Disruptive Emergent Systems in Disaster Response: Study of Hurricane Katrina, Sandy, Maria, Harvey - Innovation, Use of Social Media and Volunteers to Fill Gaps in Federally Managed Responses

This informative report from March 2019 has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. The 2017 hurricanes in the southern United States provided an impetus for wider social technology use than during previous disaster responses. Hurricane survivors rapidly turned to social media for help, while physically unaffected social media users crowdsourced emergent crisis mapping systems. Volunteers unaffiliated with first responder organizations conducted rescues based on those systems to form new response systems. These new, disruptive emergent systems displaced, supplemented, or filled gaps in the established, federally managed responses. This research examined disruptive emergent systems and associated effects on disaster responses.
A total of thirteen disruptive emergent systems from four hurricane responses were analyzed. This research resulted in a set of eight features and an ontological visualization of disruptive emergent systems. The results show that disruptive emergent systems demonstrated supply responses to survivor demand. That is, these systems emerged through particular capability and organizational mechanism conditions to satisfy survivor demands. Cultural motivations provided the call to action for many of these disruptive emergent systems. These features can be used to understand disruptive emergent systems in the context of future disaster responses.

This compilation includes a reproduction of the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

This research sought to reveal the effects of disruptive emergent systems on established disaster response systems. Four major hurricane responses were selected for analysis: Hurricanes Katrina (2005), Sandy (2012), Harvey (2017), and Maria (2017). These hurricanes represent the costliest U.S. hurricanes on record as of mid-2018. Damage due to high winds and flooding were widespread. The scale of the damage and large response areas produced two important effects. The first was that federal response resources were spread thin and dispersed over the affected areas. The second was that the disaster scale, combined with scarce federal resources, provided conditions for need-based emergent solutions. In other words, emergent systems arose based on survivor needs that were not being met in an acceptable timeframe. It is not surprising that emergent systems were developed to provide solutions for the many immediate needs in the aftermath of these each of these hurricanes. A total of thirteen disruptive emergent systems from the four different hurricane responses were analyzed in this research. A constant comparative grounded theory approach was used to identify properties and features of the disruptive emergent systems. Each system was also analyzed in terms of the National Response Framework's Emergency Support Functions and core capabilities. The analysis showed that disruptive emergent systems are likely to supplement ongoing response activities or fill gaps in Emergency Support Functions and core capabilities. This research also discovered that these systems emerge based on survivor demand conditions and motivations along with available capabilities and culture.

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