Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
eral government to state and local oficials in just minutes (in the case of a near-ield tsunami)
or hours (in the case of a far-ield tsunami). Sustaining the organizational preparedness and
coordination across many jurisdictional boundaries presents a daunting challenge.
The committee recognizes that the nation's tsunami detection, warning, and prepared-
ness efforts originated in many diverse efforts distributed across several coastal states, and
that attempts to integrate these distributed components into a coherent program have only
recently begun. In particular, because tsunamis are rapid onset events, there is very little
margin for error in the system before failure becomes catastrophic. An organization that oper-
ates in a low probability, high-risk environment, allowing few errors, is called an HRO (Roberts,
1990). HROs manifest a number of common properties: lexible and adaptable organizational
structures, continually reinforced organizational learning, decision making that is both lexible
and mobile, a strongly reinforced organizational culture, constant and effective communica-
tion, and trust among members of the system, particularly across organizations (Grabowski
and Roberts, 1999; Grabowski et al., 2007). Because the committee identiied the need for
high-reliability operations in TWSs, the committee draws from the research literature on HROs
(Roberts, 1990) and resilient systems (Hollnagel et al., 2008) to highlight particular characteris-
tics that reduce the risks of failure in an idealized end-to-end warning system:
•
Situational Awareness in an Emergency:
Because tsunamis are events that allow
only minutes to hours for evacuation, a keen sense of situational awareness and the
ability to respond quickly and effectively is required (Weick, 1990, 1993, 2003). HROs
require decision making that is adaptable to change and surprise, and that is able to
continually reassess needs across distributed organizations (Weick, 1993, 1998; Weick
et al., 1999). Such is the case with the nation's tsunami warning and preparedness
efforts, where the TWCs, the state and local ofices, and emergency managers and the
affected public are geographically dispersed and often lack face-to-face contact. The
dispersed and decentralized nature of the end-to-end tsunami warning and prepared-
ness efforts make it a signiicant challenge to maintain awareness of the evolving
situation during a crisis.
•
Learning and Training:
To maintain situational awareness under changing conditions
requires training. Therefore, an effective TWS requires that watchstanders, emergency
managers, regulators, the public, and the media learn together, and engage in learn-
ing that enhances sense-making and developing alertness to small incidents that may
cascade into much larger disasters (Weick, 1993; Farber et al., 2006). Because of the
low frequency of tsunamis (e.g., California is issued an alert bulletin on average once
every three years; Dengler, 2009), a TWS has few opportunities to learn from an event
and therefore needs to learn from exercising the system through drills. Trial and error
can be disastrous not only because disasters are rare, but also because in the absence
of a major catastrophe to focus attention in the system, lessons learned from previ-
ous events may be forgotten or misapplied (March et al., 1991; Levitt and March, 1988;
De Holan and Phillips, 2004). Learning in a high-reliability organization needs to be
systematic, continually reinforced, measured, and made part of the system's core values.
