>>Good morning an welcome to Global Perspectives.

I'm David Dumke.

Today we are joined by Doctor Tricia Wachtendorf who is the Director of the Disaster Research Cente at the University of Delaware.

Welcome to the show.

>>Than you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

>>So tell us a little about the Disaster Research Center.

Obviously, there's disasters of all kinds of varieties throughout the country and throughout the world, but let's learn a littl about the research center first.

>>Yeah, our center actually i the oldest center in the world focused on the social science and management aspects of disaster.

We started at the Ohio State University in 1963, moving to the University of Delaware in 1985, starting of very much as a sociology center.

But we have really transformed into much more of an interdisciplinary outlook.

So we have civil engineers, social and policy scientists, epidemiologists who are looking at disasters as a key social problem.

How do organizations coordinate or not coordinate with each other?

What are some of the aspects that impact different communities in different ways?

Differential experience ranging projects from, disaster donation to critical infrastructure to, risk perception during Covid 19 and really having an effort in supporting our emergency management agencies with state of the art information so they can make the best decisions, trying to protect their own communities.

>>So you work with a variety of agencies, obviously local, state as well as federal and even international.

How does that coordination generally work?

>>Yeah.

So our, work is primarily on the research side of it.

We are not involved in actually responding to a disaster, but we frequently get calls.

Both, after a disaster happens, communities trying to find information that could be a chamber of commerce who's trying to find more about business recovery and what strategies work or don't work.

It's the training that we help augment and support.

We have a really good relationship with FEMA, with our state agencies.

They'll often reach out before a disaster happens.

And it's also tryin to make sure that the students who are going on to take those professional careers are aware of the research that's out there to support them, to dispel some of the myths and misconceptions.

So we support a lot of undergraduate and graduate programs at our university as well.

>>In responding to disasters.

It would would seem, from from the uninformed outsider, that there's just a lot of tria and error based on experience, what has worked and what hasn't worked.

How critical is it to government leaders to look at some of the research, to understand again, success and failure depends on these variables?

>>Fortunately, communities don't always experience a disaster every day.

I think that in some communities in the U.S.

especially, that assumption is being pushed to the limit.

But you don't want to wait until a disaster happens to begin learning those lessons.

There's always been myths and misconceptions about how people and organizations behave in disasters, sometimes assuming that people are need somebody else coming in from the outside to help them respond to that event where we know that citizenry help each other, are very proactive or strong partners.

Sometimes there's a misconception of antisocial behavior that happens in pockets, but in that immediate aftermath, people are very helpful sometimes just figuring out th strategies that actually work.

So, it's one thing to say that you need to bring the whole of community to the table.

It's something that FEMA has been really advocating for for the last ten years.

How do you actually do that?

How do you bring sufficient partners in?

So it's not a room of 200 people trying to have their voices heard, but that you actuall create dialog, involve people, and their perspectives were needed that actually get that action moved forward so things get done.

>>So both the Disaster Research Center and yourself were involved in in 9/11.

And kind of the aftermath of that, you were telling me before we went on the air that you were there two days after, after that unfortunate incident took place.

And that, of course, involve a variety of different agencies, lots of different agencies, lots of different elements.

Describe a little little of that process of 9/11.

>>Yeah.

And it's actually the 25th anniversary of 911.

And a lot of those lessons that, we, we learned by shadowing logistics personnel, attending some of those meetings.

We had a very good relationship with the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management at the time.

So those lessons are really applicable today.

Improvisation and flexibility was a key one that we had noticed throughout the response.

Planning is important, but being able to demonstrate creativity, flexibility, having a system where you are not entirely skeptical of someone coming in that can provide assistance.

We did an in-depth study of the boat evacuation, on on 9/11, where a half million people were evacuated from Manhattan by boat and ad hoc flotilla of ferry boat operators, cruise vessels, completely unplanned, improvised over the course of the day.

Extremely successful because people responded in a way that associated with their identity.

These were mariners.

They knew the harbor.

They knew where their boats could take them.

They saw problems and began doing.

And organizations like the Coast Guard and the Harbor Police facilitated that They didn't say, you know what?

You're not you're not part of the system.

Go away.

It's how can we bring in thes resources and allow us to focus on the things that we need t focus on, given our expertise?

But see, that response is an improvisation and one that affords over the days and weeks.

>>In a situation like 9/11 which which was such a tragedy on so many different levels.

You have a lot of emotions at play as well.

How hard is it for those who have worked on the response, for example, to this disaster to accept, okay, we've done research on this an X, Y and Z could have been done in a different way, in a better way.

