Nov. 6, 2001
On the Front Lines of Disasters
Crisis, Emergency, and Risk Management Faculty and
Students Apply Classroom Work to Terrorist Attacks
By Greg
Licamele
Coast Guard Capt. Mike Egan quickly fought off the feelings of shock
and denial and sounded the alarm for a terrorist strike when American
Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
As chief of the National Response Center, Egan, a PhD candidate in the
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), operates the weapons
of mass destruction hotline for the United States and provides first
alert to senior federal and state officials.
“I’ll never forget the unbelievable scene on our big TV which
monitors CNN,” Egan says.
On watch Sept. 11, he and his staff convened the National Response Team,
dispatched emergency portable satellite communications to “Ground
Zero” at the World Trade Center, coordinated service support for
the Coast Guard’s strike teams, and dispatched liaisons to FEMA,
EPA, DOT, National Military Command Center, and Joint Forces Command.
Developing the ability to put aside the emotion, make decisions and
assessments, and prescribe solutions in crises are some of the goals
of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management (ICDRM) program
at GW, where Egan and 79 other students are pursuing degrees and certificates.
When the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, GW students, already professionals
in their fields, were saving lives, securing America’s shores,
and coordinating resources throughout the country. Col. Larry Porter
was the Federal Emergency Management Agency —Department of Defense
liaison. George Munoz worked for the American Red Cross Disaster Services
at the World Trade Center. Nelson Morse served as logistics manager
at the WTC. Lissa Westerman was a first responder at the Pentagon as
a member of the DC National Medical Response Team.
“I spent the first 12 days at the Pentagon involved with decontamination
of responders,” says Westerman, who is pursuing a graduate certificate
in crisis, emergency, and risk management from GW. “Upon completion
of that response, I was deployed to New York City to the Emergency Operations
Center of the Office of Emergency Preparedness, where I spent two weeks
involved with the management of healthcare assets.”
She says involvement at two levels, as a responder and manager, provided
unique opportunities to build on her academic work.
“From classes at GW, I gained a better understanding of the complexity
and multiple issues involved in disaster management,” she describes.
“As an individual responder on a local level, it is sometimes hard
to understand what some might perceive as insensitivity to needs by
management agencies; classes have illustrated many of the constraints
placed upon those agencies involved.”
Jack Harrald and Joseph Barbera are the directors of the Institute for
Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management, which was chartered in 1994.
Its academic wing grants degrees through GW’s School of Engineering
and Applied Sciences, but the institute and academic programs are interdisciplinary
and affiliated with many GW schools, including the Elliott School of
International Affairs and the School of Public Health and Health Sciences.
ICDRM also has affiliations with other GW research centers such as the
Ronald Reagan Institute of Emergency Medicine, the Cyberspace Policy
Institute, and the Center for Infrastructure Safety and Reliability.
The first class of eight graduates received their degrees in May 2001,
three years after the degree-granting component was established.
“The thrust of our program is that we see emergency management
emerging as a profession that has a theory, as well as a practice,”
Harrald says. “We’re somewhat unique as one of two doctoral
programs in the country.”
The doctor of science program requires 54 graduate credits beyond a
master’s degree. For a master of science degree, students must
complete 36 hours of work. Graduate certificates require 18 hours of
study.
One element inherent in most of the course and institute work is communication.
Interagency and interpersonal communication are critical in crisis and
disaster situations such as Sept. 11. Harrald says the National Science
Foundation has provided ICDRM a $25,000 quick-response grant to examine
how organizations worked together on Sept. 11 and to document what did
and did not work well. The institute will look at paper records, media
reports, and public government records, and then conduct personal interviews.
Porter, the FEMA-DOD liaison who completed the graduate certificate
program in spring 2001, found himself communicating among agencies and
with average Americans. The week after the terrorist attacks, Porter
received a call from New Jersey. The man on the line wanted information
about gas masks. Porter, ever vigilant, assured the man the federal
government was doing its job to stave off the need for gas masks.
“It was refreshing to talk with a ‘common man’ like that,”
Porter says. “It helped remind me about the people we serve. When
you operate at the federal agency level, and deal with programs and
myriad federal response elements, you are pretty far removed from individual
taxpayers.”
At Egan’s level, communication was just as important with the National
Response Team as Porter’s experiences.
“We rapidly established communications with FEMA and the National
Military Command Center in the Pentagon prior to the aircraft striking
that facility,” Egan recalls. “We initiated a massive sea
lift of survivors off of the southern tip of Manhattan and within 90
minutes, we established a system of port control where we screened all
passengers and crews of ships arriving and departing US ports in a coordinated
effort with the FBI to detect and apprehend suspected terrorists.”
He credits his GW training and previous experiences with giving him
the “discipline and doctrine” to organize his people quickly.
Barbera, co-director of the institute, spent 12 days working in New
York, at the Pentagon, and at GW Hospital. When the events broke on
Sept. 11, Barbera provided oversight and advice for the GW Hospital
emergency operations plan. Later that day, Barbera served as a FEMA
Urban Search and Rescue Incident Support Team Medical Unit leader. This
management-level position coordinated safety, health, and medical entities
and addressed issues such as HAZMAT assessment, food safety, body handling,
and other operational concerns. On Sept. 12, Barbera went to New York
and for the next 11 days and nights, he played a variety of roles for
FEMA by advising the New York City Fire Department and Secretary of
Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson. Among his many tasks, he was
asked to provide expert advice in moving from the rescue phase to the
recovery phase.
This response by ICDRM faculty members and students is not their first
in national and international crises. In 1999, Harrald traveled to Turkey
to assess damage from the 7.4 magnitude earthquake that struck the country.
Barbera headed one of the research teams that responded to the Oklahoma
City bombing in 1995. GW researchers responded to the Exxon Valdez oil
spill in 1989, assessing the future risk of oil pollution from tankers
in the area. The GW team suggested changes that sponsors agreed with
and these supporters invested millions of dollars to adapt solutions
and ultimately reduce the pollution risk.
Barbera, Harrald, and their students have seen priorities shift in the
emergency management field since Sept. 11. However, Harrald cautions
against second-guessing some of the responses to Sept. 11 and other
cases because the emergency response field, theoretical and practical,
is rooted in anticipating and managing the unexpected.
“Because academics can pontificate with 20/20 hindsight, we have
to be very careful as we point things out that can be done differently
in a non-critical way,” says Harrald.
“The events of Sept. 11 were not a starting point for the program,”
Westerman says. “For the institute, Sept. 11 perhaps served as
a check point of ‘are we on the right track and how can we improve
what we’re doing?’ ”
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu
