Public-Private Partnerships

Recent and Historical Partnerships

Many recent large disaster relief efforts have been met with disconnected coordination between businesses that want to provide relief, and government authorities who need to coordinate and secure relief efforts. During the 2009 Haitian quake and subsequent devastation of urban landscape, there were boatloads and planeloads of supplies standing on station waiting for a place to land or dock on which to unload. The lengthy wait prevented some relief efforts from continuing and others from starting. The same was true for other large disasters like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. According to the Public-Private Partnerships for Emergency Preparedness Overview from its Lessons Learned: Information Sharing in 1995, the reestablishment of electrical power by private sector energy providers was essential to response operations.

Disaster relief partnerships have occurred as a natural reaction to disasters since ancient times. Small bands of affected populations would leave impacted areas and be taken care of by sympathetic neighbors in villages not impacted by the disaster. It was also easier for small populations to simply relocate outside the impacted area, since little land was owned by anyone.

As transportation improved, it became easier for sympathetic neighbors to bring relief directly to the impacted areas by wagon and by train. More organized government and improved farming techniques brought much more land under government or private control. Larger populations became less likely to relocate [Page 535]to different areas, because unimpacted land was under ownership, or the population had an economic interest in their village or the surrounding land. As more populations were required to generally shelter in place or evacuate and then return very soon after the event, it became increasingly important to have effective and timely relief efforts for larger populations. The discipline of emergency management (EM) was created to help assist with all aspects of disasters.

The Deepwater Horizon oil well shortly after exploding on April 21, 2010. The Gulf of Mexico oil spill involved a variety of public-private responses and coordination between oil giant British Petroleum and agencies of the U.S. government

Modern efforts at partnerships met with resistance, because EM was prepared to take private sector resources without definite plans, or timeframes for reimbursement that would endanger the ability of companies to do business afterward.

The urgency of the need for partnerships was expressed from many areas. According to the Wisconsin Office of Justice Assistance, for example, all government safety agencies are required to establish partnerships with the private sector to coordinate prevention, preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery efforts, protecting their jurisdiction's workforce, economy, and infrastructure.

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