On Resilience – What Is It? Why Are We Talking About It?
Emergency Management Once Removed
October 4, 2024
By Jim Mullen
Some people have difficulty discerning what disaster resilience means. Admittedly, it’s an amorphous concept because it does not carry the aura of a “final solution” – and in emergency management some of the better expert staff I oversaw were wary of the term. But It’s time for homeland security/emergency management professionals to understand the concept of resilience -bend but don’t break –is essential to sustain the social equilibrium in difficult circumstances. What homeland security and emergency management professionals must understand that it is their role to foresee potential gaps in readiness, prepare the public to manage their circumstances, while responders and recovery experts figure out how the community can “bounce back.”
As an emergency management professional of some 30 years, I came to terms with the term ”resilience” as an overarching description of preparing a community to mitigate, absorb the “hit” and respond to, and recover from a disaster. You see, even relatively small incidents, if not contained, can become major disasters if the proper systems aimed at resilience are not in place.
Emergency management’s four traditional elements – mitigation, preparedness (of the community and its infrastructure), response and recovery are all tied to the notion that these are ongoing efforts. It is tantamount to mowing one’s lawn – it will be fine in the short term but in two weeks you probably should repeat the process. Inserting “prevention” into the emergency management dialogue is, at best, disingenuous – we can’t prevent all wildfires, any earthquakes or a slew of other terribly difficult challenges, but we can apply our best efforts in mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery to minimize damage that could occur, thus enabling a return to an acceptable normalcy as soon as possible. And that collaborative effort makes a community resilient.
In my career I have worked as an ombudsman for a state to assure that public services are delivered as promised. I’ve spent years working to implement programs that improved law enforcement activities, to help increase resiliency of our public safety resources. I’ve worked to assist neighborhoods to obtain fulfillment of government’s commitments to underrepresented neighborhoods. And, of course, I have spent the better part of three decades in emergency management, where when all else may have failed in an area for a time, we arrived with resources, comfort and hope. But the recovery is dependent upon the extent of mitigation and, preparedness that eases the response burden, leading to recovery.
I want to remind skeptics laser-focused on “metrics” as the sole determinant of a successful endeavor that the term “success” itself is an inconclusive descriptive term in coping with a disaster’s impact. A disaster that takes many lives is hardly referred to as a success even if many more were saved than were lost – it remains a tragedy for which the only antidote is to rebuild, restore as possible, and recommit to mitigate avoidable future tragedies. The end state, or destination, is a resilient community.

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Jim has spent 3 decades in emergency management, including 12 years at the local level as director of the City of Seattle’s Office of Emergency Management and 8 and a half years as Washington State’s Emergency Management Division Director. Jim retired from state service in March 2013. Jim also served as President of the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA) from January 2011 to October 2012. He is currently sole proprietor of “EM Northwest Consulting” based in Seattle.
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