[Column] Lessons learned in disaster management

It is time for the country to accept its lack of ability to deal with a disaster and improve that ability across the board before it is too late.

Kim Sun-hye

The author is a lawyer andformer standing member of the special investigationcommittee on the Sewol ferry sinking. In the Sewol ferry tragedy in 2014, a total of 304 passengers, including 250 high school students on a field trip to Jeju, died. In the deadly crowd crush in Itaewon eight years later, 158 people, mostly those in their 20s and 30s, died. Two months after the unfathomable tragedy in Itaewon, many people recollect the painful memories of the Sewol ferry disaster eight years ago.

The ferry sank after the operator reduced water equilibrium to overload freight, which is against the law. But the Korean Coast Guard dillydallied for a while and failed to rescue passengers stuck in the slowly submerging ship. In the Itaewon disaster, the police failed to respond quickly even after receiving many emergency calls from people on the spot to warn about the gruesome possibility of the crowd being crushed to death. The police may have miscalculated the likelihood of a fatal crowd crush. But a poor system to prepare for — and deal with — disasters was a decisive factor in raising the death toll.

As a standing member of the special investigation committee on the Sewol ferry disaster, I had a chance to visit several disaster management institutions in the United States in June, 2016 with other members of the committee and learn how they prepare for massive disasters and effectively respond to them. I would recommend some ways to improve our response based on the experience in the United States

What attracted our attention from the beginning was the Institute for Crisis, Emergency, and Risk Management (CERM) at George Washington University. CERM was serving as a think tank on large-scale accidents involving a number of deaths and injuries. The graduate education program focused on how to identify the victims, how to help families with loss, how to train disaster management personnel and how to manage volunteers. The program recorded its past experiences systematically and analyzed the results to help find substantial guidelines on disaster management. I thought Korea could learn from the effective program of the university.

We also visited the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Emergency Management Institute (EMI) both under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In particular, the way the EMI educates and trains students was impressive, as it included courses for in-house education, including by video, and various types of onsite disaster education. When it comes to the in-house education aimed for federal and local government employees, the instructors at the institute trained them to methodically brace for a possible disaster happening in their own neighborhood on the map.

The teachers then instructed them to devise detailed plans to deal with an emergency situation by group, debate on their plans and evaluate their countermeasures among themselves. The process aimed to encourage participants to find better solutions by themselves through heated debates by group. The moment has come for Korea to concentrate on educating and training involved parties to elevate their ability to prepare for — and respond to — a sudden disaster that can have an extensive impact on their lives.

We moved on to Baltimore and New York to find out how local governments respond to disasters. The two cities have been conducting regular exercises to cope with an emergency by establishing a cooperative system among related agencies in advance and clearing some blurry boundaries of their jobs. The two cities set up a 24/7 emergency call system along with a monthly meeting and quarterly drill of volunteers from local communities.

The capability of local residents to proactively respond to a disaster cannot be acquired overnight. It is only possible when local governments educate and train them in advance. In the U.S., the leader of rescue operations on the site of disasters is the so-called Incidence Commander (IC) stipulated in the Incident Command System (ICS). Local governments mandate their staff to receive education and training on the ICS.

Korea should introduce a system in which working-level officials on the spot can have more composure to deal with an emergency on their own and report the developments to senior officials. They can hand over command to senior officials when they arrive with reinforcements. That can help cut the time needed to report the developments through a chain of command.

An ability to cope with disasters, particularly ones involving many lives, can be a measurement to determine the fundamentals of a country. That ability cannot be nurtured overnight. It is time for the country to accept its lack of ability to deal with a disaster and improve that ability across the board before it is too late.