ABSTRACT
Disasters, such as major storm events or earthquakes, trigger an immediate response by the disaster management system of the nation in question. The quality of this response is a large factor in its ability to limit the impacts of the disaster on the local population. Improving the quality of disaster response therefore reduces disaster impacts. Studying past disasters is a valuable exercise to understand what went wrong, identify measures that could have mitigated the issues, and make recommendations to improve future disaster planning and response. The reports that result from this reflective process have a variety of names such as “lessons learned” docu-
ments (Birkland 2009), “after action” reviews (Comfort 2005; Donahue and Tuohy 2006), and “ex-post” evaluations (Cosgrave et al. 2009; OECD 2010). Due to the focus on disaster response, this article uses the term “post-response” report (Birkland 2009) to refer to documents that evaluate disaster response activities, make recommendations for improvement, and which are issued after the response phase is over.
