Abstract
Background:
This project interrogates how nonprofessionals are included or excluded in a professional-led disaster recovery process after Hurricane Michael along Florida's Gulf Coast. Disaster nonprofessionals, often volunteers, engaged in disaster work perceive their efforts as necessary to the recovery of impacted communities.
Methods:
Participant observation, semi-structured interview, and web response across three sites in the Florida Panhandle after Hurricane Michael generate insight into how different actors working in the same space perceive their work and develop or maintain fictions of institutional incongruences and barriers to coordination.
Results:
Findings identify vital processes that produce organizational incongruencies with grave and lasting implications for disaster-impacted geographies. These processes include volunteer intake, federal match funding, and exacerbated crises.
Discussion:
This tenuous dynamic, created by a lack of alignment of goals, exists primarily due to communication incongruencies, local history, and relationships built on professional forms of trust. Such trust, when tied to overwhelmingly white professions, can be racialized and classed, entailing potential environmental justice challenges. Narrative and organizational memory from past disasters drive feelings of trust and betrayal between these two groups working in the same context.
Conclusion:
This study reveals how disaster professionals and nonprofessionals perceive their work as part of or distinct from an accessible and unified government-managed disaster recovery process. Our findings demonstrate that the exclusion of certain populations from early recovery work has uneven, long-term implications for hurricane-impacted communities.
INTRODUCTION
As floodwaters subside after major hurricane disasters, impacted communities often experience a second flood of professional and nonprofessional actors eager to lend their skills and time to help those most severely affected by the storm. The landscape for this labor is uneven, changing across the jurisdiction, yielding vastly different outcomes depending on organizational affiliation, history, intention, and coordination with government agencies. Every hurricane event entails collaboration, duplication, and contention as groups address unmet needs and, at times, unintentionally create new disaster recovery challenges.
Hurricane Michael was a category four hurricane that struck the Gulf Coast on October 10, 2018. The storm made landfall on Mexico Beach, Florida, with winds reaching more than 139 miles per hour. The town of Mexico Beach was largely destroyed, with most of its structures washed away by a 14-foot storm surge and high-speed winds. The storm caused 72 fatalities, 47 of them in Florida, with USD 25.1 billion in damages. 2 The surrounding Panhandle, including the cities of Panama City and Panama City Beach, Florida, experienced damage, primarily due to wind. Most of the region's utility poles were brought down, interrupting power and cellular service for more than 1 million customers. Before this event, the last major hurricane to make landfall in the region was Hurricane Dennis in 2005, which mobilized a similar collection of organizations mentioned in this investigation. 3
As a region, the Gulf Coast has already been subject to contentious debates about the equitable distribution of recovery-related resources after other disasters, such as Deepwater Horizon. 4 Collaborative work in the response and recovery phases after an event can substantially multiply the impact of human, material, and financial resources that funnel into communities. 5 This study contributes to that necessary work by examining the work of and relationships between disaster professionals and nonprofessionals through interviews and participant–observation fieldwork. The research questions that guided this study are: How do disaster professionals and nonprofessionals perceive the role of their work in the same disaster context? What do these experiences imply about the role of emergency management (E.M.) professionals managing the process? How might the relationship between these two groups impact a community's future? What are the environmental justice implications of these perceptions and relationships?
Using excerpts from interviews and participant–observation field experiences, this article discusses how professionals and nonprofessionals experienced volunteer coordination, outreach and inclusion, communication, nonparticipation, and exacerbated crises after Hurricane Michael. In doing so, it highlights problems in coordination with government agencies. and how Michael could provide an understanding of how postdisaster coordination could either facilitate recovery or contribute to a community's downward spiral.
BACKGROUND
Disaster professionals and nonprofessionals
This article contributes to the existing body of literature that shows disaster volunteerism is on the rise and that volunteer coordination is an increasingly vital component of disaster response and recovery. 6 ,7,8,9,10,11 This article categorizes people working in the post–Hurricane Michael context as either professionals or nonprofessionals. Disaster professionals, taking cues from Dynes' articulation of “established” and “expanding” organizations, are those whose tasks qualitatively stay the same after a disaster event. Disaster professionals range from emergency managers to respondents in coordinating roles for nonprofit organizations. 12 Our nonprofessional category is similarly guided by Dynes' “extending” and “emergent” organizations, where someone's tasks shift and they begin to act and organize in ways they previously did not. Disaster nonprofessionals include community leaders who never led during a disaster, random individuals with no previous experience who decide to help, and people working in organizations with no previous role in disaster response or recovery. 13
This typology is not a comprehensive articulation of the ways people engage in disaster work. However, it offers a basic roadmap to asking questions about how different actors' work structurally relates to each other. It also enables questions about how this work might be thought of across different geographies with varying capacities. Disaster events that spill over into residents' daily lives highlight growing needs not captured or managed by disaster professionals. This phenomenon is exacerbated by underfunding. Historical examples demonstrate that underfunded disaster professionals are more likely to depend on nonprofessionals' services during times of crisis. 14 Because of this, the stakes for nonprofessional coordination are even higher for jurisdictions with underfunded E.M. agencies or higher rates of poverty.
Without intentional coordination of nonprofessionals, even high-capacity agencies can produce tension or mismatched efforts while working alongside emergent, nonprofessional groups. Compared with disaster professionals, nonprofessionals may have fluid, unwritten ways of coalescing and responding to community needs. Small emergent groups utilizing newer communication technologies are often considered challenging to collaborate with by professional groups and established organizations that utilize conventional partnership models that prioritize nonprofits and businesses. 15 These differences sometimes discourage collaboration between professional and nonprofessional actors before they can even begin. 16
Environmental justice
A hurricane hitting the Florida panhandle brings up obvious questions of equity due to the socioeconomic and demographic makeup of the state, particularly the differences between coastal and inland regions. Mexico Beach, which was famously destroyed by Hurricane Michael, had 3 out of 100 residents under the poverty line compared with parts of inland Jackson County, with 1 in 5 residents living in poverty. Racial distribution for these same two ends of our study geography follows patterns seen elsewhere. About 9% of residents in Mexico Beach are Black compared with more than 60% for the same part of inland Jackson County. 17 Education levels are distributed along the lines drawn by racial and class disparity. 18 Given that volunteerism levels are positively associated with income, whiteness, and higher levels of education, it is important to understand how professional and nonprofessional human resources are distributed in a postdisaster context. 19
Although there is a large body of literature that focuses on the socioeconomic and demographic makeup of disaster-impacted populations, there is very little research available on the race of disaster professionals and nonprofessionals. 20 ,21,22 A notable exception to this is Weaver et al.'s (2014) study that surveyed 1062 emergency managers in the United States and found that 80.8% of respondents were male and 94% were white. 23 Given the importance of social networks and social capital in postdisaster situations, it is essential that studies pay attention to the ways resources are mobilized and information is shared among professionals and nonprofessionals in postdisaster scenarios.
METHODS
Disaster volunteer experiences were collected through key informant interviews, in-depth participant interviews, web questionnaires, and participant observation. The methods used to obtain the study data have been reviewed and exempted by MIT's Institutional Review Board (IRB), the Committee on Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES) pursuant to Federal regulations, 45 CFR Part 46.101(b)(2), protocol 1812630496.
Site selection
On-site interviews were conducted between day 89 and 157 after the event. Interviews were done in the Florida cities and towns of Mexico Beach, Panama City, and Miramar Beach. Respondents represented work experiences in all counties affected by Hurricane Michael, including Jackson, Calhoun, Bay, Gulf, Liberty, and Gadsden Counties. The impacted region has significant inequities. Mexico Beach, which was famously destroyed by Hurricane Michael, had 3 out of 100 residents under the poverty line compared with parts of inland Jackson County, with 1 in 5 residents living in poverty. Racial distribution for these same two ends of our study geography follows patterns seen elsewhere. About 9% of residents in Mexico Beach are Black compared with more than 60% for the same part of inland Jackson County. 24
Key informants
We were able to identify four key informants through purposive sampling. We identified these informants by compiling a list of actors advertising their work on social media. I selected informants that could speak, in unstructured interviews, to project considerations at each level of organization (from national to local). Four key informants were interviewed, one in a national-, two in a state-, and one in a local-level organizations.
In-depth interviews and questionnaire
Eight solo interview respondents were identified through a combination of purposive and snowball sampling. Recruitment methods (posted flyer, social media, and snowball sampling) were aimed at capturing perceptions across various work contexts, from professional actors in government agencies to nonprofessional first-time spontaneous volunteers. This meant eliciting responses from every level of organization active in Hurricane Michael recovery (national, state, county, and local), across a diversity of group type (established, expanding, and emergent) working in the same geography. The eight in-depth interviews were conducted between day 89 and 157 after the storm event. No extending agencies were identified in the course of data collection. Interviewees wished to preserve the privacy of their affiliations. Large faith-based organizations, small non-Christian faith-based organizations, secular nonprofits, government partnerships, and internet-based collectives are represented in the respondent group. Interviews were semi-structured, with questions aimed at soliciting perceptions of agencies and organizations their work intersects with, the work of professionals and nonprofessionals, and the challenges that emerged in the field after Hurricane Michael. Interviews ranged from 30 to 120 minutes. In-depth responses entailed relaying group coordination experiences, motivation, dynamics with other organizations, successes, and failures. Two project participants wished to provide written responses, and a web questionnaire matching the interview guide was subsequently administered for a total of 10 in-depth responses.
