2004 Tsunami Management Challenges

The tsunami crisis presents unique management challenges rarely seen before in other disasters. Harvard professor Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard analyzes the issues facing relief workers.

Editor's note: Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, a professor at both Harvard Business School and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is one of the world's foremost thinkers on crisis management. Leonard agreed to contribute his insights on the business management aspects of the tsunami crisis, which is unique both because of its multicultural, multinational sweep, and because of the vast amount of worldwide aid that must be coordinated.

Leonard is Faculty Co-Chair of the Social Enterprise Initiative at Harvard Business School and Faculty Co-Chair of the Crisis Management Executive Program at the Kennedy School.

by Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard

Evolving relief imperatives

Sudden disasters—an explosion, a volcanic eruption, an earthquake, or the recent tsunamis in South Asia—are followed by predictable patterns of human needs and required relief responses that evolve in a natural sequence. As this sequence unfolds, the nature of the aid required from outside the disaster area shifts from basic life support to the reconstruction of livelihoods and communities:

1. Rescue, Phase I: The desperate dash: minutes and hours to (rarely) days.

The most immediate need during the destructive event and in its immediate aftermath is to rescue those who can be saved. During the tsunami events, some were able to reach out and provide assistance to others, pulling them to safety in a boat, in a tree, in a house left standing. In the immediate aftermath, some were saved by being pulled from the rubble, pulled from the receding water, dug out of still-flowing mud. In the first minutes, this can only be done by those who are there already; in the following hours, help from more organized responders, specifically deployed to the impact zone to help victims, may be able to extract injured and partially buried people, provide first aid for medically traumatized victims, and provide emotional support for distraught survivors.

2. Rescue, Phase II: The sprint: hours to days.

As those in most desperate need have been saved, attention turns to the immediate needs of those injured, traumatized, or separated from loved ones. Medical attention, food, water, cooking, shelter, and basic sanitation arrangements are the most critical priorities.

3. Cleanup and the beginning of recovery: The run: days to weeks.

As the most urgent human survival needs have begun to be met, the critical needs become those of dealing with the aftermath of the destruction. Identification of, religious rites for, and burial of the dead, identification and exchange of information about displaced survivors, reduction of dangerous conditions (unstable houses, infrastructure, and so on), and early attempts to restore vital services where possible now become the focus of activity and effort.

4. Reconstruction: The marathon: weeks and months to years.

Once basic immediate needs have been met, the focus shifts to the reconstruction of economic capacity, livelihoods, communities, and the ongoing institutions of life (schools, public services, and so on). In the aftermath, surviving victims' emotional trauma—processing and coping with the devastating human and economic losses—implies that the challenges are not in physical reconstruction alone.

Establishing command and control

Past disasters have taught us a great deal about how to rapidly organize logistical efforts to support people who are suddenly in need of food, water, shelter, clothing, medical treatment, and healthcare—as so many hundreds of thousands along the rim of South Asia are today. Sadly, countries and the international community have faced many previous sudden large-scale disasters, and significant experience has accumulated about how to organize effective responses in such circumstances.

One of the most effective ways to organize sudden responses is through an "Incident Management System" —a well-defined approach to establishing a temporary organization with logistical, operational, planning, and financial capacity to carry out a rescue and recovery effort. A principal imperative is the establishment of a clear chain of command and central authority that can direct the assessment of needs, the planning of a response, and the execution of the planned activities. Many relief organizations use some variation of an organizational design with a central authority supported by:

1. An operational command (carrying out activities).
2. A planning group (developing plans for the next "operational cycle" of hours, days, or weeks).
3. A logistics group (organizing the flow of people and materiel in to the action areas).
4. A finance group (arranging for payment to suppliers and workers).
5. A public communication group (keeping relevant constituencies informed).

Perhaps the best-developed form of Incident Management is that practiced by the U.S. Forest Service and associated federal firefighting agencies; it was developed as a response to the challenge of organizing sustained efforts for fighting large wildfires. This approach has now been applied in various other emergency management situations, and is now mandated as the basic template for response by U.S. federal agencies to any emergency situation.

