Volume 9, Issue 1

Fires in passenger rail vehicles pose threats to people and to critical transportation infrastructure. Although relevant guidelines and regulations exist, current approaches lack details needed for comprehensive fire-related threat, vulnerability, consequence and risk assessment (TVCRA), particularly with respect to identifying the size of initiation fire necessary to ignite the interior lining materials, assessing the potential for a fire to encompass the entire vehicle, and evaluating options for reducing the overall energy of a fully involved vehicle fire. However, these shortcomings can be addressed cost effectively by obtaining fire properties of materials used in passenger rail vehicles through small-scale tests, applying a simplified flame spread screening approach using the test data, and incorporating the output into an existing fire TVCRA framework. With these enhancements, operators will be better able to link vulnerabilities and consequences to a range of fire threats, and have more robust data for informing fire mitigation and operational response decisions.

Cyber security has evolved from a technical discipline to a strategic, geopolitical concept. The question for national security thinkers today is not how to protect one or even a thousand computers, but millions, including the “cyberspace” around them. Strategic challenges require strategic solutions. This article considers four nation-state approaches to cyber attack mitigation: 1) Technology: Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6); 2) Doctrine: Sun Tzu’s Art of War; 3) Deterrence: can we prevent cyber attacks?; 4) Arms control: can we limit cyber weapons? These threat mitigation strategies fall into different categories. IPv6 is a technical solution. Art of War is military. The third and fourth strategies are hybrid: deterrence is a mix of military and political considerations, while arms control is a political/technical approach. Technology and doctrine are the most likely strategies to provide short-term improvement in a nation’s cyber defense posture. Deterrence and arms control, which are more subject to outside political influence and current events, may offer cyber attack mitigation but only in the longer-term.

Encouraging freshman students to register for a campus’s emergency notification system (ENS) is challenging for many colleges and universities. Many institutions have opt-in systems that require students to register and subscribe to emergency notifications. However, many students choose not to register and subscribe to an ENS despite violent active shooter events at institutions such as Virginia Tech University, University of Alabama at Huntsville, and Northern Illinois University. Of particular interest to many institutions is encouraging freshman students to register for an ENS. Generally, most freshman students move away from home for the first time to attend a college and university. They are a vulnerable population since they are use to a family structure that helps protect them. Most colleges and universities have student development programs that help freshman students learn personal protection skills that include registering for the ENS. However, despite these programs, many freshman students still do not register for their institution’s ENS. This paper explores the use of a marketing program that encourages freshman students to register for an ENS. This paper reports the results of the number of freshman students who registered for a university’s ENS. Additionally, this paper reports the results of a series of interviews conducted with freshman students who registered or did not register for the ENS. The results suggest that a marketing program can improve freshman student registration for an ENS. However, the marketing program should also target the parents and significant referents of the freshman students. Additionally, the marketing program should emphasize ENS registration as a valued behavior for freshman students. Finally, the ENS system should contain the features desired by freshman students in an ENS, and the registration process should be easy and simple.

This study examined whether there are empirical evidences of organizational learning in the U.S. emergency response system and how the strategic uses of lessons enabled organizations to upgrade system’s capabilities and interaction structure to respond to major disasters. For this, this study conducted comparative analysis of Hurricane Katrina and Gustav response systems and analyzed data from semi-structured interviews with the managers of 36 leading organizations that actively participated in both response systems. To address challenges from complex and uncertain circumstances of disasters, organizations need to collaborate and their joint operations should be nicely coordinated. The findings of this paper reveal that, through effective communications, organizations could secure timely, accurate, and valid information and create a common knowledge base that is critical for collaborative response to disasters. In addition, organizational capacity to detect, process, and transmit information could increase through appropriate training and retention programs. Importantly, the collective capacity of organizations to collaborate in coherent ways could be strengthened through the development of organizational culture that facilitates face-to-face interaction.

