Emergency Manager

Evolution

Although emergency managers are found in both the public and private sectors, the term originated with and is generally applied to public-sector employees. Although the function of government in reducing vulnerability and coping with disasters has been evolving over many years, the concept of a specific individual charged with discharging this function is of relatively recent origin and has [Page 344]its beginnings in the Cold War era. With the passage of the Civil Defense Act of 1950, the federal government began providing funding for local planners to develop plans for nuclear war. These planners were primarily retired military personnel who adapted military planning techniques to the various levels of government that employed them. Separate legislation (the Disaster Relief Act of 1950) provided for disaster response unrelated to civil defense and created a separate arm of the government to discharge these functions. However, these two functions were generally merged at the state and local levels. The result was a gradual shifting of the roles of the federally funded planners from nuclear war planners to all-hazards planners as the Cold War threat diminished.

Given its origins in Cold War nuclear planning, the role of the emergency manager has been closely associated with the development of the emergency operations plan and the position viewed as one of a technical specialist. The position tended to be plan-centric, with the major task of the emergency manager being to develop the emergency operations plan and prepare the jurisdiction for disaster response. However, with the adoption of the four-phase comprehensive emergency management model in 1978, there has been a growing recognition that emergency managers cannot limit their role strictly to response planning. Instead, studies have demonstrated that effective emergency managers share the same characteristics as effective managers in other fields. The increase in scope of duties necessitated by planning for mitigation and recovery in addition to preparedness, coupled with the advent of standards and program accreditation, has changed the role of the emergency manager from that of a planner to one of program manager.

This evolution from nuclear planner to all-hazards planner to program manager has been heavily influenced by a growing body of research on crisis and hazards, principally in the social sciences. Disaster research also has its origins in the Cold War: military planners were attempting to use natural disasters as a method of predicting the impacts of nuclear war on civilian populations. From this beginning, disaster research has grown to become an academic discipline in its own right and the theoretical basis for modern emergency management.

Current Role

The role of the emergency manager remains hard to define, as there is no standard job description. Until the adoption of the Principles of Emergency Management by several national emergency management organizations in 2007, there was no generally agreed-upon definition of emergency management. The actual role of an emergency manager seems to depend on two factors: (1) the size of the community and (2) the perception of competency of the emergency manager.

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