Reflections on 40 Years in the Hazards and Disasters Community

Abstract

This piece is based on the keynote address I delivered at the 40th Annual Conference of the Hazards Center at the University of Colorado/Boulder in July (www.colorado.edu/hazards). My charge from the Hazards Center was to "provide your reflections on how our community (researchers and practitioners) has evolved over the last four decades" and "feel free to get personal and to talk about what the community has meant to you and your work." Unlike the other keynote talks at that conference, and unlike the other articles in this journal, this is a personal history, based on my career experiences over the past 38 years. As such, it includes many candid comments on things that have gone well and things that have not over the past four decades.

Representative Bureaucracy in Emergency Management: Attitudes About Contemporary Emergency Management Policy and Politics in Local Agencies

“…Others point to the successful response to "Superstorm" Sandy in 2012 as a demonstration of enhancements within FEMA itself. In this case, progress stemming from previous incidents (like Hurricane Katrina) led to an improvement in what federal actors and policies desired to accomplish during a catastrophe, which assisted in the response to the storm's impact along the Mid-Atlantic coast (Kahan 2015b;Rubin 2015;Sadiq, Tharp, and Graham 2016).…”

Is there coercion in local emergency management policy implementation?

“…But, disagreement exists regarding federal policy expectations in this field. Many researchers feel the federal government learned from various experiences since the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and in doing so clarified what resources are available across levels of government, and what local actors must do to obtain them (Comfort et al 2010 ; Chang 2017 ; Molino 2006 ; Rubin 2015 ; Sadiq et al 2016 ; Kahan 2015 ). Criticism of the federal policy expectations focuses on DHS itself as being too terror-centric under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, and downplay efforts made by DHS to coordinate resources as disorganized (Kahan 2015 ; Birkland and Waterman 2008 ; Derthick 2009 ; Gerber and Robinson 2009 ; Roberts 2014 ).…”