Participant observation
In tandem with collecting in-depth interview data, participant observation methods were used on two occasions by one of the authors to develop a rich thick description of volunteer group experiences. 25 Fieldwork consisted of 1 week driving and walking through hurricane-impacted Jackson, Calhoun, Bay, Gulf, Liberty, and Gadsen Counties. On the first occasion, one author was a participant–observer to a small group of nonprofessional volunteers for 1 day (eight people). The group was faith based and consisted of local and nonlocal volunteers. This author conducted several short, unstructured interviews with the group members as they mobilized and engaged in volunteer labor in a destroyed section of Mexico Beach, FL. One of the authors conducted participant observation again at a day-long conference and roundtable meeting and discussion between about 40 professional organization representatives. Although most of the participants were part- or full- time staff, their conversation, exclusively about the coordination of volunteer labor, constraints, donations, points of connection, and contention, yielded useful quotes and memos for my analysis. In total, including all interviews, web responses, and participant observation, this article includes shared challenges and perspectives of about 50 organizations and about 12 nonprofessional volunteers in this investigation.
Analysis
The authors chose qualitative coding for our analysis, because it is the most appropriate method for a systematized understanding of meaning, context, narrative, and personal experience gleaned through interviews and participant observation. The research questions involve both disaster worker experiences and their feelings or reflections about these experiences. These questions necessitate methods that respect details such as respondent role, motivations, and prior experience.
Using Atlas.ti, a qualitative analysis program, the interviews, web responses, and participant observation notes were coded for thematic elements with a codebook developed from factors in categories such as individual role perception and agency or authority to complete a recovery-related task. The first-run descriptive codes, drawn from themes in the literature, include descriptive details such as organization type, task type, communication modes, inclusion, relationships, feelings, history, experience, success, and challenge.
Second-run coding generated the broader themes explored in this article: labor reporting protocol, speed and intake, disaster exacerbation, perceptions of coordination aversion, and communication challenges. 26 Coded segments were compiled and evaluated for thematic consistencies across challenges, resources, and organizations. These methods capture a process from the perspective of established, expanding, and emergent groups after the hurricane.
RESULTS
Findings from fieldwork cover specific postdisaster processes such as volunteer hours, federal match funding, volunteer intake, outreach and inclusion, communication, nonparticipation, and exacerbated crises. We organize findings across themes into two groupings: disaster professionals and nonprofessionals. Interviews revealed common spaces, times, and mechanisms where different actors could act in coordination or conflict with other groups. We later interpret reported experiences as they relate to community recovery.
Overall, the investigation revealed an uneven landscape of involvement based on the degree of disaster professionalism and reflections on hurricane history. Such histories impacted who certain actors felt were worth engaging versus whom they considered obstacles. This uneven landscape is reflected in immediate response work (federal hours match, intake, outreach) as well as the early stages of disaster recovery (communication challenges, exacerbated disaster, participation rates).
Registering hours and federal match
Federal regulation requires county jurisdictions to provide 25 percent of overall Public Assistance (P.A.) spending after declared disasters. Volunteer hours can be counted toward a county government's contribution in a process called “federal match.” This process enables more federal spending and the freeing up of public dollars for other projects. Given this process, accounting for volunteer hours becomes an important element of disaster recovery funding. This process is intended to aid localities in funding their disaster recovery and funnel unaffiliated volunteers into affiliated organizations. From the very start, E.M. agencies distinguish the value in the labor of different groups. The process of recording and registering volunteer hours came up repeatedly in interviews with disaster professionals.
When asked about how volunteer work relates to state-managed disaster recovery, professional respondents repeatedly referred to volunteers' potential to multiply the impact of their work through recording and reporting their hours. Conversely, they described disappointment with the potentially missed opportunity of unaffiliated volunteer labor. Almost every respondent conveyed multiple advantages and zero disadvantages associated with coordinating professional and nonprofessional efforts. In this endeavor, professional respondents cited the necessity of centrally located and directed volunteer intake, at volunteer reception centers (VRCs). The VRCs have the purpose of connecting volunteers with the formal process of recording and submitting their hours worked. Recording and reporting volunteer hours are considered necessary for several reasons; reporting can connect nonprofessional volunteers and their communities with resources on the disaster recovery process. The process can provide volunteers with protocol to mitigate accidents and can expand the community reach of the VRC. Two disaster professionals' perspective on the process of volunteer hour reporting exemplify the priority placed on this process:
“What we tried to do was get all these organizations to register their hours so we could turn this into the county [and assist the] county with pushing the dollar amounts that they need to meet for FEMA aid.” “One of the biggest outcomes besides volunteers being managed and supervised in a safe and effective way is being able to grab those volunteer hours and get those that match information. And if you're not doing that almost immediately you can't go back and get that.”
