The Disaster Cycle

Over the last few decades, hazards specialists have come up with various ways of classifying the timelines of disasters, looking for common elements in the sequencing of activities and outcomes. Haas, Kates, and Bowden proposed what may be the first formalization of stages in the timeline (Haas, J. Eugene, Robert W. Kates and Martyn J. Bowden (eds.). 1977. Reconstruction Following Disaster. Cambridge: MIT Press). They proposed that the sequence of activities after an event is "ordered, knowable, and predictable," comprising four clear stages:

• Stages as an event impacts society:
  • response or emergency response, which is taken up with such immediate and urgent activities as search and rescue, life-saving, and emergency medical care (possibly including triage of victims), shutting down ruptured gas lines, evacuation, establishment of temporary housing (e.g., tent cities), and other emergency operations
  • restoration, which is the set of activities that allows some resumption of non-emergency, normal activities. This is the phase when lifelines are repaired (sometimes just cobbled together enough to function while correct repairs are underway), debris is removed, transportation detours and alternate routes are worked out, evacuees begin to return to their residences or at least to the area, people return to their jobs, schools re- open, structures are repaired (or bulldozed)
  • reconstruction, when structures and infrastructure are repaired or rebuilt and economic activities return to their previous level, a phase that can take many years
    • New Orleans is still contesting directions for this stage many years after Katrina hit in 2005: For a brief 2020 update, click here).
    • Haïti, struck by a 7.0 M_w earthquake in 2010, was still mired in contested reconstruction after a botched response and restoration 10 years on, just before the 2021 7.2 M_w earthquake of 2021 and Hurricane Grace. For more on that, you can click here
  • commemorative reconstruction, a long period marked by development activities where attempts are made, not just to recover but to improve, and society devotes some attention to building commemorative monuments or otherwise institutionalizing narrative memory of the event and the many losses it incurred (New York City has been engaged in this phase for a few years, and, in some ways, the election-year agitation around the community center the old mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero wanted to build is precisely a struggle over how 9/11 is to be remembered in our cultural narrative)
• More controversially, Haas et al. posited a logarithmic temporal relationship among them
  • Each stage was said to take 10 times as long as the previous one
  • If response takes 1 week, then, restoration will take 10 weeks, and reconstruction 100 weeks, and commemorative reconstruction might be as far off as 1,000 weeks or as little as 200-300 weeks
• The idea of a disaster having distinctive stages was quite useful, and the Haas et al. scheme was the classic piece that got people thinking more systematically about disasters as temporal structures. Stages schemes are common now. Here are a few more recent derivations:
  • David Alexander's rehabilitation, followed by temporary reconstruction, followed by permanent reconstruction (Alexander, David. 1993. Natural Disasters. University College London Press).
  • Susan Cutter's 2003 rescue, relief, recovery, reconstruction, preparedness (Cutter, Susan L. 2003. GI Science, disasters, and emergency management. Transactions in GIS 7, 4: 439-445) -- in our Library.
  • FEMA's National Disaster Recovery Framework, 2nd ed. (2016), with short-term, intermediate, long-term, and preparedness stages.
• Criticism of the classic Haas et al. scheme has focussed, not so much on the sequence, which is intuitively recognizable, even if worded differently by different people, but on the mathematics and timing (Neal, David M. 1997. Reconsidering the phases of disaster. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 15, 2: 239-264; Berke, Philip R., and Beatley, Timothy. 1997. After the Hurricane: Linking Recovery to Sustainable Development in the Caribbean. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press; Rubin, Claire B. 2009. Long term recovery from disasters -- the neglected component of emergency management. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 6, 1: article 46) -- in our Library.
  • Stages are not discrete; they interpenetrate, a point conceded in the Haas et al. book (think about how New York City was debating what sort of memorial would go up on the site of the World Trade Center, even as restoration and reconstruction activities were going on, and how the twin light beams went up fairly early in the process)
  • Some activities are hard to classify as one or another (temporary housing can become much more permanent housing, so does the reconstruction phase require the closing of tent cities in all disasters?).
  • The timing of the processes of recovery can vary by different socio- economic groups.
  • The logarithmic relationship among these stages has received particular criticism as a kind of false precision. Yes, reconstruction takes longer than restoration, and restoration takes longer than emergency operations, but there is no magical requirement that they each take ten times as long as the stages immediately preceding them, and a lot of these conceptually clear categories of activities actually go on simultaneously in a real disaster.

More creatively, Eugenie Rovai has found that you can use the Haas et al. scheme to differentiate the recovery process in rich and poor communities, and this application does not depend on the specific nature of the underlying mathematical relationship (Rovai, Eugenie L. 1994. The social geography of disaster recovery: Differential response to the North Coast earthquakes. The Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 56): 49-74 -- in our Library.

• Her case study was the Humboldt County quakes of 1992
• She focussed on media stories about recovery in Ferndale and Rio Dell, classifying each story by the predominant topic it covered and the classification of each topic by the Haas et al. stages.
• From that, she constructed "wave diagrams," like those of Haas et al., but showing each community's phasing separately on the same graph.
• Rio Dell's transition markedly lagged: It is a much poorer community than the picturesque Ferndale.