>>I think it's how it's approached.

I think the challenge is more so the time that's available between disasters producing and after action report.

Usually a community is experiencing a crisis.

By the time those those lessons have been processed, let alone implemented.

I do find that most responders and policymakers in that domain are really receptive to it.

There has been more of a professionalization of emergency management over the past 20 years.

They seek out that information.

9/11 for example, the mayor's office invited us into the EOC, said, you need to be behind us around us.

Look at what's going right, look at what's going wrong.

We're focused on the response, but we need someone else to come in and identify some of those issues that can be improved.

I think there's a lot of reception to that.

>>Before we went on, another item you were mentioning was the disinformation and how that's affecting the response to disasters of all kinds.

Obviously, people get their news in a variety of ways, and they get it from different angles depending on the kinds of events they've followed, where they live, etc., etc.. How challenging is that on your, I wouldn't say industry, but on the disaster field?

>>I think that's a huge area that will, be vexing for emergency management going forward.

Not to get too sociological, but there's a term called cultural la where you have the technology, but you don't quite know how to to manage it with your policies and your processes yet.

My feed that I get is very different from my spouses, very different from my kids, probably very different from yours.

And if I'm making sense as a citizen, what's going on in my community when things are uncertain, who do I trust?

What is actually the the context of that disaster?

My perception, who I'm going to go to, the directions I'm going to follow might be very different from yours.

Not because I'm, you know, doing something stupid, but because I'm doing it based on the information provided to me.

Emergency managers of all kinds will face that same situation right now, there's there's very good ways of distilling information that's coming out ground truthing that information in the moment.

But when the media suddenly is showing one thing happening and it is a really great generated AI video and is done with some malicious intent that will put a huge pressure on emergency managers to make a decision in a very short time frame, while also figuring out, is that is that true?

My listening to the person on the field, am I listening to what's showing up on my own social media?

Am I paying attention to what all the TVs in the EOC are telling me?

What's happening?

>>So what can be done to it to address that?

Based on the research that that you're doing at the DRC?

>>Yeah, I think some of the the honest answer is we don't know yet.

AI is pretty, pretty new.

There's bee a lot of work on misinformation.

Not as much work on the polarization.

On on emergency management.

I think that there will have to be some deep coordinatio with those who have an expertise in AI and expertise in tech with decision makers, and how to filter that information in a way that they feel comfortabl with prioritizing their decision making and a way to bring in those decision makers in the moment to say, what do we think is really happening here?

How do we ground truth this in the moment?

It'll be a very different strategy in a in the middle of a crisis, in the middle of a disaster compared to what we might have in blue sky periods.

We might have a day, we might have two days to make sense of it.

You might have a matte of ten minutes and a disaster.

>>You had some of this, of course, surface right in 2024 when you had flooding and Carolinas, I believe, correct?

How was that dealt with at the time?

Because that was kind of a at least for those who don't follow it as closely as you.

Obviously, that was the first time you heard, you know, first responders to this crisis actually having problems with the people they're trying to help.

How do you overcome that gap?

>>I don't know that that's really the first time.

It's it's it's happening in different ways.

Right.

So emergency managers might have had resistance before, but when it's so entrenched in what people are seein in their own social media, it's a it's a different manifestation of the same problem.

One of the things that that certainly came out of Hurricane Helene, there's a well known charity scam that happene to an image of a very young girl in a boat with a puppy, and the misinformation associated with trying to scam people out of mone with a very compelling picture.

If you have a discerning eye, that photo looks like it's AI constructed.

I think the technology is going to get a lot more difficult to discern, especially when you add video.

So it's something that we're looking at and need partnership with, with emergency management to work on.

>>So, so looking at some of the disasters you mentioned 9/11, what are some of the other disaster that you particularly remember and are actually very, offer the most lessons?

>>Yeah, one of the, it' actually a series of disasters.

But looking back to Hurricane Katrina, we did considerable work looking at the challenges of unsolicited donations after a disaster.

And that's been repeated, whether or not it's the Haiti earthquake, whether or not it's hurricane Sandy and even the LA wildfires, very well-meaning individuals collecting a whole bunch of stuff after a disaster, emptying ou their closets of their clothes, sending sheets and, bedding and canned food that can be really helpful in, an isolated crisis when you have a local food bank that's that's doing a donation drive.

We often call those, unsolicited donations in a disaster, the second disaster, they arrive en masse.

There's nowhere to put them.

Sometime they get dumped on the streets because people have to go home.

They arrive at times when people don't need them.