The critical role of responsibility of establishing VRCs was placed on counties, often supported by state and federal agents. Even with support from the state and federal government, each county jurisdiction has vastly different histories, budgetary constraints, and personnel capacities for adequate intake.
Volunteer intake
If respondents mentioned federal match, they were asked to more deeply describe the VRC process by which volunteers became affiliated. This process was fraught with factors related to community resources and planning. Disparate experiences were reported relating to the substantial difference in the amount of time that had passed before VRCs were set up. The VRCs themselves were meant to serve as a point of contact and vehicle to build trusting and communicative relationships between organizations. Respondents noted the speed and expansiveness of communication as a paramount factor of VRC success. Even within a narrow geography comprising several highly impacted counties, respondents reported wide variability in VRC setup and engagement. Despite the structure provided by standard operating procedures, established organizations faced challenges in achieving volunteer intake goals. When asked about this process, three disaster professionals in coordinator roles described procedures that varied across jurisdiction:
“We've seen many CERTs ([Community Emergency Response Teams]) across the state being trained and utilized to open up a volunteer Reception Center VRC… That's a place that we can direct the public to go sign up to volunteer and match them with those affiliated groups.” “I think there's probably a number of factors that are delving into this but VRCs, if they're not open almost immediately, you don't really have much of a chance of success with them working long term and they're pretty labor-intensive. They're pretty technical assistance intensive. There is some resourcing that has to happen for those to be done really well and not every community is going to have that.” “The VRC I don't think was really officially stood up until the middle of November. Prior to that all the management and distribution of volunteers and donations was done from the Emergency Operation Center.”
Even when a particular jurisdiction can efficiently mobilize a VRC or other resources in a timely, volunteer coordination challenges remain.
Outreach and inclusion for professionals
The endeavor of reaching unaffiliated volunteers looks different across the impacted geography. Communication about the location and services offered by VRCs can be unpredictable before a severe storm, due to a lack of clarity about available space, degree of damage, and infrastructural capacity in the immediate aftermath. This unpredictability meant that certain populations expressed feeling left out of the loop, particularly when important meetings were coordinated with invited community leaders. The unevenness of this process heightened the potential for feelings of distrust. Still, emergency managers made substantial efforts to disseminate information through traditional media, the internet, word-of-mouth, and other channels. When asked about how people and organizations were prioritized to participate in disaster recovery meetings with government officials, one disaster professional described the following:
The [community leader] was recruited by the county to be the community liaison… It was important that all these emergency workers from out of town had some local contacts and some local people that they could rely on to share information with them.
Emergency managers rely on pre-event social and professional networks, or stakeholders as proxies in many of their information dissemination efforts. This, foreseeably, presents situations similar to convenience sampling bias. When asked about this, disaster professionals reflected on varying degrees of inclusion, as well as their understanding of the challenges that emergency managers deal with when crafting holistically inclusive outreach strategies:
Honestly, local emergency management has to do a better job of communicating with their stakeholders—and the stakeholders in emergency management are everybody—and that's the problem. How do you talk to everybody? It's got to be John Smith the local emergency manager going out and talking to faith-based organizations locally… and if people come in we need to have them sign at our VRCs. But two years later, different pastors, different directors of the non-profit. It's continuous. It's a process. There's no end.
One widely espoused best practice in disaster recovery is the importance of relationships between local E.M. offices and residents, businesses, and local organizations.
27
This practice is understood to foster resident familiarity with E.M. processes and better attune emergency managers to the needs, concerns, and priorities of a wide variety of community members. It implies a certain level of trust in the primacy of state-led disaster recovery, something reflected in the responses of affiliated volunteer coordinators who were well connected with established actors immediately after the storm. When asked about people included in long-term disaster recovery meetings, one disaster professional shared that both he and a friend who was active in the local chamber of commerce were tapped to work alongside government officials:
[We'd all] known each other personally and had a personal friendship and have served on other boards for a long, long time… [and] I guess if you call him like the chief civilian during that time. So, when the county or anybody else the government had a need [for] information [and] wanted to get information to folks in the private community, [the Chamber person] was that connector.
