9/11: 15 years onCommand under attack: What we’ve learned since 9/11 about managing crises

By Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, Arnold M. Howitt, Christine Cole, and Joseph W. Pfeifer

Published 14 September 2016

Major disasters pose difficult challenges for responders on the ground and for higher-level officials trying to direct operations. Some events are novel because of their scale, while others involve challenges that no one may ever have envisioned. Communities need to bring their response agencies together regularly to plan and practice. This can develop and maintain knowledge and relationships that will enable them to work together effectively under the high stress of a future attack or disaster. Any community can do this, but many have not. Where training and practice have taken place, these tools have worked. They can be improved, but the most important priority is getting more communities to practice using them more regularly, before the next disaster. One important way this nation can honor the victims of 9/11 is by using these lessons to create the conditions for even better coordination in future events.

The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 was the largest coordinated, multi-site international act of terror ever carried out on U.S. soil. Almost 3,000 people died, many others were injured and property damage ran into tens of billions of dollars.

Many people acted heroically at both attack sites. In New York, firefighters climbed staircases inside the World Trade Center towers even as damage from fires on upper floors threatened the integrity of the buildings and eventually caused them to collapse. At the Pentagon, military personnel, civilian employees and first responders entered the still-burning impact area to help people who had been injured.

Unfortunately, these efforts were not as coordinated or effective as they could have been.

At the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Crisis Leadership, we work to help societies prepare for and respond to catastrophes, from accidents and natural disasters to terrorist attacks. Since 9/11, government agencies have developed new tools for organizing collaborative responses to novel large-scale emergencies. We believe that these new techniques are making a difference, and that many more agencies – especially at the state and local levels — should be using them.

The challenges of large-scale emergencies
Major disasters pose difficult challenges for responders on the ground and for higher-level officials trying to direct operations. Some events are novel because of their scale — for example, flooding throughout New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Others involve challenges that no one may ever have envisioned, such as terrorists using commercial aircraft as weapons. Almost inevitably, no single agency has all of the capabilities needed to respond, so many agencies need to be deployed and coordinated. Often it is hard for officials to understand what is happening, both because the situation is unusual and because conditions are evolving.

What makes for an effective response? First, agencies develop an array of capabilities in advance: They craft plans, design procedures, procure equipment, train responders and leaders, and practice carrying out operations. Second, they develop methods for rapidly designing response efforts that can adapt to novel events. Third, they organize and coordinate response actions in real time to manage the deployment of resources.