9/11: Organizations detecting novel crises

This paper studies the detection of novel crises in the context of emergency management. Theoretical models (e.g. Billings et al. 1980; Cowan 1986) represent crises recognition as a function of cumulated cue discrepancy. The paper analyzes the response of 9-1-1 emergency system at the time of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001; the data set consists of 356 phone calls to the 9-1-1 emergency number, registered during the 102 minutes encompassed between the first attack to the WTC and the second collapse of the Towers. Conversation analysis is developed to study the case. This analysis of the first response as a case of problem detection offers an original approach to consider the 9/11 disaster. In addition, data analysis displays that the existing theoretical models, based on cumulated cue discrepancies, fail to capture some fundamental dynamics that characterize the detection of a novel form of emergency. First, emergency units become progressively aware that they are experiencing a novel situation. Second, rapidly evolving situations and a distributed structure of information processing make it harder to distinguish relevant novel information from background noise, and this difficulty affects the possibility to detect new types of disasters. Finally, the paper discusses what emergency organizations can do to prepare themselves to cope with unexpected and novel crises.