When another disaster professional was asked about the sorts of people included in their highly coordinated group, they shared:
There's a fair amount of people that have been in public service paid public service positions who are either retired or are in semi-retirement. Some are ex-military, some are ex-EMT, some are ex-law enforcement, and some are ex-fire.
When probed on the reason it seemed that people of a particular background seemed to gravitate toward their organization, they quickly responded the necessity for helpers who worked in military and law enforcement because “[understanding] protocol actually helps calm things down.” They reported that these people understood being told what to do and easily plugged into command structures. In this context, highly specialized past lives of volunteers and new disaster colleagues generated a sense of trust between members of a specific segment of the disaster professional population. All involved people in his group either knew the local emergency managers directly or knew the nature of their work intimately enough to have seamless working relationships.
Outreach and inclusion for nonprofessionals
Some nonprofessionals found themselves grappling with feelings of being forgotten or disregarded by professional E.M. actors, such as government and nonprofits. I met one disaster nonprofessional, a local faith leader, at their house of worship in a very prominent part of town. Their largely immigrant congregation remained committed to attending weekly services in a nearby temporary structure, where I first asked them for an interview. During that interview, I asked about any form of contact they had with E.M. in the storm's wake. Because they were a prominent faith and community leader, I assumed they might have had some interesting experience with E.M. after the storm. They responded:
I was expecting some official efforts because I [worked] with [DHS & local E.M. actors]. Everybody, they know us very well—I have not received any calls. Nobody offered help. Nobody asked ‘How are you doing?’
They thought they had a relationship built on prior surveillance by and communication with disaster professionals. Frustrated with the lack of support they received from relationships he had nurtured before the event, however, they turned to more official means of securing information and aid. When prompted, the faith leader described the process of seeing public announcements about an Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tent setup where disaster survivors could go to get “resources.” On arrival, however, their efforts were met with a roadblock that generating heightened feelings of postdisaster betrayal at the hand of disaster professionals:
Everybody was kind of lost at this time—and unfortunately government wasn't there… I'm actually blaming some of it on them… It was a waste of time for me to drive all the way to them there. I was hoping that they could offer something substantial to people or help people apply. They would just throw some papers to you.
In cases such as these, disaster professionals have an opportunity to build increased trust with nonprofessionals outside of their networks. In this example, trust was eroded. As a result, particularly with a community leader they had a prior extractive relationship with, nonprofessionals develop a rationale for not engaging further. In instances such as this, the respondent did not choose to disengage. Instead, the actions of established actors prevented them and their congregation from contributing more to the state-managed recovery process.
Communication for professionals
Communication challenges exacerbated all frustrations. Cellular signal was poor, most buildings were destroyed, and repairs to communication infrastructure were being made. Professional respondents cited disruption of their primary and secondary modes of communication:
“Communication was as limited as could be. The telephones were out… You couldn't get a signal anywhere you had to drive out of the county and out of the area.” “We had to use two-way radio… Literally you're rolling into a disaster zone. There's nothing. I didn't have the ability [to communicate].”
Disaster professionals had resources or know-how to circumnavigate many postevent communication challenges. They generally were able to keep each other informed, especially for groups with prior coordination training, such as Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). The actual communication and coordination capacities of impacted county E.M. offices vary across jurisdictions. Some impacted counties featured teams with delegated roles, supported by outreach and communications staff, and the ability to disseminate information across broad stakeholder networks. The least resourced affected county had a single emergency manager, sometimes supported by an administrative assistant. During roundtable discussion, one county emergency manager pleaded for personnel assistance from volunteer organizations, in preparation of waning state and federal support in the months after the storm.
Communication for nonprofessionals
Nonprofessionals cited similar disruptions in communication as professionals. Nonprofessionals also pointed out that if they had access to the internet or their regular phone, their inboxes were often overwhelmed by the volume of communications that individuals engage in after a disaster, regarding their homes, insurance companies, loved ones, local organizations, and jobs. In the absence of the ability to regularly receive updates about community recovery developments, respondents often looked to emergency managers as responsible for overcoming these obstacles and finding ways to reach out for important recovery matters. Disaster nonprofessionals frequently cited the importance of transparent and open communication channels and the utility of actionable information from reliable disaster professionals. When these forms of coordination were lacking, as they were for a non-English-speaking cultural-religious minority, alternative channels were established.
[Our Whatsapp] group chat consists of the members of [our faith group]. It was set up by [one of our faith leaders], and I guess it was just the best way to communicate with everybody. Especially because cell service was very awful and at first it was more so just trying to make sure everybody was okay—and then people started adding everybody else and it just kind of became the source of communication between everyone in the community.
Although such nonprofessional communication channels aided community members in coordinating among themselves, they also ballooned into rumor mills and disinformation, further hindering collective engagement in the area's unified disaster recovery.
