(54cs) Validation of Resilience Model of Multiagency Emergency Management System through Hurricane Harvey and Irma

Modern socio-technical systems necessitate not only safe operations but also resilient performance to adapt to emerging changes and to maintain its control against complex and unexpected disruptions (Hollnagel, Woods, & Leveson, 2007). Such demand for engineering a resilient system becomes increasingly apparent in emergency response operations as seen in multiple catastrophic disasters in past few decades (Comfort, 2002, 2007). To that end, Incident Command Post (ICP), the major operational component of the U.S. National Incident Management System (NIMS), has been modeled as a Joint Cognitive System (JCS) based on literature (Hollnagel & Woods, 2005). This model represents how the Incident Command Post (ICP) as a distributed cognitive system perceives, evaluates input from external events and make decisions to control the abnormalities. To validate this model against the real cases of extreme events, interviews of emergency responders involved in Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are conducted and analyzed to elicit the sources of resilient or brittle performance in the responses to the disasters. The qualitative data analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) of the interview highlights examples and counter-examples of adaptation to varying external inputs, temporally expedited response and recovery, flexible and improvisational resource utilization, organizational sensemaking of the rapidly evolving situation, and changes in organizational structure and personal behavior to satisfy goals of operations. In addition, effects of technological artifacts (e.g., information and communication technology) on such performance are examined.

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