Complicating factors

Unfortunately, the peculiar circumstances of the 2004 South Asian tsunamis create unusually challenging circumstances for the rapid establishment and coordination of relief efforts. In particular, it will be difficult to establish effective incident command systems as a result of the following circumstances:

(1) A myriad of places in which it is essential to operate suddenly and simultaneously. The tsunamis affected a very large number of different locations along a shoreline stretching literally for thousands of miles, spreading across about a dozen countries. Relief efforts will have to be mounted—and locally coordinated—in hundreds of different locations, challenging the capacity to mount teams with incident command experience in so many locations simultaneously.

(2) Multiple and confusing jurisdictions. The impact zone is characterized by many locations with multiple authorities—federal, local, international, community—of many different types—governmental, military, police, paramilitary, public health. These are now joined by many outside organizations—international NGOs, the U.N., and so on. Sorting out who is in charge, and of what, and who reports to whom, is likely to be a continuing challenge for some time. Incident management experts report that their work is greatly facilitated in locations where clear authority can be established—and delegated to them. Where authority is multiple, or shared, and contested, it can be exceedingly difficult to coordinate, direct, and distribute aid—especially as immediate needs have been met and more controversial priorities (whose roads or electric grid will be rebuilt first) have to be established.

(3) Political instability. In the short run, most of the decisions that need to be made are technical and straightforward—people are doing everything they can, with the resources available, to rescue victims, support the injured, and care for traumatized survivors. As the immediate human needs come to be met, however, and the situation stabilizes, the decisions become more controversial. While people are generally willing to accept expert guidance and judgment for the technical matters, when it comes to setting longer-term priorities the community will expect to play a more determinative role. At this point, the political instability of some of the affected areas is likely to come to the fore in the form of conflict among different groups about who should be consulted and whose priorities should receive the greatest attention.

Seven unusual disaster management challenges

The damage caused by the tsunamis of December 26th is unarguably of crisis proportions. With approximately 150,000 lives lost in the catastrophe and its immediate aftermath, hundreds of thousands injured, and millions displaced and potentially at risk from disease, contamination, and trauma, the world has been confronted by an enormous task of rescue, recovery, and rebuilding. There have been other large-scale human disasters, and in some ways countries and the international community are prepared to deal with some of the elements of human tragedy on a large scale. In many disaster circumstances, there are enough similarities to past situations to allow relief agencies and governments to mobilize reasonably quickly and reliably: stores of needed supplies have been stockpiled, responders have been trained and can be deployed, and routines have been developed and practiced. The current crisis, however, combines so many elements—and so many of those elements are so unlike those of past disasters—that it requires responses that are profoundly different from any disaster relief effort ever before mounted.

1. Simultaneous high-intensity destruction in thousands of relatively small and widely distributed individual locations.

The tsunamis struck essentially simultaneously along a relatively thin strip of land (a few hundred to a few thousands of feet wide in most locations) along thousands of miles of shoreline. Where they occurred, the tsunamis struck with great intensity; enormous destruction was thus created in literally thousands of different locations. The total area of destruction may be measured only in thousands of square miles—by comparison, many forest fires have destroyed much larger areas—but relief agencies are confronted by total devastation in a widely distributed collection of (mostly) relatively small individual areas. The damage is all "edge"; it has (practically) no "interior." Logistics and transportation to provide services in an area of this shape are particularly challenging and expensive per unit of aid that needs to be delivered. By contrast, most disasters (even large-scale catastrophes) are geographically relatively concentrated. The transportation needs for servicing a "disk" —the classic shape of a disaster impact zone—are significantly simpler than servicing a "ring" —the unique form of this tragedy.

2. Extremely difficult circumstances for assessing damage and relief needs.

Because the damage was caused by an inundation from the sea driven by energy transmitted by the sea, the amount of damage is highly variable as a function of the local topography of both the seafloor and the seashore. Offshore reefs in some cases deflected, and in other cases focused, the energy of the onshore waves. Relatively small differences in the slope of the seafloor near the shore created profound differences in the size of waves at the shore, in the amount of water that came ashore, and in the distance that water traveled inland. Similarly, small variations in the elevation of the land near the shore led to radical differences in the destructiveness of the waves and flooding. Finally, the nature and distribution of human habitation—concentrated in low-lying areas in some locations, and on higher ground in others—combined with the variation in tsunami destructiveness to produce widely varying amounts of damage in locations that superficially look quite similar.