Disasters are constantly happening in the world and people suffer as a result of these disasters. The Van Earthquake and many others which have occurred in the past few years in Turkey, and disasters around the world like the South Asian Earthquake and the tsunami which followed in 2004, the earthquake in Pakistan, Hurricane Katrina and the humanitarian crisis in Darfur in 2005, the Chinese earthquake in 2009, the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes, and floods in Pakistan in 2010, and finally the Japanese Earthquake and East African drought this year have all shown the extent of the losses caused by disasters.The fact that the level of damage and losses in those disasters are not the same in each country and even in different provinces of a country, and that underdeveloped and developing countries and regions have suffered more damage, suggest the possibility that disaster vulnerability is a problem caused or exasperated by a lower level of development.The goal of this study is to examine the relationship between vulnerability and social and economic development by analyzing a region’s socioeconomic development (SED) level and social and economic vulnerability (SEV) level, and to show the direction and the power of this correlation. In literature there are studies supporting this correlation. Some of these studies claim that social and economic development adds some new dimensions to vulnerability. This study which has been done with data on Turkey’s provinces, uses four different types of analysis to see different dimensions of this correlation. The results show that SEV is partially correlated with SED, yet there are other aspects that appear to be unrelated. Thus in order to reduce future damage and make better planning, detailed vulnerability analyses have to be conducted.

Never before has it been more critical to address the prospect of natural disasters that affect millions of people around the world every year. Efficient military involvement in domestic disaster relief (MI/DDR) is supposed to facilitate disaster response operations. This paper, based on a case study of Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s engagement in DDR, aims to theorize the key legal variables of MI/DDR and offer an analytical framework for it. This paper theorizes five key legal dynamics: legitimacy, domain, command, support, and cost. It also suggests that MI/DDR is, first and foremost, a function of law enforcement and should be one of the visible ways through which a government demonstrates the rule of law. The insufficiency of Chinese MI/DDR within the current legal underpinning illustrates the need to reconsider the re- structuring and application of the aforementioned legal dynamics. This study proposes that comparative studies are needed to further explore the complexities of this issue.

Objective: Data from a sample of 391 respondents who responded to ABC News Hurricane Katrina Anniversary Poll, August 2006, are used to test the relationship between predictor variables (social vulnerability index, insurance and severity of damage in living area) and the dependent variable (perceived disaster impact). Methods: Multiple regression is used to test the theoretical relationships. The dependent variable disaster impact is regressed on seven predictor variables simultaneously. Results: Social vulnerability has a statistically significant, positive effect on perceived disaster impact. Fully insured variable has a statistically significant, negative effect on disaster impact. Finally, severely damaged living area has a statistically significant, positive effect on disaster impact. Conclusion: The social vulnerability theory holds true in the context of Hurricane Katrina. Those who possess mixed characteristics of social vulnerability tend to be more affected by the impact of a disaster. Insurance tends to help lessen the disaster impact when individuals have the policies that cover all of their property. Finally, those who live in areas that are severely damaged from a disaster tend to experience more impact than those whose living areas are less damaged or not damaged.

Organizations have and will continue to face threats and crisis from a number of sources. We study trust from a contingency theory framework and hypothesize that trust levels vary depending on different organizational designs. Using data from the laboratory experimentation tool ELICIT, a multiplayer simulation, we examine the effect of trust levels and organizational design on performance. We find that trust and organizational design have strong interactions and that hierarchical organizations experience performance levels well below flexible organizational structures. We offer implications for managers who are responsible for identifying and responding to threat and crises.

Accidents, terrorist acts and natural disasters occurring worldwide are heightening society’s concern for the risks affecting our lives. It has also led to the realization that a more systematic and holistic approach to risk management is needed. In earlier work, the authors began to address this issue by initiating development of an all-hazards risk management (AHRM) approach, taking multiple disaster risks into consideration. A proof-of-concept application was presented, focused on truck transportation of hazardous materials and earthquakes as two risks threatening a government jurisdiction. The AHRM methodology has since been extended to include terrorist acts. This paper describes the overall methodological development and presents its application in a case study region in the United States. Beyond demonstrating how disaster risks compare in the region, the paper discusses how a risk manager can use these results to establish risk priorities and develop mitigation strategies that offer the greatest return on investment.

Background: The north of Israel is inhabited by approximately one million people, of which 60% are Jews and 40% Non-Jews. During the 34-day Second Lebanon War (July 2006), approximately 4,000 rockets of various types were fired at the civilian population in the northern part of Israel. About 300,000 people decided to spontaneously evacuate the areas under attack. Objectives: The objective of this paper was to evaluate the differences between Jews and Non-Jews in their decision to evacuate from a threatened area and to identify the factors that influenced their decision. Method: We carried out a telephone survey one year after the end of the 2nd Lebanon war. A representative sample was constructed of civilians who had resided in the north prior to the start of the war and were over 18 years of age. Results: Significant differences were found between the Jews & Non-Jews in their evacuation behaviors and expose the main reasons for evacuating or not evacuating during the war. It exposes the two groups' future plans for considering evacuation in a similar situation. 50% of Jews evacuated and only 9% of non-Jews evacuated, and this discrepancy is a difference that makes our study a worthwhile one in order to identify the different factors involved. Conclusions: The government policy-makers in Israel had chosen not to issue orders for the evacuation of the northern population during the 2nd Lebanon war, yet over 300,000 individuals evacuated. The main reasons for deciding to evacuate during the 2nd Lebanon War differed between Jews and non-Jews. This study found differences in personal decisions to evacuate; differences which may have an important influence on the future behavior of the Israeli population and particularly of the Non-Jewish population. What appears from our study was that the expected rate of future evacuation on the Non-Jewish group was expected to more than double (9% in 2006 as compared to 29.1% who would evacuate in the future). If decision makers in Israel have the intention for the Non-Jewish population to evacuate in similar future events, it is necessary to reduce barriers so that evacuation will be more likely.