We had some more questions and people who knew the answers to them would provide them. But as for official people providing that information, no, we never really got that.
Overcoming such communication hurdles was often cited as a prioritized skill of a qualified emergency manager. In general, interview respondents also cited many different duties of an effective emergency manager, including coordination, planning, event facilitation, first response, and medical expertise.
Nonparticipation for professionals
Professionals expressed concern about deliberate nonprofessional nonparticipation in professionally led disaster recovery efforts. They were concerned about nonprofessionals, in essence, “doing their own thing.” When respondents discussed these subjects, it was often a conversation where perceived distrust of process affected how groups mobilized their efforts. Professional reflections on this issue ranged from groups deliberately opting out to people being ignorant of the full benefits of reporting their hours worked and connected with VRCs:
A lot of organizations and in this particular case a couple of church groups did not want to participate because they thought ‘No we're not here working for the government.’ Not realizing how often I tried explaining that by registering their hours they were not only helping Mrs. Jones or whoever they were individually they'd be helping the entire community. They wanted to do it by their rules certain their standards… They're not necessarily comprehending why the local jurisdiction wants it done a different way or in a different manner… They could be doing so much more good than they do by just going and doing good on their terms. A church in that local community could be a volunteer group that is doing amazing things for the community that's maybe not coordinated at an emergency management level. I think the average person doesn't understand the whole process and the coordination that happens. Too many of these organizations want to report up their own chain of command and assume it'll get back and it doesn't. They want to focus on doing good work and don't realize they could double it by playing with government.
During the roundtable discussion, just one professional identified barriers for nonprofessionals, claiming difficulty understanding and communicating proper protocol for reporting volunteer hours.
Nonparticipation for nonprofessionals
Nonprofessionals did not cite an intentional opting out of working under professional leadership. They provided an explanation based on a variety of circumstances ranging from ignorance to exclusion:
I think it's important to recognize that people right now are in a state of conflict deciding whether to stay or leave because it just seems like the progress isn't improving fast enough, and it's heartbreaking because [my community is] a very tight-knit community. It's not very big, so everyone knows each other. It kind of feels like we're giving up on the community by choosing to leave, but at the same time it's like what more can we do? These people have children and businesses and lives that they need to continue working for and moving forward. And it's heartbreaking to see that to the outside world, that doesn't matter. Because we're not seeing the improvement that we would like to see as fast as we would like to see it. This [work] was just led by our hearts' desire… we were not connected with larger churches or Christian organizations or any other organizations for that matter. And it was not prompted by all or led by any of the larger organizations or anything.
In other contexts, reasons for nonparticipation were rooted in protocol experiences. One nonprofessional respondent searched for a trusted professional to help her community group. When one could not be located, she mobilized human and financial resources on Twitter, funneling volunteer efforts into issues identified in their community-wide Whatsapp group, a platform for up to 250 people to message each other. In this 250-member, ethnicity-oriented community Whatsapp space, families expressed needs, communicated valuable information, shared resources, and processed and dispelled rumors. Many group members did not speak English and relied on hearsay from multilingual members to navigate the community postevent and strategically direct their volunteer efforts. The group accomplished this without outreach from official E.M. agencies, inspiring feelings of solidarity across community members, and a feeling of betrayal toward E.M. that did not consider them a priority. Perhaps most importantly, this nonprofessional group did not deliberately opt out of a recovery process directed by the state.
Web respondents cited a lack of knowledge about any official process, with only one project respondent in total stating they were explicitly uninterested in coordinating their work with government agencies. One nonprofessional with a prior surveillance-centric relationship with county government attempted to register hours but found themselves frustrated by a bureaucratic breakdown and subsequently made no future attempts through such channels:
I was expecting some official efforts because I work with the FBI guys, [they] know me. I work with them. The local sheriff department [and others] know us very well. I have not received any calls. Nobody offered help. Nobody asked how are you doing—how can we help you or anything like that. It was only FEMA several weeks after they extend an invitation to us and it was kind of a formal event that they said “Well these are the websites you can apply for help and your place of worship can apply for help.” It's okay but I was expecting the government to be more concerned for the people themselves. I drove first thing in the morning—they said they were going to be open at 8 and I was there at 8. They were not ready. They didn't have any access—there was no computer—they said the computers were coming later—coming later! There was a huge long line of people and they were all just frustrated—that happened like two weeks after the disaster.
In general, respondents connected their intentions to participate in particular processes with a set of experiences associated with attempts. Multiple interview respondents reported nonparticipation after attempts through professional-managed channels.
