Disaster response has often been a reflective industry, constantly performing self-assessments to see how things could have been better handled, or resources better deployed. According to some experts in an article in The Washington Post, however, this reference to past activities may result in plans lagging behind when the conditions under which they were developed no longer apply. In the current environment, with concerns over climate change and populations, concerns over whether historical data and performance metrics are still applicable are growing. “The disaster-response industry is probably the only industry left in the world that uses self-analysis to measure impact and make improvements,” Tomas Kirsch, director of the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health at the Uniformed Services University, told The Washington Post when speaking to them about this reliance on historical review.
Increasingly, individuals within the industry are calling for a research-driven or forward-thinking strategy, which involve more aggressive data collection during disasters, and comparison between studies. Mike Clarke, founder of Evidence Aid, told The Post,“Self-assessment is “perfectly okay if you are saying, ‘How did we do last time?’ But what we need to be predicting is how we will do next time.”
Instead of relying on self-assessment, the creation of an independent organization similar to the NTSB may be a way forward, according to The Post. Says W. Craig Fugate, former chief of FEMA, of the NTSB and its powers, “The NTSB ain’t beholden to anybody except the truth.”