In this paper, we describe an approach to rank a set of terrorism-related countermeasures. The proposed methodology is particularly useful when the set of countermeasures have to be evaluated against different combinations of terrorist attack methods and targets. We refer to this approach as the Risk Informed Decision Framework (RIDF), which integrates three independent methodologies – Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), Risk Analysis (RA) and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). As we demonstrate through a terrorism case study, RIDF is not data intensive and it uses a breadth of decision criteria. The criteria are flexible and the required data is available from pre-existing studies or high level qualitative judgments. Given these characteristics, the RIDF approach is responsive to some guidelines from the National Research Council (NRC) regarding countermeasure evaluation. We utilize a Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) terrorist threat, as described in the National Planning Scenarios (NPS) and countermeasures which were based on the Target Capabilities List (TCL) as an example.

During major disasters, requests for federal assistance are of vital significance since speed of response can preserve lives and minimize total damage. Disaster declarations have extensive political consequences, and yet no previous study has explored the impact of partisan politics on the speed or timing of the decision. In this study, we use public choice decision theory to examine decision delays, since delays are often used for bureaucratic positioning and coping with uncertainty in the political process. We propose that the interaction effect of the political party affiliations of the president-governor dyad could partially explain the approval time delay differentials. We analyze 917 disaster declarations that occurred between 1993 and 2009. Using hierarchical moderated regression, we found evidence that the partisan nature of the dyad does influence overall decision delays and more specifically that a Democratic president-Republican governor combination resulted in the shortest mean delays across all declarations.

The process of shaping an integral critical infrastructure protection policy has turned out to be very demanding due to the growing network complexity of critical infrastructures and deep institutional and policy fragmentation. We argue in this paper that knowing the cross-sectoral similarities among functionally different sectors of critical infrastructures can improve the integral approach. The results of our comparative expert-based cross-sectoral scanning of critical infrastructures in the case of an EU member state confirm the cross-sectoral convergence of several variables. Successful integral and cross-sectoral policy will need to focus on joint threats and risks, objects with similar functions across sectors, as well as multicritical areas, objects and links, including immaterial links. Asymmetric cross-sectoral attention should also focus on those groups of infrastructures with an instant crisis impact on society, groups of the most influential and most sensitive infrastructures according to their network position, and on managing jointly expected cross-border cross-sectoral effects.

Cultural context is emerging as one of the most important aspects of crisis communication; yet cultural context adds layers of complexity to situations that crisis theory has difficulty explaining. This study investigated the crisis communication strategies revealed through U.S. media during the immediate post-crisis phase of the November 5, 2009 Fort Hood shooting. A textual analysis identified situational crisis communication theory strategies (Coombs, 2006) employed by different spokespeople/groups. Cultural context emerged as a key variable in explaining what happened when culturally insensitive policies and procedures were revealed. This case illustrates the importance of incorporating a culturally sensitive approach to homeland security policies, procedures, and understanding.

This work examines how the introduction of social media has affected the role of the Public Information Officer (PIO)—the public relations component of the National Incident Management System (NIMS). Through analysis of 25 PIO interviews, we examine the work practice of PIOs and find that social media expand not only the scope and type of PIO work activity, but also the “information pathways” that exist between PIOs, the media, and members of the public. We model these changes and examine how the presence of social media challenges previous conceptualizations of PIO work. Lastly, we present a view of how PIO work could be better imagined for the future of emergency management organizations.