Exacerbated crises for professionals
Exacerbating crises was one of the primary reasons that disaster professionals cited for not trusting the work of nonprofessionals who worked outside of managed processes. This phenomenon arose only in interviews with professionals and was a central concern. Many emergency managers and professional volunteer coordinators presented early career stories of emergent, unnamed volunteer groups, making a situation worse and generating heightened distrust. These narratives were cited meaningful even long after the disaster in which they arose—informing approaches and attitudes in the next disaster. The stakes can be high for communities where emergent groups of nonprofessionals carry out work without professional coordination, with repercussions for survivor-residents. In one instance, a professional respondent described a deliberately resistant nonprofessional determined to carry out their intended form of service, despite a mismatch with their target community's needs:
A guy came down with a trailer of boxes that his neighborhood had gathered for this affected community. It was clothes… well we didn't need clothes. So I asked him to please take it back. We appreciate their assistance but donating money to organized, recognized non-profits that are assisting the area would be better. He turned the corner, dropped everything off at a tennis court. The next morning, we walked over and people were rifling through his boxes and complaining about it. That was the creation of a secondary disaster and now we have to clean all this up.
Multiple respondents referred to Crisis Cleanup, a web portal where disaster-impacted residents can match their needs (in the form of “jobs”) with willing volunteers who can claim and complete jobs. Disaster nonprofessionals, sometimes unaware of the process of reporting, claiming work, and marking it complete, caused frustration for professional organizations. Professionals often sank time into preparing, gathering supplies, personnel, and travel to Crisis Cleanup worksites. The resource loss can be substantial in these instances, given the lengthened travel time requirements when road infrastructure was blocked or damaged. Without prompting, respondents shared their frustrations with this process:
I'm not going to name any names, but there are some organizations that go in and grab information from Crisis Cleanup and go out and do the work and then do plan it, don't update information, and don't close it. Then that makes it harder for the other people. One of the failings or the challenges that people had [was] people [going] into places on the website finding that somebody had already been there and had taken care of [the job].
Their experiences represent unintentional sabotage resulting from a lack of participation on a platform built by professionals. In these instances, frustration was diffuse, as there is no obvious person to blame beyond the unnamed, uncoordinated, nonprofessional person or group. Such discouraging conflicts add to the narratives some have about nonprofessional actors. Nonprofessionals made no mention of exacerbated crises.
DISCUSSION
These findings enable us to attend to our original research questions in reverse order: What are the environmental justice implications of these perceptions and relationships we have explored? How might the relationship between these two groups impact a community's future? What do these experiences imply about the role of E.M. professionals managing the process? How do disaster professionals and nonprofessionals perceive the role of their work in the same disaster context? Our reflections span the systemic and demographic factors, expectations of individuals and agencies, disaster traps and negative feedback loops, the impotence of reflection and narrative, and the emergency manager as a gatekeeper.
The question of environmental justice implications becomes clear when we consider local and regional disaster recovery and the production of vulnerable communities through a potential negative feedback loop spurred by disparate ability to volunteer or participate in a managed recovery process. Except for Calhoun County, the inland regions of the study geography are measurably poorer than the coastal towns and cities. The contrast is as sharp as Mexico Beach, which was entirely destroyed by Hurricane Michael, with 3% of residents under the poverty line compared with parts of inland Jackson County with more than 20% of residents living in poverty. Racial distribution for these same two geographies is unsurprising, with about 9% of residents in Mexico Beach being Black compared with more than 60% for a region of inland Jackson County. Education levels are distributed predictably along the lines drawn by racial and class disparity. 28 With these facts in mind, if we understand volunteerism to be positively associated with income, and more closely statistically associated with whiteness and higher levels of education, we can surmise how different parts of the region might have disparate rates of participation in formal, professional-led volunteer opportunities. 29 This furnishes our understanding of disaster professional capacity expectations after Hurricane Michael.
We can begin to understand how these relationships might impact a community's future as investigation reveals the anti-Black macro relationships between wealth, whiteness, and volunteering and the nascent issues identified in our study of Hurricane Michael. Wealthier, whiter regions have instances where disaster professionals can insularly engage people with backgrounds in fields with white overrepresentation, such as E.M. and law enforcement. These areas can also tend to have bigger E.M. departments that can coordinate more. Suppose the experiences of respondents of this study serve as an entry point to understanding how disparity in process is maintained. If this is the case, we can see how such patterns could produce a landscape where already-wealthy areas can facilitate favorable professional and nonprofessional involvement alike, with more resources to guide all residents and volunteers in engaging a managed disaster recovery process. Conversely, we can see how all these factors could be hindrances to poorer, Blacker counties where engagement may look different than an emergency manager engaging their veteran first responder peer group and where residents have the personal stability to engage in volunteering, thereby facilitating increased federal match amounts. More than dollar amounts themselves, these differences mean that the timeline and nature of recovery are qualitatively different across jurisdictions hit by the same disaster. If a community is unable to holistically recover from one disaster, in a hurricane-prone region such as the Florida Gulf Coast, it is reasonable to see how this process produces a negative feedback loop where poverty and limited engagement encumbers communities with increasingly difficult recovery processes with each passing storm. This process is by design and has nothing to do with any inherent quality of hurricane events.
