I teach emergency management courses including Intro to Emergency Management, Vulnerable Populations in Disaster, and the Political and Legal Foundations of Emergency Management. My courses have, of course, been moved online. Every semester I incorporate current disasters into the classroom and COVID-19 is obviously no exception. There is a lot of news flying at us all very fast. It’s nearly impossible to keep up. So, in an effort to help my students make connections between course work and the current pandemic I’ve begun to curate a weekly list of news articles for them to read. My focus is primarily on articles related specifically to emergency management given the subject of my courses.
I’ve decided to make these curated lists public because I suspect emergency management practitioners and others are also struggling to keep up with the rapidly unfolding response.
There are many more good articles out there raising important issues than I can read or include here but these is at least an attempt to narrow down what the key issues are as we move forward in this long-term response.
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If you think we’re overreacting start with this powerful piece written by a woman caring for her sick husband.
This is a starting place for an overview of the various strategies and needs related to the immediate response. We’re experts in emergency management which is different than being an expert in epidemiology and associated fields. In the same way that we listen to seismologists about earthquakes and meteorologists about hurricanes we need to listen to epidemiologists now.
This explains how COVID-19 fits into the disaster life cycle. In the US, we’re still at the beginning of the response.
When this started HHS was the lead agency. That changed last week with FEMA taking over coordinating the federal response. This is the agency’s biggest challenge ever.
There has been widespread confusion regarding the various declarations, the role of FEMA, and the timeline. Everyone was mixing them up! So I had to write a summary myself.
Related to Stafford Act declarations, there were questions raised about the ability of a virus to qualify as a disaster based on the definition used in the Stafford Act. Tom Ridge, the author of the Stafford Act, wrote an argument in favor of using the Stafford Act in this situation. (Truly, if we don’t use the Stafford Act for this when would we!?!)
I always tell you disasters are political and COVID is certainly no exception. Here’s just one example from the past few days involving the governor of Michigan.
How is FEMA going to manage this? Well, the short answer is that they’re not. As emergency management students, you know the history of FEMA and the limitations of the agency in a situation like this.
FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor wrote an open letter to state/ local emergency managers:
We are largely improvising the response to COVID-19. Were we really so unprepared? Well, there were a number of plans in place and even an exercise done in 2016, in addition to many other preparatory efforts done over many years and across many agencies. The question isn’t if we had planned for this but whether or not those plans are being used.
Of course, it’s not just the government involved in the response. Here’s an article about some concerns with the nonprofit sector – specifically our national disaster nonprofits.
COVID-19 is affecting everyone in various ways but it is important to understand that some communities face higher risk and have fewer resources to meet associated needs. Here is one example. Also, New Orleans.
We know that other disasters will happen in the next few months. COVID changes the way emergency management needs to address nearly every aspect of those preparedness, response, and recovery efforts. Here are some articles that address this by hazard including flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, and tornadoes.
The good news is that there will one day be an end to this even though that is still very far away. Here’s a big-picture about what that could look like.
Finally, I assume most of you are struggling emotionally with this entire situation. In emergency management, we’re used to dealing with disasters and high-stress situations but even this is doing a number on hardened professionals. I found this essay, which connects this moment to climate grief, to be helpful to me.