This study analyzes the evolution of interorganizational response networks over time. The study aims to investigate an organization’s position and role as a result of the dynamic changes that occur through the evolution of interorganizational response networks. Social network analysis measures are applied in order to evaluate not only network structure and specifications but also an organizations focal structure and role changes over time. Using Hurricane Charley’s coordination data of the activities of several organizations involved in the response process over time, the study evaluates networks and the organizations’ network structural changes over a period of time. The results show that analyzing static networks does not reflect how the network evolves and how different organizations change their role as the incident emerges. This study takes these criticisms into consideration and adds time dimension to the analysis of response networks. It is the first step in investigating the emerging structure of interorganizational response dynamics during emerging disasters and its effect on improving coordination output. In addition, the study proposes indicators for identifying real, lead or coordinating organizations in interorganizational networks.

This article presents a review of some literatures that have been instrumental in forming at times disparate scholarly thoughts on managerial and operational decision-making and behavior during extraordinary events into the nascent academic field known as crisis management studies. The article outlines some of the most influential literature streams, presents their main findings, reveals four significant knowledge gaps in the present literature, and calls for future crisis management research to direct attention to the organization as the principal level of analysis.

The paper attempts to accentuate the significance of multiple players’ (both public and private) involvement for safeguarding U.S. food imports, particularly at maritime prots of entry.The task of ensuring food import safety is a responsibility shared by a multitude of actors in the food industry, encompassing everyone from farmers, producers, and retailers to federal and state regulatory agencies. If America’s food supply is to remain secure, it is critical that everyone involved in this process remain vigilant and knowledgeable about the requirements of food safety, particularly within the context of international trade involving multiple players. The manuscript talks about the various multiple actor programs like Container Security Initiative (CSI), the Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT), Free and Secure Trade (FAST), the Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA 2002), Bio-terrorism Act, the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code (ISPS, adopted in 2002 as an international counterpart for the MTSA), the 24-hour Rule, Automated Targeting System (ATS), Operation Safe Commerce (OSC), and the Smart and Secure Tradelanes (SST) initiative. Port security encompasses numerous issues ranging from the security of actual port facilities to the verification of passenger identities and the investigation of threats posed by cargo container shipments. The paper highlights that greater linkage of resources, expertise, and initiatives are needed at all levels of government and in the private sector in order to achieve the shared objectives of security and emergency preparedness. It is important to note that preventing problems that can arise outside the United States is a more effective approach than merely attempting to identify and catch problems when products arrive at our borders. The paper concludes by reiterating that public-private partnership must become stronger in order to improve the quality and safety networks upon which the U.S. relies to supply the food we eat and the products we use.

This article joins the growing debate regarding the current and future state of the homeland security affairs discipline. This debate has asked questions about what the discipline should be studying, how those studies should be conducted, and where the discipline should move in the future. I argue that many of these debates have focused on methodology; this is putting the cart before the horse. Homeland security needs to concern itself with questions of ontology and epistemology before it can tackle methodology. I illustrate why these questions are vital and suggest ways in which they may be approached. Ultimately I suggest that the discipline of International Relations offers useful insights here as a disciplinary model as it has self-consciously asked, and answered, these same questions through a series of sustained debates. The article concludes by investigating what a IR-inspired homeland security affairs discipline might look like.

Emergency response personnel are called upon by society to solve, in a short and urgent time frame, policy dilemmas that have been perplexing even under conditions of leisurely consideration. In the wake of hurricane Katrina the methods for preparing, designating, operating and maintaining safe General Population Shelters (GPS) and Sex Offender Shelters (SOS) for unique populations received increased national scrutiny. This was because post Katrina, over 2000-registered sex offenders were placed into shelters and then evacuated to 30 states without the knowledge of the judicial system or the receiving states. The rapid proliferation of sex offender minimal use distance/ residence laws have created a new set of location conflicts and exacerbated problems for multi-sector organizations involved in providing safe post-disaster temporary shelters for the evacuees.This paper examines these conflicting residence laws, the variety of sex offender shelter types available, and the challenges faced by the Red Cross, emergency managers and law enforcement agencies in using these alternatives while trying to provide equitable shelter options for all. Data consists of systematic searches of news media reports, journal articles, FEMA reports, and state/ federal laws and regulations. Additionally, face to face interviews were conducted with seven key informants– emergency managers from three cities in the North Texas Region, two high ranking American Red Cross personnel, and two law enforcement officials concerned with providing safe shelters to evacuees in Texas.The paper is concluded by offering future considerations for research and suggesting that multi-sector, multi-level organizations work together in sharing their challenges and finding common ground that will prevent the diversion of resources and multiplicity of efforts. This will ensure that mass care and sheltering operations become more streamlined, and more reflective of the latest scientific knowledge.

