This post was originally published by the National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
Twenty-five years after September 11th, 2001, it is still difficult to contemplate what happened without first thinking about the people. The firefighters and police officers who ran toward the World Trade Center, the emergency managers and health professionals trying to make sense of an unconceivable situation, the transit workers helping people evacuate Lower Manhattan, and the countless New Yorkers who simply tried to help one another are part of the city’s history. For those of us who work in the disaster risk management sector, September 11th is also a marker in the history of how we prepare, respond, and recover. The attacks exposed serious weaknesses in information sharing and coordination, but they also demonstrated an aspect of equal importance: when a disaster overwhelms an entire system, disaster survivors and organizations need to find ways to collaborate that may not have existed before the disaster began.
One of the most distinct ways to understand how dramatically the field has changed is to consider the technical tools emergency managers had available to them in 2001. New York City was already using geographic information systems (GIS), and these digital maps became enormously valuable during the response and recovery. However, transferring large digital files across networked systems was constrained by limited bandwidth, slower network speeds, and substantially less mature data infrastructure than emergency responders have access to today. Internet capacity was so limited that critical GIS disk drives had to be delivered daily by state troopers from offices in Albany to New York City so they could be used in the response. There were no smartphones, no social media, and no cloud-based systems through which responders could immediately share information or communicate with the public. Today, satellite imagery, digital maps, mobile communications, real-time data and increasingly sophisticated analytical tools are so commonplace that it can be easy to forget how innovative and useful they would have seemed on September 11th.
The communications problems that morning were not simply a matter of having cumbersome technology tools. The destruction of infrastructure in Lower Manhattan, combined with the extraordinary volume of people trying to communicate, overwhelmed telephone, cellular, and radio systems. Responders lost contact with colleagues and leadership and, critically, did not always have the information they needed about what was happening inside the towers. In the middle of an emergency, information can be as critical as any physical resource, yet it only becomes useful when it can move between people and organizations. This lesson helped change emergency management for the better. Since September 11th, New York City and other jurisdictions have invested heavily in interoperable communications, emergency operations centers, GIS, mass notification, mutual aid, regional planning, and training programs that bring agencies together to practice before a disaster occurs. We have become much more aware that a major disaster in New York is never the responsibility of a single agency.
Perhaps the most important change, however, has been cultural. Emergency management has become much more focused on relationships among organizations and on the ability to adapt to emergent events. The people responding to September 11th were not unprepared; many were among the most highly trained public safety professionals in the U.S. Instead, they were confronting something for which there was no precedent. The lesson was not that planning had failed, but that no plan can anticipate every scenario. Good preparedness therefore means creating organizations that can recognize when their assumptions are wrong, share information quickly, request assistance, and adapt. Contemporary training exercises are most valuable when they expose those unnerving moments when a plan breaks down, and responders have to figure out together what to do next.
A new generation of leaders has also developed professionally in the years since September 11th. Many of today’s emergency managers, public safety officials, hospital managers and disaster researchers began their careers around that time or were shaped by its aftermath. They have subsequently dealt with hurricanes, floods, wildfires, pandemics, infrastructure failures and other emergencies that have reinforced the same primary lesson: disasters cross boundaries. A hospital may depend on the electric grid; a transit system may determine whether people can reach safety; a private company may control infrastructure essential to public response; and community organizations may know things that government agencies cannot fathom from an emergency operations center. The strongest response is therefore rarely about one institution having all the answers. It is about people knowing whom to call, trusting one another, and being willing to share what they know.
We should be proud of how far this evolution has taken us, but we should also be cautious to assume that progress means we are prepared for everything. That’s far from true. The U.S. remains vulnerable to unprecedented disasters that could overwhelm the systems we have built, and preparedness requires sustained attention even when the immediate crisis has passed. Changes in federal priorities, programs and policies can also create uncertainty for state, local, Tribal, and territorial emergency managers who are trying to plan years ahead. At the same time, technology is moving faster than many of our public institutions. Artificial intelligence, remote sensing, automated damage assessments and predictive modeling may dramatically improve our ability to understand a disaster as it unfolds, but such digital tools cannot replace leadership or trust. A sophisticated system is of limited value if the people who need to use it do not adequately communicate with one another.
Twenty-five years later, I think that is one of the most important lessons we should carry forward. We cannot know what the next catastrophic event will look like, and the technologies available to us in another 25 years may be difficult to imagine today. What we can do is continue learning from experience, investing in systems that let credible information flow freely, and developing leaders who know how to collaborate and build relationships before they are needed. The greatest homage to the people who responded on September 11th is not to just remember what they did that day. It is to use what we learned from their experience to make the next response more effective. New York City has spent 25 years doing exactly that, and the work is not finished.
Thomas Chandler is a senior research scientist and the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.
