Volume 18, Issue 3

Communities have a vital role to play in managing the risks associated with natural disasters. As such, their strengths, weaknesses, and priority concerns must be factored into policy decisions to ensure local recovery efforts reflect community needs. Regular engagement with community members provides opportunities for emergency managers and first responders to tap into a reservoir of local knowledge to build a shared understanding of how to foster local preparedness and help communities reduce the impact of a disaster. Not all communities are alike; needs can differ for a variety of reasons and can help determine the best ways to galvanize an appropriate response. The methods of engagement should also be tailored to ensure communities are willing and able to participate in the types of interactions emergency managers wish to initiate. In this paper, we used a mixed method approach to examine several different community engagement and data collection strategies conducted, observed or examined by our research team during six months of post-Hurricane Maria recovery efforts in Puerto Rico from February to July 2018. The aim of this study is to assess whether different outreach approaches used illuminated different perceptions about disaster preparedness and recovery and to identify what works and what does not work when engaging communities in emergency preparedness and recovery activities.

Modeling terrorism is both necessary and difficult. While the necessity comes from the all too obvious real-world pressures our society is facing, the difficulty stems from the underlying complexity of the phenomena itself – there are many variables to account for, they are hard to measure, and the relationships between them are confounding. Since modeling terrorism is at its most onerous when it comes to predicting specific attacks, their timing and scale, we opted to work around this using observed probabilistic distribution and integrate power laws into our system dynamics model. After evaluating thousands of simulations runs, this allows us to replicate historical data as well as produce prognostic scenarios, while maintaining what we believe to be authentic behavior. Compromises need to be made, but we believe that this approach can be useful for systems highly dependent on events or parameters which we are unable to predict but whose distributions are known.

This article presents and discusses, in the new context of COVID-19, findings from a tabletop exercise on response and resilience in the ongoing opioid crisis in Pennsylvania. The exercise was organized by [identifying information removed] and held at the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA), in further collaboration with the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security, the Pennsylvania Department of Health, and with the participation of several additional agencies and institutions. It addressed first-responder and whole-community response and resilience to the ongoing opioid crisis. More than 50 experts participated in the one-day program that involved state and local agencies, first-responder organizations, as well as academia in a discussion about effectuating comprehensive response to overdose incidents. Participant experts represented a wide array of backgrounds, including state and local law enforcement agencies; emergency medical technicians; public health and health care professionals; and scholars from the fields of law, security studies, public policy, and public health, among other relevant areas. Participants addressed specific challenges, including resource sharing among responders; capacity-building for long-term recovery; effective integration of non-traditional partners, such as spontaneous volunteers and donors; and public education and outreach to improve prevention. The exercise aimed to strengthen the whole-community approach to emergency response.

This paper reviews the extant literature on the development of online education within the discipline of emergency management and identifies areas exposed by the COVID-19 pivot needing further examination. We suggest utilizing a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning framework to identify best practices for responding to issues of access and inclusion.

Concerns about infectious disease in mega-shelters following hurricanes should be a top priority. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the challenge of implementing standard evacuation and sheltering procedures for hurricanes during an outbreak of a respiratory disease and the lessons learned from the 2020 hurricane season must be applied to future response efforts. In this article, we examine the current risk framing for hurricane preparedness and response utilizing Prospect Theory. We also examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has complicated this traditional framing and offer a new framework for which to provide adequate sheltering following a hurricane, while minimizing the risk of respiratory disease to those seeking shelter. We argue that such a framework is necessary to protect American citizens in future hurricane seasons.