Part I: Observing and Documenting the Inter-Organizational Response to the September 11th Attack on the Pentagon
The George Washington University
1. Introduction
On September 11, the United States (U.S.) suffered its greatest civilian mass casualty event since the Texas City Explosions/Fires of 1947 (581 deaths, 3,500 injuries). The death toll of the attacks approached the casualty toll of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the most catastrophic natural disaster in U.S. history. First response, emergency management, emergency medicine, and military organizations responded heroically and effectively. These attacks have, however, exposed as myth the idea that somehow the U.S. will remain immune to mass casualty disasters and that the U.S. emergency medical, emergency response, and emergency management systems will not have to deal with tragedies on the scale experienced in less developed countries.
Coordinating complex organizational systems that are rapidly created in response to an event such as the World Trade Center (WTC) collapse and the Pentagon attack is incredibly difficult. After the September 11 attacks, the U.S. experienced its first use of the Terrorism Annex to the Federal Response Plan (FRP) and the U.S. Government Interagency Domestic Terrorism Concept of Operations Plan (CONPLAN, 2001) to provide large scale integration of emergency management, emergency medical, law enforcement, and military resources. Ensuring that these meta-organizations will function effectively has not been well described, including how best to manage them, how to effectively use technology to support their decision processes, how to manage information in such a turbulent environment, and how to retain the organizational knowledge of the incident response successes and failures.
The objective of this project was to identify management (including information management) and coordination issues that arose in this response and to document how the emergency management system designed for response to natural and technological hazards was used to respond to terrorist attacks. Most but not all of these goals were attained.
Early in this project, it became apparent that there were not sufficient resources and time for detailed examination of the on-scene response to both attacks. The focus of the research became the response to the Pentagon attack and the mobilization of federal resources to support both the Pentagon and World Trade Center responses, while drawing parallels with events and problems for the New York City response. This approach was selected for three reasons. First, The World Trade Center response was exceptionally large with many confounding variables, including the loss of the primary emergency operations center (EOC) and the use of two subsequent EOCs. The scope of an adequate interview investigation would have been far too large for the time frame and budget support of this project. Additionally, the World Trade Center response was examined in a parallel NSF funded project (using different methodology) by the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center. Second, GW’s geographic location provided ready access to federal and local emergency managers in Washington, D.C. Third, and most importantly, the Pentagon response was a complex, unique, and effective coordination of local, state, and federal resources that deserved a focused examination and documentation. The mobilization of federal resources in support of both the Pentagon response and the World Trade Center response is described in the timeline developed in Appendix 1. The University of Pittsburgh, as part of this project, performed a related analysis of organizational relationships, communications, and organizational adaptation based on the print media and situation reports. This analysis, which provides insight into the complexity of the World Trade Center response, is presented in Part II of this report.
