Calling The Dead: Resilience In The WTC Communication Networks

TL;DR

This study models how emergency response organizations adapt their communication networks after personnel losses, highlighting the impact of removing key individuals and the organizations' resilience strategies.

Contribution

It provides empirically calibrated models analyzing communication network resilience and adaptation in disaster response organizations after personnel removal.

Findings

Removing key personnel impairs communication and coordination.

Organizations adapt by reorganizing, sometimes improving connectivity.

Specialist responders are slower to adapt to losses.

Abstract

Organizations in emergency settings must cope with various sources of disruption, most notably personnel loss. Death, incapacitation, or isolation of individuals within an organizational communication network can impair information passing, coordination, and connectivity, and may drive maladaptive responses such as repeated attempts to contact lost personnel (``calling the dead'') that themselves consume scarce resources. At the same time, organizations may respond to such disruption by reorganizing to restore function, a behavior that is fundamental to organizational resilience. Here, we use empirically calibrated models of communication for 17 groups of responders to the World Trade Center Disaster to examine the impact of exogenous removal of personnel on communication activity and network resilience. We find that removal of high-degree personnel and those in institutionally coordinative roles is particularly damaging to these organizations, with specialist responders being slower to adapt to losses. However, all organizations show adaptations to disruption, in some cases becoming better connected and making more complete use of personnel relative to control after experiencing losses.