ABSTRACT
What my analysis of disaster management organizations has shown us is that disaster managers and their client-stakeholders don’t see eye to eye on a number of critical issues. This has surfaced in a number of ways. The first andmost basic is that public sector organizations have attempted to dilute the community of its ability to prepare, mitigate, and recover from disasters. This has stripped the community of a wealth of hard-learned lessons in critical disaster behaviors that have sustained it over time. What was once the province of organic community organizing in response to disasters has been transferred to noncommunity bureaucrats. A recent example of this was a study in a Midwestern metropolitan area that looked at how disaster organizations and local community service organizations tackled the issues of volunteerism and resource sharing (Zakour andGillespie 1998). The critical use of volunteers to quickly help communities recover from disasters and in bringing needed materials to victims has long been part of traditional disaster behaviors (Rosse 1993). The researchers concluded, however, that emergency management organizations had a very limited service range, tended to block the distribution of vitally needed resources, and limited volunteer participation of community members in helping their neighbors. In other words, the community was actually being deprived of many of its vital social resources to cope with disasters.