Experiences catalogued in our findings demonstrate that nonprofessional perceptions of the roles, responsibilities, and skillsets of emergency managers span multiple professions. Respondents referred to emergency managers as public information officers, firefighters, meeting facilitators, police, crisis counselors, event planners, and project managers. When an emergency manager was not proficient in one of these roles, often due to lack of resources and capacity, the community often expressed frustration. In lower-funded jurisdictions, emergency managers may also work other jobs, splitting their time between roles and potentially affecting their capacity to effectively make the predisaster stakeholder connections necessary for wide-reaching inclusion postdisaster. We see problems identified historically persisting today. “Money, of course, is always a problem. Large cities and counties have more money… Most emergency managers are technically qualified in emergency-related areas… but they are less able to handle the increasingly sophisticated demands of budgeting, personnel management, program development, and administration.” 30 Such a range of sophisticated demands were reflected in discussions in the field. Disparate capacity to meet such demands was most embodied by the emergency manager from a poorer inland county begging for assistance.
Finally, the question of how professionals and nonprofessionals perceive the role of their work in the same disaster context deeply involves personal memory and narrative. Individual stories that disaster professionals reflect on seem important for the lens through which they assess the current disaster. Despite professional respondents bringing up nonprofessional volunteers' deliberate nonparticipation many times, it was barely mentioned in my interviews with nonprofessionals themselves. That is not to say the sentiment does not exist within this group of postdisaster actors. Instead, we could reframe nonparticipation arising from a particular set of experiences along a timeline rather than an initial guiding intention in and of itself. The reported experience of a nonprofessional leaving boxes of clothes to waste away and be a burden on locals revealed a problem of the absence of a system to direct the resource available to a different population who may have been in need. The result of this mismatch was a new distrust for nonprofessionals and a narrative of betrayal that the professional respondent carried into new disaster work settings. In this regard, professional respondents adopted narratives that did not have much room to include genuine attempt, followed by difficulty, exclusion, and lack of awareness (or any combination of these factors) as a reason for nonparticipation in hours-reporting and the state-managed disaster recovery process. If we are to better equip our communities with the tools necessary for eliminating disaster as a phenomenon, our efforts would be aided by repeated reminders to look toward how we construct our processes for engagement.
CONCLUSION
This project is a first step toward exploring the connection between postdisaster norms and practices and disparate long-term trajectories for communities that experience the same hazard. Under present conditions, disaster professionals are gatekeepers for resources that can beget more resources. A staff of one spread too-thin potentially renders the emergency manager incapable of succeeding at their perceived roles. Professionals, particularly those embedded in state agencies, have the institutional agency to prioritize engaging diverse nonprofessional groups toward holistic community recovery. Despite this, nonprofessional groups are sometimes considered a hassle. Reaching out to them demands increasingly diverse modes of communication, an approach that proves to be organizationally challenging to disaster professionals. 31 Such perspectives routinely neglect to consider the power dynamic created in contexts where skilled, but under-resourced, E.M. agencies depend on local nonprofessional volunteer activity. The consequences of this lack of capacity were felt by affiliated and unaffiliated volunteers alike, with potential negative ripples in the federal P.A. funds available, county budgets, and disaster recovery progress for years to come.
Our findings can inform conversations along the Gulf Coast, as the geography is virtually guaranteed to experience a similar hurricane event in the future. For these reasons, this work highlights the conditions of challenges that are likely to appear again, providing the groundwork for a further up-scaled study of volunteer network experiences, yielding potential policy recommendations. Future investigations can include quantitative exploration of volunteer labor and acquired funds, once those data are made publicly available for all impacted geographies.
Footnotes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are due to Amy Glasmeier, Erica James, Ronnie Williams, R. Shawn Abrahams, Shai Andrew Garcia, Steve Galette, Eric Brown, and communities across the Florida Panhandle.
AUTHOR DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors have no conflicts of interest or financial ties to disclose.
FUNDING INFORMATION
This research was funded by a grant from the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Center through its Quick Response Grant Program, which is funded by National Science Foundation grant number CMMI1635593.