold says:
> the interconnectedness of disaster impact 
> assessment  
> information suggests that an ontology developed
> solely for Response,  
> will fail to meet the needs of comprehensive
> emergency management as  
> it won't allow DIA information to be captured from
> events, and  
> transferred to future research and planning.

It will also cause numerous culture and coordination
and conditioning problems among victims and responders
and managers, due to shifting back and forth between
one mode of operation and another, and the stress and
errors this causes.  Resilience minimizes this stress
and reduces load/stress in Response phase by making it
more likely that locals can handle their own Response.

Resilience is, in effect, the feedback from the last
to the first phases and the standards underlying all.

---------

Gavin and Quentin are debating the most difficult and
thus most important problem.  Their points deserve
very deep examination and will change both the mission
and the name of the project in one way or another.  I
therefore attempt to combine their views in some way.

I am in absolute agreement with Gavin on all counts
except a couple of detailed points of language and a
more serious difference in balance between phases.  I
believe "Response and Recovery" are MUCH weakened if
they insist on applying inappropriate data standards
or practices prior to disasters or fail to coordinate
or compromise with longer term resilience efforts. 

One obvious problem is that shifting over from pre- to
during- to post- disaster methods and standards is
costly, confusing, risk-prone and extremely likely to
fail given the stress people are under.  In a crisis,
people fall to the level of their conditioning.  So it
is better to have one robust set of tools, procedures,
data standards, even if this is slighly less useful in
the response and recovery phase than another set that
would have to be imposed by surprise on stressed
folks.  Admittedly this is not always possible, but
when it is possible, it should always be preferred.

Another problem is that short-term events are quickly
forgotten and cannot easily change long-term habits,
so the motivation to cooperate with prevention efforts
is less if those efforts aren't seen to be part of the
ongoing routine effort to reduce other routine risks.

There's a gulf between "management" and "crisis" style
and habits of decision-making.  The worst time to have
that turn into a fight, is when a disaster hits.  So
recognize that cooperation and resistance to pre- and
post-disaster efforts, and to handoffs either way,
tend to be partly determined by the degree to which
the "Response and Recovery" varies from the standard
routine practices.  Thus the "resilience" approach
which minimizes these differences and seeks robust
practices useful across all phases.

For instance, I would rather have a vulnerable persons
list that meets privacy laws and is accordingly
limited in scope, but often consulted, often updated,
consulted long before the disaster strikes for
planning, and immediately available for use when the
disaster hits.  This is clearly better than to have a
specification for a very detailed such list, that can
only begin to be compiled once a disaster has been
recognized and authorization to over-ride privacy laws
is given.  It's possible to keep the data in separate
"silos" and then combine it only once the disaster is
imminent, but then it's all the more important to have
it follow the same gathering discipline and integrity
tests (why the ontology must be useful in all phases).

That said, there are some who object to this approach.
I believe Quention's issue of resilience and disaster
reduction interfering with lifestyles is more a US
bias with predictable and disastrous outcomes. It is
at best extremely expensive (rebuilding homes in flood
plains or storm surge zones to await another
disaster).

The above however amounts to quibbling.  As Gavin very
pointedly argues:

The NZ approach appears to be quite robust and the
only one that is truly dealing with implications of
the plain fact that information must be gathered
before, and used after, the so-called "response", and
that there's feedback between the phases and persons. 


So a "Disaster Management" ontology that tries to deal
only with the narrow slice of time and narrow range of
issues involved in a specifically "disaster" scale or
"relief" or "response" time frame, will badly fail.  I
believe the vision of how this ontology should work in
practice will strongly resemble what Gavin outlines -
and that this is almost exactly the model that the UN
Resilient Communities and Cities Initiative pursues. 

I think the following statement of his could go in the
mission:

--- Gavin Treadgold <gt@kestrel.co.nz> wrote:
> the interconnectedness of disaster impact
> assessment  
> information suggests that an ontology developed
> solely for Response,  
> will fail to meet the needs of comprehensive
> emergency management as  
> it won't allow DIA information to be captured from
> events, and  
> transferred to future research and planning.

My point regarding compromises and conditioning
however would change what follows slightly, as we
should avoid use of non-operational terms like "work"
or specify what is "non-negotiable" or seem to side
with one side or another.  I would rewrite this:

> Any ontology must work  
well enough
> for Response and Recovery - this is non-negotiable.
> From there, it  
> makes sense then to apply it across all four phases
and to seek principled compromises to gain compliance.
Improvements to coordination between the phases will
be more likely to reduce risk than accomodating any
one phase so far that it reduces compliance in others.

Or, in more detail, one might argue that case as:

"Any ontology must enable Response and Recovery - this
 will be how it is judged by most of the public and
the
 media.  However, it's ability to enable those phases
 is radically reduced if it makes no compromises or is
 in violation of principles or laws that apply both
 before and after these phases.  If data gathered in a
 response and recovery effort is not immediately
useful
 afterwards, it will fall out of date.  If data that's
 gathered before is not immediately useful or
available
 during the most intense phases, the major opportunity
 to reduce impact (and gain more cooperation) is lost.

