Disaster Response and Recovery Since the Halifax Explosion

One Hundred Years of Certitude? Disaster Response and Recovery since the Halifax Explosion

Adam Rostis Nova Scotia Health Authority, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

In 1917, a collision between two ships in Halifax Harbor resulted in the largest human-made explosion before the bombing of Hiroshima. SS Mont Blanc was loaded with munitions, and when the Imo collided with it, the resulting explosion destroyed 22 percent of the city, killed 1,963 people, and injured 9,000.1 In 1920, Samuel Prince published a sociological analysis of the response. His was one of the first explorations of disaster and community recovery and set the tone for the modernist view of disaster response, relief, and recovery.2 The Halifax Explosion was a maritime disaster that devastated a coastal community, and on the 100th anniversary this essay takes stock of the prevailing and emergent views of disaster response, relief, and recovery. It is variously claimed that the frequency of disasters is increasing, that this is happening naturally, or that there is some inherent process of disaster cre- ation that is rapidly accelerating.3 Alarming suggestions are made that rapid technological revolution, globalization with attendant interconnectedness of events, increasing terrorist and subversive activities, climate change causing new weather patterns, increasing mobility of humans heightening the risk of mass epidemics, and exponential population growth resulting in use of mar- ginal land have all contributed to the growing number of disasters and crises.4 No longer, it is claimed, can organizations and governments hope for stable and predictable patterns of continuity.5 These claims often begin arguments for an increased need for organizations and experts able to understand and manage these events. In other words,

1 J. Scanlon, “Rewriting a Living Legend: Researching the 1917 Halifax Explosion,” International Journal of Disasters and Mass Emergencies 15, no. 1 (1997): 147–198. 2 S. Prince, “Catastrophe and Social Change, Based upon a Sociological Study of the Halifax Disaster” (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1920). 3 G. Bankoff, “Rendering the World Unsafe: ‘Vulnerability’ as Western Discourse,” Disasters 25, no. 1 (2001): 19–35. 4 D. Alexander, “Globalization of Disaster: Trends, Problems and Dilemmas,” Journal of Inter- national Affairs 59, no. 2 (2006): 1–22. 5 A. Farazmand, “Introduction: Crisis and Emergency Management,” in Handbook of Crisis and Emergency Management, ed., A. Farazmand (New York: Marcel Dekker, 2001), 1–10.

432 Maritime Safety and Security the number and intensity of disasters has been increasing, together with the number of people affected, and this has been met by a technical and orga- nizational response. An example of this approach, and the flaws with it, can be seen in the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster.6 On 29 August 2005 it devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States, precipitating a scene that could barely be believed: the complete evacuation and near-complete destruction of an entire US city. According to a 2006 report commissioned by the White House, the storm caused 1,330 deaths, resulted in about US$96 billion in direct damage, destroyed or made unlivable 300,000 homes, forced the evacuation of 1.1 million people, and created a huge pool of internally displaced people.7 President George W. Bush admitted that Katrina was the worst natural disaster in US history, and the federal government admitted its failures.8 Katrina is a well-known example of a major disaster exposing the underlying logic of the current approach taken by formal organizations in managing disasters. The popular media has presented the decisions made by government leaders during the Katrina response as being confused and irrational. However, government officials were all operating under laws and policy that limited their ability to take decisive action. Further, individual decision-makers all worked within formal response organizations such as the Federal Emergency Manage- ment Agency (fema). When approaching the management of a disaster, these organizations take a highly rational, positivistic approach in that they attempt to understand and diagnose the problem, rely upon pre-defined rules and poli- cies, adopt formal roles for individuals involved in the response, and utilize a centralized decision-making system. Understanding that response organizations are structured this way, it then seems reasonable to suggest that the disaster management system did ex- actly what it was expected to do. In this light, the much-discussed failure of the response to Katrina can therefore be recast as a success. It is the logical outcome of a bureaucratic, rational approach to the management of a chaotic and ambiguous environment.9 In the Katrina disaster, fema behaved as it was

6 A. Rostis and J. Helms-Mills, “A Pedagogy of the Repressed? Critical Management Education and the Teaching Case Study,” International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy 4, no. 2 (2010): 212–223. 7 Government of the United States, The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned (Washington, DC: The White House, 2006), https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ reports/katrina-lessons-learned/index.html. 8 Id. 9 M. Takeda and M. Helms, “Bureaucracy, Meet Catastrophe: Analysis of Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts and their Implications for Emergency Response Governance,” International Journal of Public Sector Management 19, no. 4 (2006): 397–411.