So you don't need bedding and sheets when you're still trying to find accommodations, you don't have a bed to put them on yet, and so trying to really understand the appropriate ways to give those that are most helpful, like monetary donations, providing support to local groups that that provide that support, usually in their community.

If there is, an organization, for example, that helps the unhoused population, they know that community, they know their needs.

They're probably going to get less charitable donations when a disaster happens.

So to be able to identify those local groups, give them support, rather than sending, you know, your old clothes from your, your closet.

>>So you use the example o bedding in specific disasters.

Can you think of others where they got way too much material support that they just couldn't, that just couldn't be used or does that happened at every disaster?

>>It happen at every large scale disaster.

We have seen pallets of water move from a tornado event in Oklahoma to a hurricane event in Texas showing up.

In Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

>>No one wants the water.

>>There's just too much.

There's too much, and there's other sources for it.

And so this is a common situation.

Sometimes you have expired medication that people give or it's there's been a recall on it unbeknownst to them.

So after the Haiti earthquake, I remember going into one of the donation areas and right here in Florida, and they had signs saying wha medication to pull to pull out, because there had been recalls on it.

We've seen Elmo chairs donated after a disaster in hurricane Sandy.

We've seen people send socks t Japan after the tsunami there.

They have socks.

Often, it's a way that peopl want to give something tangible.

They want that connection.

They feel that it is a way of really being more more humanistic than than giving cash.

People sometimes don't trust the system.

So they think, if I give a jacket, it's mor likely to end up in in the hands of someone who needs it, as opposed to giving $5, but they don't really appreciate how much it costs to get those material out there, to find somewhere to to store them, to sort them, inventory them, to make sure that it's appropriate.

Again, if you have a hurrican in Puerto Rico, they don't need warm winter jackets, but those sometimes show up as well.

And so that is something that even thinking back to the earl founding of the center in 1963, a common misconception that we try to work with, decision makers and policymaker how to communicate what you need in a way that that doesn't go to send everything that you've got and really try to prioritize and plan for those that communication messaging early on.

>>What what makes for a an effective message from a government agency, especially in places where you have some distrust, like you mentioned Katrina, you had a population that was quite angry as well as didn't feel felt that their government was failing them at multiple levels.

>>Yeah, there's a few key factors that go in.

Messages have to be clear.

They can't be filled with jargon.

They have to be something that the average everyday person is going to understand.

They have to be consistent.

So to hear one thing coming from your mayor, another thing coming from, the Department of Transportation, another thing coming from your governor, that inconsistent messaging can pose a real problem.

It has to be specific.

So if you want someone to do something, evacuate is not a good specific message.

Who is supposed to evacuate?

What areas of the community Where are they supposed to go?

What's the timing associated with that?

So that specificity is really important.

And appreciating that people get their information from different sources and trus different information as well.

I might put a lot of trust in a, public health official.

Another person in my community might be have distrust of of that official, but have a great deal of confidence hearing something from their family physician.

That's something that we saw with, the pandemic.

What you're hearing from your family physician made a big differenc in, in people's decision making.

Less so in some cases, if it was coming from a state or a federal government official.

So having that consistenc across those different sources is key.

>>I heard you in the past comment on on the fires in Maui, for example.

And there was a problem, massive problem with communication.

Now people didn't know wher to go when the disaster started.

Is that frequent that people kind of lost.

Do we run from it to what do we do, you know?

>>Yeah.

And in that situation, what is challenging is you have different kinds of hazards.

So if it is a tsunami, you would want people to run away from the water to move away from from that, from the shore, in the case of a wildfire that's coming down the hill, moving towards the water or moving out in a particular direction is is important.

So trying to make sens of having multiple strategies.

One thing that works in a, hurricane versus another thing that works in a, in an earthquake, do we know in that moment what what the difference is, using there was some pushback about not using sirens in in that particular disaster.

Sirens are generally restricted for, tsunami warnings.

And there was some debate whether or not they should have been used.

In the case of the wildfire or if that would have generated miscommunication.

Is this a tsunami that's happening?

Do I do those things?

Do I do something else in relation to a wildfire that community's really, difficult to get out of?

Sort of thinking about th direction you're, you're moving, you know, to the right of the community, to the left of the community.

There's not a lot of paths out.

So the time it takes to find your loved one, go to make sure an elderly parents has a way out of town.

Those are minutes and seconds that count so the earlier people can be notified.

We think there is a threat here.

Can you take a preemptive action moving out of that area before something happens?

That can be the difference between life and death.

>>You've also done a lot of work in Puerto Rico, which is unfortunately been stricken by a series of natural disasters.

