Peering Beyond the Storm: Emergency Manager Decision-making During Severe Weather

How do emergency managers (EMs) make decisions when severe weather is bearing down on a vulnerable population? EMs serve as an essential link between meteorologists and the public during inclement weather conditions, performing a variety of duties from sounding sirens to evacuating towns. They must understand and relay large amounts of complex information in a domain of science that lacks standardization. Existing research has focused on modeling emergency management decision making through the application of individual psychological decision-making models. These models, however, tend to lack specificity, neglect interpersonal communication, and fail to capture the uniqueness a severe weather scenario can present. This research sought to investigate emergency manager decision making during severe weather and identify aspects of the EM decision-making process that the conceptual model developed by Baumgart et al. (2008) did not capture. Using version 1.7.1 of NVivo, a popular qualitative analysis software, 16 transcripts, comprised of emergency managers, National Weather Service officials, and first responders were qualitatively coded using the emergency manager decision-making model presented in Baumgart et al. (2008) as a deductive framework. The interviews were collected in early 2022 by the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL)/Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO), a few months after the December 10th-11th, 2021 tornado event across the Ohio River Valley. CIWRO then transcribed the interviews in the months leading up to the summer of 2022; the transcripts were then provided for this study as a secondary data source, with personally identifiable information redacted, during Summer 2022. The findings of this study concur with the existing knowledge that emergency management as a field lacks standardization. Furthermore, EMs strive to make socially competent decisions during severe weather based on prior experience and the resources they have available, and preparedness is the most salient factor EM decision-making models fail to capture.