Uncommon Hazards and Orthodox Emergency Management: Toward a Reconciliation

Abstract

Effective emergency management requires a close fit between state of risk and stale of hazard management. If these components get out of phase, a marked increase in societal vulnerability is likely to prevail. Recognizing that the major burden for developed societies has shifted from risks associated with natural processes to those arising from technological development and application, disaster-relevant organizational networks have adopted a Comprehensive Emergency Management “all-hazards” approach. However, in Australia, as elsewhere, technological hazards present major problems for emergency managers because they pose different and often more difficult predicaments than do the more familiar natural hazards. While CEM is a good “in principle” strategy, the practices needed to pratect society from a diversity of disaster-producing agents are more difficult to achieve. Two explanations are given for this: misperceptions about common features of hazard types; and differential progress between social components. The concept of cultural lag provides an explanatory framework as to why predicaments like this occur; and the concept of disaster subculture may provide a solution.