  

She and I later were able to use a different approach to implement this concept on the Northridge earthquake (Rovai, Eugenie, and Rodrigue, Christine M. 1998. The "Northridge" and "Ferndale" earthquakes: Spatial inequities in media attention and recovery. National Social Science Journal 11, 2: 109-120) -- available at https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/nssajournal.html.

• We bought several editions of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety database of red/yellow/green tagged buildings
• We tracked the bulldozing of red and fixing/reclassification of yellow tagged structures by address and Zip code
• We subtracted the red and yellow tagged buildings for one period from those of the previous one to come up with a crude index of recovery by Zip code (which were then aggregated into the named communities of Los Angeles)
• We then compared the recovery rates for each named community with the number of times the community was mentioned in regional print media (Los Angeles Times and La Opinión) by using a simple linear regression model of their relationship, basically comparing the two geographies of actual damage and of media attention to identify communities that were overcovered by the media and undercovered by them.
• The way overcovered communities were much richer and whiter than the undercovered
• You would expect that poorer neighborhoods would lag in their recovery simply because they have fewer resources to rebuild their lives, but we detected an independent influence of media on these rates of recovery
• The neighborhoods that had been seriously undercovered by the media, even a few rich, white communities, lagged in their rates of recovery (see figure below, which tracks how many damaged buildings remained in communities that were undercovered by the two L.A. papers versus those overcovered by each paper)
• Media coverage can directly affect recovery!
• The take-away message is that first-responders and humanitarian aid organizations should be aware of this possibility and invest some time in independent canvassing of damages, rather than rely on the media, in setting up emergency operation plans and disaster assistance centers

  

The disaster cycle is a common theme in the hazards literature and several schemes for ordering the timeline have been put forward since Haas, Kates, and Bowden. It is embedded in FEMA's current National Disaster Recovery Framework (2016), which you can access from here. See Figure 1 on p. 5 of the Framework PDF, which uses the terms "short-term, intermediate, and long-term post-disaster, preceded by a period of preparedness.

You can get an idea of the diversity of ideas by doing a search for "disaster cycle" in a search engine. One of the biggest evolutions in the concept has been the integration of pre-event activities and planning into the timeline, truly closing the circle.

• Crisis management:
  • Event: disaster and its impacts
  • Response: the emergency phase as described earlier. Normal life activities are very significantly disrupted or cease entirely.
  • Restoration: as described above. Life begins to resume some of its normal patterns.
• Risk management - activities are no longer crisis-management focussed but may (ideally) begin to focus on assessing and reducing future risks as society and the economy return to "normal."
  • Reconstruction: more permanent repairs and rebuilding, and any commemorative reconstruction (combining the last two reconstruction phases discussed above)
  • Mitigation: ideally, this is integrated into reconstruction. Mitigation is marked by continuing assessment of risk and improvement of predictions, as well as structural and non-structural improvements to reduce the transmission of risk from extreme events to human bodies. This can include building to codes improved by analysis of the event, retrofitting of bridges and such things as home foundation bolting, water heater and furniture strapping, establishment of emergency kits, and disaster planning. Prevention is sometimes set as a goal ("only you can prevent forest fires"), though human agency is perhaps too feeble to make much headway here!
  • Preparation: this entails human organizational activities, such as running scenarios to give cooperating agencies practice in interacting with one another in common Incident Command Systems in more-or-less realistic simulated disasters, pre-positioning of resources ahead of an impending (predicted) disaster, activating forecast and warning systems and public communications systems to deliver them, declaring voluntary or compulsory evacuations.
  • Here's a nice representation of the cycle, from https://sites.google.com/site/dimersarred/disaster-management- cycle:

  

Another major theme that has been growing is a desire to spiral above the recurrent event-response-recovery-get ready for the next event pattern and look more closely at the connections between recovery/reconstruction in the crisis management part of the cycle and the prevention/mitigation part of risk management and explore the concepts of resilient communities.

• Can our economies, social dynamics, cultures, as well as our construction practices be worked with during recovery so that we can become resilient to extremes, essentially downgrading disasters in the direction of nuisances?
• This has brought in a more critical look at "recovery" and more attention to the concept of sustainable (re)development.
  • In many parts of the world and in many sectors of virtually every society, the "normal" conditions of life are so harsh and the options for keeping one's loved ones safe are so limited that everyday life is carried out in conditions that are little different from those nearly everyone experiences just post-impact.
  • Is the goal of "recovery" to take people right back to "normal" conditions, conditions that made them so vulnerable to risk in the first place?
  • Instead, is there some way of coupling disaster response, restoration, and reconstruction in a way that actually reduces fragility and vulnerability to the next event? In other words, is there a way to do sustainable recovery?
• In short, there is a lot of cross-fertilization going on now between hazards and emergency management on the one hand and sustainability science on the other to move us toward resiliency. Here are a couple links to this conversation:
  • U.N. Sustainable Development: Disaster Risk Reduction (2015)
  • Ditching the disaster cycle (2015)
  

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  Last revision: 08/25/21