 Compromise costs.  Those who take responsibility for 

 just one or two phases of a comprehensive emergency
 management approach can reasonably be expected to 
 object to choices and compromises made to accomodate
 constraints that apply in other phases.  However, 
 for every cost one seeks a benefit like reduced risk
 and failures of coordination are the worst such
risks.
 It's better to avoid anyone having strong objections
 than it is to overcome all objections of those whose
 responsibilities will be limited to a few phases,
 because having only one standard is so advantageous."
 
Another statement worth considering for inclusion in a
mission statement or paper defining the mission is:
> community aspects including infrastructure planning,
> emergency  
> management, hazard management, risk management,
> urban design and  
> planning and sustainability are all inherently
> linked and cannot and should not be separated.

It may help to critique other efforts, as Quention is
seeming to do here:
> > At present, however, the field of emergency
> management is  
> > concentrating on developing a description of the
> Response Phase, an  
> > ontology of chaos as it were,  however ironic that
> might be.

Gavin says:
> I don't quite follow this statement?

I think I do.

Assuming Quention means to invoke the terminology used
in say the ABIDE framework, I believe what this is
intended to say is that the phase where there is least
order is the one that is getting to impose its concept
of order on other phases that are already much more
constrained and ordered.  This can easily fail and at
least leads to major clashes and incompatibilities.  I
believe it is fair to say the the US ER establishment
has experienced exactly these domestically and abroad.

The "resilience" approach does the opposite, it tries
to discover what is NOT changing even in a disaster so
as to maximize the use of existing data at that time,
and also maximize the usefulness of data gathered in a
response and recovery effort.  As I've outlined above.

For "chaos" you can reasonably read, as I understand
ABIDE, "pre-baseline".  That is, the situation in
which there is no way to assess whether things are
getting worse or better.  In this situation, you MUST
act and so an ontology that describes action (only) is
appropriate, NOT one that attempts to define the
situation itself beyond a set of inhibitions to
action.

So a list of types of disaster could help you identify
types of problems to watch closely for, patterns of
how the problems get better or (anti-patterns) worse. 
It could authorize certain types of actions or probes
or data aggregation that would otherwise be forbidden.
But it would not really help you to "manage" a crisis.

Once a baseline is established, the situation becomes
"complex", that is, you know if it's getting better or
worse, just not why.  If you try to develop a plan at
this stage, you're going to miss things and the plan
will fail.  Your senses and instincts remain quite
untrustworthy.  So instead you focus on probing to see
what specific actions seem to cause less or more good
or bad things to happen.  This is more like field
social science epistemics where you lack a control
group and rely on pattern recognition and heuristics. 
You can do harms reduction, for instance, not develop
comprehensive treatment plans.  Like field medicine.

Only once there is some agreement on the causality of
the worst aggravating factors, only once there is some
probing that establishes what's working and what is
not working, can we really start to define the "work"
required long term.  

We are dealing in causes now not mere correlations. 
At this point the situation is merely "complicated"
and can be managed by people with long-term skills.

ABIDE and like approaches are discussed often in US
circles. It seems to be a response to massive failures
of management and planning such as Katrina and Iraq.

In both cases, the inability of field personnel to
take reasonable action or reduce harms (like
protecting the Baghdad Museum or emptying deserted
supermarkets of supplies) may have led to a cascading
series of events (looting, lawlessness, self
protection societies that become sectarian groups, or
opportunistic alliances that become insurgent groups
or crime gangs).  But rules of engagement were being
"managed", emergency relief supplies "managed", etc..

In the ABIDE terminology, one would say that "chaotic"
and "complex" situations were thus being approached as
if they were only "complicated", and attempts to
"manage" them were made by persons far away who did
not understand them first, and indeed had no idea of
how one develops understanding of complex situations.

So Quentin's statement is indeed ironic in that it's
those who attempt to over-simplify the problem in the
first place, who are trying to impose their failures
on the next problem by over-simplifying the ontology.

Elaborating the lingo, what he said can possibly be
rewritten as follows, though of course in more words:

"Persons skilled in response and recovery often fail
 to realize that the minimal order they must impose in
 a genuinely chaotic situation won't be acceptable nor
 even comprehensible as a goal to the persons they
must
 cooperate with to prepare for, and reconstruct after,
 a disaster.  Accordingly their terms of reference are
 usually poorly integrated with those of colleagues in
 positions of long-term responsibility.  Data gathered
 beforehand by, and left afterwards to, the long-term
 authority, is useless if it describes distinctions or
 definitions used in response and recovery but not in
 long-term planning or routine operations.  Even the
 victims are likely to demand or seek normalcy or take
 action to impose it, resulting in 'vigilante'
effects.

 The chaos of disasters require those who arrive first
 to establish a baseline understanding of situations.
 The complexity of response and recovery require then
 more disciplined probing and experiments to establish
 what is working to improve those situations - or not.
  
 Guiding such action and probes under uncertainty is a

 distinct and separately studied phenomena, and what
 terms are appropriate to describe it may not be
useful
 to describe even the most terrifying, complicated and
 confusing situations that arise in routine emergency
 management.  In the latter, management is possible.

 An ontology that describes situations in which it is
 not possible to manage at all, will be difficult to 
 convince long-term managers to impose or even use."

Or just take that last paragraph.  I'll leave it to
Gavin and Quentin to say if I've understood them or
not, and if they object to the above elaboration and
integration of their respective positions.  

Craig Hubley



 
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Received on Tuesday, 19 June 2007 20:57:48 UTC