A Study On The Mechanism Of Reliability Of Incident Response To Unconventional Emergency

As the core phase of emergency management, emergency response plays a vital role in that the result of emergency response to unconventional emergency(extrem events) always determines the loss caused by them. The research on emergency response effectiveness or performance assessment so far has got great attention from both the academic circle and practoionars in other countries. During the Hurricane Katrinan hit the southern part of U.S. in2005, the failure of government response to the catastrophic disaster was harshly criticized by the public and some scholars,which ended up with reflection of Incident Command System,the tool used as de facto standard and viewd as Panacea in America. Such reexamination has already yeilded many research results in Western countries, however, little research in China focus on the topic of reliable reponse to unconventional emergencies. In August2009,the National Natural Science Foundation of China launched the key program of unconventional emergency management,and since then a lot of Chinese scholars began to do a series of research on related topics,but it’s still a long way to go when talking about putting these research findings into pratice and making the reponse more reliable.Presently the stark reality that our government of all levels lacking the capacity to deal with the unconventional emergencies exerts influence on the missions’accomplishment of emergency response. It’s not rare to see many command or response failures centered on Incident Commad System during the response process, including the problems or malfunction in organization structure, authorization, hand-over, coordination and collaboration and the likes. Therefore, a reliability management problem comfronted with the Incident Commad System that how to better manage resources and effectively coordinate responders to achive resecure goals in limited time under the pressure of fast-changing scenarios. This is not only what the practical area needs to resolve, but also the research gap for scholars in this discipline to make up for.After getting clear about the research background as well as research aims, the athour puts forward three research questions and tries to explore in this dissertation,and they are (1) What are the most frequently happened coammand failures during the response to the unconventional emergencies? What are the enabling factors leading to these failures and the failure models?(2)What are the main factors impacting on the resluts or performance of emegency response in both catastrophe disasters and large scale incidents?(3) How do the main factors affect the response reliability of Incident Commad System?And what is the mechanism? In order to meet these questions, on the foundation of summerizaing the demestic and international research results on key factors and developing mechanism on emergency repsonse, a questionnaire(suvey) of more the200governmental officials within emergency management departments had been done in demestic and aborad. The author still adopts some other research methods such as reference research,typical case study, interview,comparative analysis,classical statistic analysis as well as Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) in the dissertation.The main points of this innovative study are detailed as following:Firstly, by reviewing and analyzing the response process to four cases of recent years in China, this dissertation discusses the real situation of Incident Commad System in China nowadays, presents the most frequently happened command failures in response phase of such kind of emergencies, and explores the immediate reasons and deep roots of these failures. This paper finally indicates three basic failure models of emergency response in large scale disasters and incidents.Secondly, based on the reviewing and summary of enabling factors of emergency response or the response performance, this dissertation proposes the conceptual frame of theory hypothesis and mechanism modeling of the reponse reliability of unconvetional emergencies from the perspective of Incident Commad System or organizational dimension to put simply. And the author carries on a questionnaire investigation through convenience sampling in China and random sampling in U.S., and executes the statistical anaylsis to the data with SEM software (Amos) and statistical software (SPSS). The results of empirical study indicate that, the coordination capability, the collaboration capability and the communication capability are remarkably impacting on the response reliability of organization system(Incident Commad System), meanwhile, the coordination capability, the collaboration capability and the communication capability are affected by the organization structure, organization operation mechanism, organization culture and organization leadership. In order to raise the reponse reliability of unconventional emergencies, we can improve the organization structure, organization operation mechanism, and organization culture and organization leadership. The results of SEM still show improving the communication capability of Incident Commad System or response networks is the most important demention regarding to the improvement of response capacity or reliability.Thirdly, based on the mechanism analysis, four key methods of promoting the reliability of emergency response in catastrophe are discussed. Combined the empirical study results and interview materials, the methods are listed as follows:(1) to build the incident command system and mechanism with discipline and agility;(2) to cultivate the organizational culture with openness and innovatoion within the organization system;(3)to improve the commanders’(leaders’) capacity to handel the unconventional emergencies and major incidents;(4) to change the traditional way of thinking about emergency management which attaching more importance to emergency response instead of emergency preparedness.