Abstract
James Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf’s American Dunkirk. The Waterborne Evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11 reports on multi-year research into the response to the terrorist attack in New York City on September 11, 2001, focusing on the waterborne evacuation of Manhattan performed by ordinary people—members of civil society, mostly mariners who had their boats in harbors around the stricken area, and other volunteers. It was a massive evacuation of up to half a million affected people. There was an unprecedented collective understanding of the situation, a spontaneous convergence on the affected area, prompt mobilization of knowledge, skills, and resources at hand, and consequently an efficient response to the evacuation imperative.
The response was not planned—it was spontaneous and improvised—but it had its internal logic of development, concurrently stimulating other actors (bus drivers, restaurant owners, bicycle couriers) to join the effort and widen the activities (evacuation of people out of the area and bringing emergency workers and supplies in). The informal response was joined and supported by formal institutions and organizations as well. The study proves once again that social and physical systems that are affected in a crisis at the same time represent our resilience, response, and recovery potential. The latter was efficiently used in this particular case, and nobody saw lay helpers as an impediment to the work of qualified responders; nor was there a need to centralize the response or provide greater military involvement, as occurred in several past crises.
Although the authors do not underestimate the role of planning and preparedness in crisis management, they emphasize the importance of improvisation based on latent capacities in our own communities. The immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack offered a large-scale, decentralized, emergent, grassroots effort to help survivors across the New York metropolitan area.
The authors started field research in New York two days after the terrorist attack. They returned to the city a year later to conduct in-depth interviews with more than sixty key responders and decision-makers. They learned about cases of successful improvisation of response to the crisis, one of them being boat evacuation, during the research. The analysis of the latter started in 2005, and more than a hundred people involved directly or indirectly in the evacuation were interviewed. Researchers visited key places and did a content analysis of related documents, videotapes, photographs, articles, news stories, and e-mails to grasp the entire picture. The researchers are cognizant of the fact that the picture would be sharper if they had been able to interview those mariners who didn’t choose to participate in the evacuation and the affected people who were evacuated. Nevertheless, the empirical part of the research is very rich.
The authors warn readers about the extent of the civil society response to the 9/11 crisis that is less known to the public. They managed to successfully place the findings of their Manhattan evacuation analysis in the context of various theoretical arguments and to compare their findings to existing data. They confirm existing knowledge and broaden it with new conclusions and generalizations. For instance, the authors emphasize the importance of self-organization, improvisation, and coordination between government agencies, private companies, and individual citizens. Extreme environmental stress required the actors to create new relationships, suspend existing procedures, develop new procedures, and make decisions regarding ambiguous information.
Concurrently, the authors dissolved some of the usual myths for describing disasters: the panic myth, the myth of extended criminal activity on the disaster site, the myth of overwhelming stress that prevents people from doing anything useful and forces them to passively sit and wait for help. On the contrary, people displayed no panic behavior during the evacuation; they initiated response activities relatively quickly, they started to help each other, and the level of stress was not so high that it paralyzed them. Although they experienced a normalcy bias for the moment, and despite the fact theydidn’t know the “big picture,” people managed to make a creative response to thesituation and demonstrated community resilience. There was no “administrative regression” of avoiding responsibilities recorded—quite the opposite: even many of those unauthorized joined the response. A sense of shared risk enabled various groups and individuals to work together and meet common needs.
Not only do the authors make a valuable contribution to the field of disaster management as a scientific discipline, but they also make several well-grounded criticisms of U.S. disaster management structures and programs, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Incident Management System, and the Incident Command System (ICS). The authors see the ICS as an external system that imposes actions from the outside on the local community. It is centralized and hierarchical, and it emphasizes command. The authors offer “management based upon coordination by noninterference, or a redefinition of disaster activities as allied modules rather than a holistic connected network” (p. 139). The authors do not fetishize planning documents but appreciate planning as a process. Creative improvisation is desired, but preconditions should be fulfilled: a strong local network and sense of community, deep local knowledge, and flexibility with existing rules and procedures.
The authors addressed some conceptual problems, too. Emergency, disaster, and catastrophe are the three categories in the authors’ basic classification of events that mean danger for society and a severe disruption of its physical and social structures. The 9/11 terrorist attack is predominantly referred to by the authors as a “disaster.” They also could have chosen “crisis,” the term that is broader than disaster and covers armed conflicts; terrorist attacks; man-made, natural, and technical disasters; environmental problems; severe humanitarian situations; riots; mass migrations; cyber-attacks; and so forth. This proposal doesn’t much help to resolve the preexisting “semantic jungle” in the field: disaster, accident, incident, hazard, risk, emergency, crisis, contingency, catastrophe, calamity, cataclysm.
The authors’ holistic approach that combines theoretical reflections, empirical findings, and practical advice is extremely valuable. The discourse of the book is predominantly analytical, but theoretical and prescriptive as well. However, the prescription is cautious and doesn’t neglect special circumstances that lead to the conclusions of the analysis. The latter could be understood as a problem-solving approach that is the added value of the book, and this will be appreciated by scholars and practitioners who like to see theoretical assumptions empirically proved and transformed into practical advice. Last but not least, the findings offered by Kendra and Wachtendorf in their analysis of the waterborne evacuation of Manhattan could stimulate citizens to develop an awareness of what their own capacities would be in a time of crisis, to think about their potential role and get prepared for it rather than only waiting for the help offered by institutions and organizations, which are too often overwhelmed by the consequences of crisis and are even among its victims.