Security Studies Professors Present Hurricane Harvey Research in Italy

Two Security Studies professors presented their grant-funded research on Harvey at the Disaster Management Conference hosted by the Wessex Institute of Technology (WIT) in Ancona, Italy. Natalie Baker, assistant professor, and Magdalena Denham, clinical associate professor, presented their paper "Harvey Unstrapped: Managing Adaptive Tensions on the Edge of Chaos," currently in press for the WIT Transactions on the Build Environment publication. They coined the term "unstrapping," which is the process of the breakdown of formal structures and the emergence of filling structures.

Two years ago, Baker applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and invited Denham to work with her. They pursued a co-auto-ethnographic study of Hurricane Harvey where both authors were citizen responders and disaster researchers. Their research looks at how formal structures and initial moments of response always fail and break in some areas and how emergent structures always fill in those gaps.

"In practice, large-scale disaster helps temporarily foster an ideal of community which is then appropriated by emergency management institutions," Baker explained. "In that time when disaster happens, it basically shatters everything that we know and we're forced to think on our feet and engage in relationships that we typically don't engage in. Or if we do, we do it in a different way to meet our needs."

Denham, who is also a member of the WIT International Scientific Advisory Committee, explained that systems break in disasters because they are developed during "blue skies," when no emergency situations are happening. An emergency operation center does not know when the crisis becomes a crisis until they actually see the actions of people in the community because they not directly involved in that community. They used Harvey as an example, where there were different participants in the response to the event, and where many examples of "unstrapping" took place in circumventing the system and using back channel communications.

"What we're showing is that we have these great emergency management/homeland security structures but they truly come to play later because initially it's the emergent force that works in disasters." Denham explained. "It's people that help people. They know who is on an oxygen tank or who needs help getting out of the house. Most of the emergency management structures don't know those details."

Baker and Denham argue that it is much easier for spontaneous volunteers and people not affiliated with formal structures to have creative solutions because people in formal structures might have them but there is a higher risk for them to make those decisions about thinking out of the box.

"When things start happening, those plans break. You can't account for uncertainty. That's our premise," Denham said. "A lot of things went wrong in Harvey but most people don't know that because we saw success at the end."

According to their research, people do not prepare. Sixty percent of households prepare which are the ones that have experienced disasters, or might have small children in the house so they tend to prepare more. For fifty percent of the population, preparedness is not even on the radar. They argue that preparedness is an illusion.

"Preparedness had become a social norm and people didn't prepare because of the way our society is structured," Baker said. "We expect things to be there without interruption. It's really hard for us to imagine the worse-case scenario in which that would happen. Then this idea of preparedness is store some supplies and get a kit, make a plan. In practice that doesn't work."

Baker and Denham's research also showed what previous researchers have stated, that during disasters there is what they call "desecuritization," where people become less hyper-vigilant, less hostile, and there's less security needed. Recent legislation now allows gun carrying in disasters, but Denham and Baker disagree with the need for it because of the false portrayal of looting situations.

"Everybody says you need more security in disasters but we're showing the evidence from Criminal Justice studies that the crime rate drops," Denham said. "Of course, you know there is this huge media highlight of those few cases of looting that gets played over and over. So, the public has this image that if they leave their home, things are going to get stolen and people are afraid to evacuate because they have seen that messaging.

So what do Baker and Denham suggest? Large-scale disasters will continue to overwhelm emergency management institutions, so let the citizens do what they already do. They suggest government and institutions should focus more on lessening the severity of social issues that recognize and emphasize differences, which they suggest will be the only way to manage future large-scale events.

You can find Baker and Denham's article "For a short time, we were the best version of ourselves: Hurricane Harvey and the ideal of community" here. Their article "Harvey Unstrapped: Managing Adaptive Tensions on the Edge of Chaos," will be published in WIT Transactions on the Build Environment publication.