Emergency Management Single Points of Failure

Disaster management begins and ends at the local level and encompasses every aspect of public administration. Emergency management practices using jurisdictional authority are central to protecting communities during incidents and events. Although contemporary emergency management plans, procedures, and policies are methodically developed over time, a single point of failure may cause preventable issues that result in a measurable loss of time, funding, or opportunity. A single point of failure can be any moment where a process, action, or detail was either overlooked or executed incorrectly and caused emergency management challenges. Fred Fiedler and William Scott’s descriptions of Contingency Theory, a human relations-oriented framework, were used to evaluate emergency management single points of failure situations and the contingent response to incident and event situations (Fiedler, 2008). The data collection methods used in this research included document analysis, interviews, an online survey, and a focus group session that explored emergency management single points of failure to develop better intervention processes that may minimize or eliminate identified failure impacts and create a new grounded theory. Key takeaways from this exploratory research highlight the importance of developing effective public administrative strategies. Through qualitative methods, data collection, and analysis, the study provides insights that can help emergency managers identify and prevent potential failures while uncovering commonalities in single points of failure related to new independent variables. This research addressed a real-world issue and contributed to past literature and theory by addressing the gaps linked to the single points of failure in the public administration of emergency management.