The result is that there are few patterns that can be relied on to assess likely damage. Only direct contact and observation will allow relief organizations and government aid officials to assess local needs, which can vary in scope, scale, intensity, and type. The task of developing "situational awareness" —an understanding of the relief requirements—in thousands of highly varied and widely distributed locations is an unprecedented disaster management task. (It is little wonder, then, that there have been complaints about the slowness of aid responses in some locations.)

3. Highly variable remaining local capacity available to help victims.

In some locations, damage was locally varied, leaving untouched areas from which help and resources could flow to nearby areas of destruction. In India, a narrow band of destruction along the coast is backed by an entire country, almost all of it untouched, with access from undamaged areas all along the damaged ring. (India announced almost right away that it could cope with its immediate needs.) In Sumatra, by contrast, human populations—and the transport, utility, and service infrastructures that helped support them—were concentrated along a narrow strip of coastline, a large fraction of which was heavily damaged, leaving little available remaining local capacity for aid and relief within short travel distances of the affected areas, and simultaneously destroying much of the infrastructure of roads and bridges along which the relief might otherwise have been able to flow.

4. Unusually challenging jurisdictional uncertainties.

A classic challenge in disaster situations is to determine who is in charge. Who is supposed to listen to whom—who has authority to command which resources, to set priorities, to distribute (and redistribute) resources? In many of the locations where relief activities are underway, there is a tangled web of authority: federal government officials, local officials, police, army, U.S. and other military personnel, local aid agencies, community groups, NGOs, international relief organizations, the U.N. Each of these has some basis for discretion and authority, and each is likely to be wary of instructions issued by others. Together, they form a tangled web of chains of command, with ample opportunity for confusion, resentment, and conflict.

In the immediate rush to the front to help in the short run, cooperation is instinctive and informal arrangements are often implicitly put in place—but these often must be rethought and redesigned as time permits more careful coordination. While this is commonly a problem in any disaster situation, in this case the disaster is in thousands of different locations, each with a different mix of organizations represented—so the jurisdictional problem cannot be addressed in this case by a single general solution, but instead will inevitably have to be worked out in a wide variety of locations.

5. Unusually challenging circumstances for coordination of relief efforts.

Coordinating relief is never a simple task. Relief agencies come from different countries, have different orientations and skills, have had different prior experiences, and have different past histories and relationships with governmental and local authorities and community leaders. They tend to share the most critical goals and objectives—helping the people who are in desperate need—but they also have their own secondary agendas: building their reputations, showing donors their value, attracting further funding, building relationships that will help them solidify their positions and build future opportunities, and so on. The potential for conflict among different agencies tends to be suppressed in the short run by the intensity of the immediate shared goals—but over time, as the immediacy of the rescue and recovery work abates, these conflicts often surface.

6. An unusually broad spectrum of public health challenges.

All major human disasters result in a wide array of health challenges, from basic daily support (food and water, clothing, shelter, sanitation, and security) to susceptibility to illness (from waterborne bacteria, from respiratory infections in crowded refugee camps, and so on). Viewed even against the usual challenges, however, the circumstances of tsunami survivors seem unusually daunting. Many of the damaged communities were inhabited by poor people on the margins of public services; in many locations, trash and toxic chemicals and substances (oil residues, dyes and tanning solutions, cleaning solvents, and so on) were stored or had been dumped in locations throughout affected areas. Churning seawater thus created a witches' brew—an unknown mixture of toxins to which victims were exposed during the floods and to which both victims and relief workers are exposed in the aftermath during cleanup and recovery efforts. Doctors have reported a high rate of infection from wounds sustained during the disaster, presumably because of exposure to bacteria or toxins in the floodwaters or residues.

7. Unstable political settings.

Political instability is both a cause and an effect of some human disasters, and so it is not an unusual feature of disaster management. Nonetheless, the political setting in some of the areas affected by the tsunami seems particularly unsettled. In several of the affected areas, political control was at issue long before the disaster. In both Sri Lanka and Sumatra, active insurgencies have been underway for many years. In the immediate short run after a disaster strikes, cooperation is common as the instinct to rescue those in need dominates peoples' responses. But relatively quickly, as the relief process unfolds, political conflicts are likely to reassert themselves—in terms both of challenges about jurisdiction (in some areas of Sumatra, rebels have reportedly told relief agencies that they should work through them rather than through government agencies) and in terms of attempts to define and use the responses of government and associated relief organizations for political ends—with government officials urging loyalty as a result of successful government efforts, and insurgents pointing to alleged relief effort failures.