The purpose of this study was to assess university students’ self-reported knowledge, behavior, and behavioral intention regarding H1N1 influenza. Participants included students at a major university in the southwestern US. Data were collected in early spring 2010 through a 24-item self-administered survey. Outcome variables included knowledge, behavior and intention. A total of 483 students participated. Most reported trying to prevent H1N1 influenza though specific behaviors. Many lacked knowledge about symptoms and treatment; a few (10%) had been vaccinated; and half had no intention of getting vaccinated or practicing self-isolation. Gender and age were significantly associated with the three outcome variables. Intention was the most significant contributor to behavior [t (1) = 3.34, p<.001]. H1N1 influenza campaigns directed toward university students in the US should focus on undergraduate, male students, and revise their strategies regarding vaccination and self-isolation.

The emergency response to and management of natural disasters has become a special challenge and indispensable capability for all governments. Those who need to step into the breach at a moment’s notice must be able to manage conflicts arising from numerous concurrent tasks, clashes over jurisdictional differences, and disputes over various inextricable matters. This paper examines some unsuccessful cases of emergency management in Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. Their employment of the American Incident Command System (ICS) for quick-response actions is examined through the lens of culture theory. A simple framework is developed to illustrate the link between (1) Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (power distance, individualism versus collectivism, femininity versus masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term versus short-term orientation), (2) conflict management styles (collaborating, dominating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating approaches), and (3) organizational cultures (pyramid, family, machine, and market). This framework consolidates the extant research on the applicability of culture typology to understand the effects of cultural distance on adopting emergency strategies and actions originally developed in a foreign country. This study attempts to explain how different cultural orientations uniquely influence how people handle emergency disasters and why directly implanting foreign approaches (i.e., practices, procedures, and organizations) is not always the best solution for resolving the issues besetting their emergency systems.

Emergency information spreading in online social networks has played an important role in informing citizens and emergency management. However, there is still very little research on emergency information spreading in online social networks from emergency responders’ point of view. Here we address this challenge by modeling and simulation. We find that social network structure, behavior of informing and spreading, number and degree of initial spreading nodes have important and different effects on the performance of emergency information spreading in online social network. Taking fully into account these factors will improve understanding of how to use social media tools to support emergency response strategies.

The management of crisis events involves activity at the organizational and governmental jurisdiction levels and is comprised of an integrated system of practice and structure. However, because there are two systems involved in crisis response, namely centralization and decentralization of disaster management, there are differences in governmental actions in response to crisis events. This article analyzes and compares the actions of disaster responses undertaken by mainland China and Taiwan when faced with major natural disasters in order to demonstrate the different response results and defects of centralized and decentralized crisis response systems, respectively. The results showed that the efficiency of decentralized response systems is higher than that of centralized systems, as respondents in a decentralized system have the ability to make independent judgments and respond to crisis situations flexibly. However, there are also restrictions on the successful operation of decentralized response systems, including problems concerning the organizational command and control model, military operations, and communication and coordination between different response organizations.

This research studies the National Planning Scenarios (NPS) as a set of tools to support federal, state, and local homeland security preparedness. The study examines how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can ensure that the NPS remain a relevant and flexible preparedness tool for federal, state, and local partners. The research suggests that the problem of developing a robust set of credible scenarios for homeland security planning may be an example of a planning dilemma known as a wicked problem. Such problems defy conventional, linear, analytic solutions. Horst Rittel and Melvin M. Webber described solving wicked problems in the 1970s as “…not objective and cannot be derived from following a formula … judgments are likely to vary widely and depend on the stakeholder’s independent values and goals.” The 15 NPS were created in 2003, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The newly established DHS used the capabilities-based planning (CBP) concept on the NPS to provide an array of response challenges for federal, state, and local governments at all levels. CBP—effectively used by the Department of Defense (DoD) —is defined as planning, under uncertainty, that aims to provide capabilities suitable for a wide range of future challenges and circumstances while working within an economic framework. This research uses the wicked problem and CBP concepts to develop an updated set of scenarios that are a relevant and flexible tool for preparing for current and future situations. Combining lessons learned from those concepts, the authors recommend an iterative, flexible process to update the NPS and make them adaptable to the differing needs of federal, state, and local governments.

The wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise liner on 13th January 2012 on the Italian island of Giglio provides an interesting example of risk and crisis management in relation to maritime disasters. Although only 32 of the 4,252 people aboard died, the wreck may prove to be the most expensive loss of a passenger liner to date, and with only slight changes in circumstances it could also have involved heavy loss of life. This paper reconstructs the sequence of events before, during and immediately after the event. It considers the disaster in terms of the new paradigm of forensic disaster investigation and the established discipline of organizational learning theory. The paper considers how real-time management of the crisis affected the evacuation of passengers, staff and crew from the liner. In this process, normalcy bias and distraction on the bridge reduced the opportunities for timely and efficient muster and departure. A web of contributory causes is formulated, and it is concluded that, as in many other large, complex events, no single factor emerges as dominant and the disaster resulted from systemic failures as much as from human error. Comparisons with other well-known maritime disasters indicate that the Costa Concordia incident had various key elements in common with them. In mid-January 2012, some long-standing lessons therefore remained unlearned.

The article provides a review of the book "Freedom and Order: How Democratic Governments Restrict Civil Liberties after Terrorist Attacks - and Why Sometimes They Don't" by Gabriel Rubin.

The relationship between public health and community resilience is one that has not seemed to be discussed in the current mainstream research of resilience. In public health, the term resilience or community resilience has not yet been widely explored, but as a sector focused on improving and sustaining the long-term health of communities (people and environment) as well as having a hand in preparedness and response to myriad public health emergencies, most would agree that community resilience is exactly what public health is focused on achieving. In addition, the concept of resilience in emergency management has been previously researched and discussed, and with the goals of public health preparedness and emergency management being dynamically intertwined, it is also reasonable to look at how those sectors interface and interact. This article defines what public health is and does, explores the reasons for why a resilient public will help communities become more resilient, and makes the argument that when studying resilience and what makes resilient communities, public health should certainly be on the list of participating planning partners and key response agencies.

Currently, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) elicits probabilistic judgments from the intelligence community on actions terrorists may take to attack the continental U.S. For example, how likely is the adversary to choose agent ‘x’ over agent ‘y’ or target ‘a’ over target ‘b’? Eliciting these types of judgments is difficult and time consuming. The National Academies and others have suggested that a better approach may be to elicit information on adversary’s preferences, perceptions, and capabilities and use this information to calculate probabilities of interest to DHS. Some terrorist groups are thinking about using weapons of mass destruction (WMD), each with its own values, perceptions of reality, and capabilities. This presentation details the findings on the factors & relationships among factors that lead to a terrorist decision to initiate an attack against the continental U.S as well as target selection. To accomplish this, we assembled international experts in WMD, adversary modeling, political science, terrorism, psychiatry, social sciences as well as experts from national laboratories, the Commonwealth of Virginia State Fusion Center, and Hampton Roads Emergency Management.This paper provides a summary of the findings from an Adaptive Adversary Workshop. In this paper, we provide an overview of the motivation for and design of the workshop as well as 19 emerging themes. The purpose of the workshop was to illicit expert opinions on terrorist decision-making and target selections in an effort to improve our understanding of adversaries (individuals, local/regional groups, transnational groups, states) who may initiate a bioterrorism attack in the form of releasing biological agents upon U.S. interests. Furthermore, these expert opinions are intended to be used to inform Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) models of terrorist networks. These models must be informed or populated with substantive information about the intelligent and adaptive adversary who may initiate an attack. To this end, a conceptual framework, informed broadly by the social sciences community, is intended to capture the terrorists’ motivations, methods, and decision calculi.

Botulinum toxin (BTX-A) is the most deadly substance known. Yet it has clinical applications, particularly cosmetic uses. With the latter’s exploding popularity, unauthorized BTX-A is emerging from suspect sources. In combination with the Internet as a virtually unregulated marketplace, BTX-A is available for direct purchase and use. This represents a safety threat against individuals and civil society. Since extant technology and Internet marketing can easily target individual consumers by changing BTX-A concentration and pose risks for society by scaling up production for terrorist purposes, BTX-A availability is a homeland security threat. To address this, BTX-A should be deemed a controlled substance subjecting it to track-and-trace and other requirements. Simultaneously, this categorization would subject it to federal law requiring Drug Enforcement Agency registration and state licensure for sales. This relatively simple step can be a strategy adopted for other high risk materials and an international approach to limit the availability of potentially harmful materials.

When Hurricane Katrina struck the United States in 2005, unified commands were established in several states under the principles of the Incident Command System (ICS). These unified commands helped to steer relief efforts. In Louisiana, however, a true unified command was never established, leaving mitigation efforts confused, chaotic, and ineffective. This article looks at the general concept of an ICS unified command; the attempt to establish a unified command in Louisiana; and reasons that the command never materialized.