Photo By: USCG & USCG Historian’s Office

All Available Boats

I’ve spent a lot of time recently on this blog documenting how government systems and current culture are not always well suited to disaster. But this week, which holds the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, I want to highlight one government organization that so often gets it right in disaster: The Coast Guard. 

My career and my approach to disasters have been heavily influenced by Coast Guard members. With ranks from Admiral to ensign, they have been my grad school professors, my classmates, my colleagues, and my bosses. I’ve heard from them the stories from the ground at 9/11, from the Oval Office during Katrina, from the first FEMA Deputy Administrator’s perspective after Katrina and the transition to DHS, from the response to the BP oil spill, from attempts to bring Somali pirates to justice, and so many more mundane but fascinating stories of everyday life in Coast Guard and Auxiliary. 

In those stories, in the ones I read about in books about real disasters, and in my own experiences in disasters, the Coast Guard is frequently a shining light amidst everything going wrong. Heroism certainly, but even more so, that it is just them doing the job as they have been trained. Everyday heroes.

In Katrina, they were able to keep operating when so much else of the federal government became paralyzed and overwhelmed. In my recollection in Irma and Maria, they were able to move supplies, especially to remote locations, much faster and easier than any of the rest of the response seemed to be able to. And so many other lesser-known stories across the major disasters in the United States. But the one we should highlight this week is what happened 25 years ago, when they sent out the message for “All Available Boats” to participate in evacuating people from the tip of the island of Manhattan.

If you have not read it, I strongly encourage you to check out the book American Dunkirk: The Waterborne Evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11 by James Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf. It provides a vivid and detailed account from so many perspectives of people who participated in the waterborne evacuation on 9/11. They describe how even before the first tower fell mariners began heading toward the scene to help people running out of the burning buildings. And while that is laudable itself, we know how inherent and common it is for people to rush to help in a disaster. It is an amazing part of our human nature. What I find more remarkable, particularly in our current disaster culture, is what the government did in response: it helped people help each other. It not only acknowledged that government could not do it all alone, it said so out loud, and trusted people to act.

In emergency and disaster management, we talk a lot about people trusting the government or people losing trust in officials, but in order to really have that conversation it should include the other side –  the government trusting the people. Trust has to run both ways.

We have a rich history of disaster research in the United States that seems increasingly to be fading into the background of emergency management. If we maintained that foundation in our training, the idea that people can generally be trusted to help one another in disasters, rather than expected to descend into panic and chaos, would not seem particularly radical.

Researchers, especially at the Disaster Research Center, have spent decades documenting how people actually behave in disasters. Panic is rare. Helping behavior is common; a natural human reaction in disasters. Yet researchers have also documented something else: officials panicking about the possibility of public panic, sometimes making their own irrational decisions because of it.

Which is critical to understand and be aware of – because if we design disaster systems around a fear of how we imagine people will behave rather than evidence about how they actually behave, we will build the wrong systems.

Yet, despite the prolific research, I’m seeing a growing number of posts and white papers from respected organizations or consulting companies repeat the long-debunked panic myth and use it to support calls for more order, control, and command. We should not allow an unsupported fear of public behavior to become the foundation for disaster policy.

This is one reason the Disaster Coordination Lab, launching in beta this week, begins with disaster research. Before we build new coordination systems and programs, we need a shared understanding of how people and disasters actually behave.

Now let’s look back to the successes of the Coast Guard in disaster.

On that tragic day 25 years ago, the Coast Guard officials saw what happened. They started getting calls for permission to go help people, though many didn’t ask for permission and just went. It is the consistent human reaction in events like these to help each other whether officials ask or not. People help each other in disasters, not as their duty to help the government. In the United States, government derives its power and funding from the people, and as an extension of the people, its natural reaction should be to help them help each other. People helping in disaster is not about helping government; government helping in disaster is about people helping in disaster.

As detailed in American Dunkirk, initially the Coast Guard said to stand by, then get ready, then they issued a request for “All Available Boats” to participate in the evacuation. Then Coast Guard officials began to assist and enable. They helped vessels find routes away from each other. They shared information with local and state officials about where evacuees were arriving and what needs were emerging on the receiving side. They did not direct or ask people to report in. As one great quote from a participant shared in the American Dunkirk book about one of the Coast Guard officials, “I mean, and he didn’t strong-arm anybody [or say,] ‘I’m the Coast Guard officer. I’m in charge.’ He just went with the flow. ‘If you need me, I’m here….’ It wasn’t like he was trying to play Big Mr. Coast Guard. He was a member of the team.”  

 I think that is powerful. The government is a member of the team in a disaster. They have critical and important roles that only the government can fill, especially in allowing access and creating a space for this emergent civilian action to happen. It is notable that a military agency with such a hierarchical structure and culture engages in coordination with civilians in this way. Being a member of the team does not mean government gives up command where it has command responsibility. On scene, within its own operations, command and control remain essential. But above and between those operations, across organizations and communities that no one entity commands, the job changes.

Command what you command. Coordinate with everyone else.

That is the distinction we keep losing in disaster management.

 It is also notable that this was happening in the middle of the largest terrorist attack in the nation’s history. While there were plenty of Coast Guard and every other government agency focused on security to try and prevent further death and destruction from the terrorists, they also prioritized the needs of the survivors and prevented the cascading effects in mental and physical health that would have compounded if they were not evacuated.

Security and access did not have to be opposites.

We can balance both.

So let’s not let the disaster management legacy of that horrific day focus only on what went wrong. The reviews of September 11 identified serious problems: first responders who could not communicate across organizational boundaries, incompatible terminology and communications systems, intelligence trapped in silos, and information that did not move where it needed to go.

We responded by building new institutions, doctrine, laws, systems, and a common national approach to incident management. Much of that work addressed real problems.

But there is an unfortunate irony in where we have ended up.

In disaster management, we have recreated versions of some of the very problems we were trying to solve. We rely heavily on specialized terminology and acronyms. We have information systems that often do not share information easily outside their own organizations. We create silos between sectors and levels of government. And we have extended command-and-control concepts beyond the places where command actually exists — treating coordination problems as if they were chain-of-command problems.

We responded to interoperability failures by building systems. We should not let those systems become new barriers to interoperability.

Let us build a better legacy from September 11 for disaster management.

Let’s study not only what failed, but what worked, and build our disaster programs, systems, and norms around those successes. Let’s build interoperability not only among government agencies and first responders, but with everyone who participates in a disaster, especially the people and communities experiencing it. Let’s build government systems capable of saying out loud when they are overwhelmed. In a disaster, that should not be an admission of failure. Being overwhelmed is part of what makes it a disaster.

And let’s trust people enough to give them the information and space to do what decades of disaster research tell us they overwhelmingly do: Help each other.

The Coast Guard showed us what that can look like 25 years ago.

Command what you command. Coordinate with everyone else. And when the problem is bigger than the capacity you control before it cascades into additional impacts:

Call All Available Boats.