Analyze what could go wrong in a catastrophic event. As seen throughout history, no disaster scene has been without complications. Catastrophic scenes are a breeding ground for mistakes and errors....

On Scene Complications" is almost a redundant statement. Every scene is, by its nature, a complication. In terms of planning, it is safe to assume that every crisis scene will produce complications and factors not adhering to initial expectations (Pope, 2005).
Expecting the unexpected is, basically, the on-going effort of every emergency manager. No matter how solid- pre-event planning is, it will invariably be complicated in the real world by uncontrollable factors: equipment malfunctioning, Incident commanders must be flexible and quick-thinking in their ability to crate ideas and plans for what additional resources or alternative options could be called upon in the event that a situation suddenly calls for a departure from all previously devised response protocols.
What can go wrong – will:
The famous axiom of “Murphy’s Law” is pretty much a given when discussing a catastrophic event. No matter how through an emergency planning team many think they have been, chances are the forces of chaos and catastrophe can devise a way to defeat them, Effective catastrophic event planning has to employ a certain amount of imagination and willingness to participate in “zero- sum game” exercises –collaborative brainstorming to envision the absolute protect yourself from it. This doesn’t mean that considerable time and money has to be invested in every fantastic possibility, but it does imply that catastrophic event planning should consider the thing that hasn’t happened yet- looking at the trends and extrapolating what it may mean in the future.
Case in point: by the dawn of the new millennium, western security planning was largely focused on worse –case scenarios we knew from the past. Radicalist hijacking in the sixties, seventies and eighties led to metal- detectors and security screeners in airports, looking for passengers carrying guns, and to the creation of hijack policies for airlines that largely dictated negotiation and cooperation with hijacker demands.
Airline bombings led to a new focus on bomb detection and the positive matching of all passengers with their checked luggage.
Because a B-25 bomber lost in bad weather had accidentally crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945, the Twin Towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center had been designed to withstand the impact of a lost aircraft accidentally striking it as well. Based on what had gone wrong in the past, process improvements had been implemented.
Unfortunately, the threat assessment of previous planners had not been updated, nor had it been extended forward to anticipate the new and emerging threats in our world.
What if hijackers used methods other than guns to seize an airplane (e.g.,. legal Chemical Mace, small knives, and box cutters?
What if the hijackers had trained as pilots so that they could fly the aircraft themselves after killing the legitimate flight crew?
What if the hijackers were not interested in negotiation but were on a suicide mission?
What if when the airplane strikes the world trade center it is a not a lost 707- the biggest airline of 1970 when the towers were built –flying slowly in the fog and low-on-fuel as it readies to land, but rather a much larger 767 traveling at 400 mph and loaded with jet fuel?
One- by- one, on the morning of September 11, 2001 our security and emergency response plans were rendered ineffective by the guile and devious creativity of the hijackers. Because the hijackers were willing to consider modern options that emergency planners had not, efforts to respond and rescue were maddeningly frustrated and fruitless.
The psychology of command is beginning to emerge as a distinct research topic for psychologists interested in selection, training, competence assessment, decision-making, stress management, leadership, and team working (Pope, 2005).
Leadership:
Leadership ability is generally deemed to be a key attribute of an Incident commander and to some extent may be regarded as an umbrella term for the required competencies which have to be trained. However, finding a precise specification of the required behaviors or the style of leadership is rather less frequently articulated.
Leadership within a military context embodies the concepts of command, control, organization and duty and there has been extensive military research into leadership much of which unfortunately, never sees the light of day outside the defence research community.
Reference
CCi Custom Publication (2005).
Catastrophic event response planning.
Boston: Pearson.