They've they've had hurricanes, earthquakes.

And that's also been compounded by some government issues and governance as well.

Tell us a little, little about what you've studied in Puerto Rico.

>>Yeah, this is actually work done by one of our research scientist at the Disaster Research Center who is from Puerto Rico.

She is based there.

And I think it's important to understand tha when we we study these events, we actually give a lot of thought.

Is there somebody who has a a connection to the area?

Do they know the cultura context, the political context?

Are they better suited to to really focus on this particular event, this particular region?

The work that she's done is really interesting because she's focused on, building connections in some of the more marginalized communities.

That experience, bot the hurricane, Hurricane Maria, but also the more recent earthquake, events Center grappling with issues of, of climate change and how that impacts some of the compounding aspect associated with an earthquake.

I'll give you one example.

I was just having some meeting with her there, and she took me to, an are that, people had moved back to.

It's on along the coast, very pretty area.

An earthquake had caused, shifts in the ground and created an area that was prone to flooding, making that into almost a small lake or pond.

That created a challenge for people who were between that lake area and the coast.

So a house that may have had a number of years before sea level rise or erosio might have impacted their home, suddenly had water coming fro the back end and the front end.

When you're looking at people who are not having a lot of resources, who have strong attachments to an are telling them to mitigate their their disaster risk is not an easy instruction to give.

So, I think one of the important things that we've learned from her work, is to really spend time in those communities trying to understand the routine challenges that people face and how that impacts their, decision making in disaster preparedness and mitigation for the next event.

>>So when when we all went to to to elementary school course, we practiced fire drills.

And where I grew up, tornado drills and things like that.

And I know that that sounds silly to ask the question of you, but do people practice for disaster, for hazards enough?

I mean, you can look at scenarios like in Florida, there's enough with hurricane that it's a frequent occurrence, but other disasters aren't a frequent, something like 9/11.

You can theorize this is a remote possibility, but people were so shocked that it that it happened.

So these are going to inevitably happen.

Can people prepare for them in advance or should they?

>>On an individual or more localized level there's a lot of great ways to do that.

I'm thinking about in California, for example, they have the great, shakeout event.

And, many state have have adopted that strategy where once a year, in preparation for an earthquake, it's a specific tim if you happen to be in a studio, if you happe to be in a classroom or at home, what would you do at thi particular moment to take cover?

If if a disaster, if an earthquake happened, it's a good way for people to then think about different spaces, right?

You're not just looking at it in your home or your place of work, but it could b if you're at the swimming pool, what would you do in that situation?

One of the things looking back to 9/11 that was really important was taking advantage of other kinds of crises or disasters, and building relationships around those that will make things work more smoothly.

If a disaster happens.

9/11 happened in 2001.

Many of us who are old enough to remember, leading up to the year 2000, there was a lot of discussion about, computer failure.

When the clocks turn to 000.

Right.

And actually in New York, those conversations leading up to Y2K agencies trying to figure out where their interdependencies were, I might have fixed my computer problems.

But if another organization I work with hasn't, then I'm going to have to.

Then I' going to be shut down as well.

So that brought a lot of different private sector public sector organizations together.

Talking about what they do, talking abou how they relied on each other.

And many of the peopl we interviewed after September 11th in 2001 said those conversations were essentia in helping them respond to 9/11.

One doesn't necessaril need to have those conversations or practicin around a specific kind of event, but building those connections, understanding who to call, understanding when there's been turnove in an organization who to trust.

Those are is essential is as knowing whether or not you get under a desk or if you have enough water in the pantry.

>>So we only have time for one more question, and you have dealt with such a range of of, of disasters.

And Covid is one that you dealt with.

That's that you know, we're talking about individual events is one thing.

But but a global pandemic is another.

And my question is actually very simple.

Your opinion studying this and looking back on it, is the world better prepared to handle the next Covid type pandemic or not?

>>I wish I could be more optimistic.

I think that sometimes when we experience an event for the first time, there is a lot more goodwill, a lot more flexibilit and and forgiveness for people figuring it out.

And working through it.

There are many way that we could imagine the Covid 19 pandemic being much worse.

I think that we've moved into an are that is much more a time where we're much more polarized, not only within the nation but across the world.

Responding to a global crisis requires good relationships and communication across the board.

There were many strong lessons that were learned and will help us moving forward, but I. I think that the challenges are still there if another event like that happens.

>>Well, Trisha Wachtendorf, thank you very much for joining us.

And and good luck in continuing your very important work.

>>Thank you so much.

>>And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again next week on another episode of Global Perspectives.