Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Faculty & Research
  • Faculty
  • Research
  • Featured Topics
  • Academic Units
  • …→
  • Harvard Business School→
  • Faculty & Research→
Publications
Publications
  • December 2010
  • Article
  • Australian Journal of Public Administration

Organising Response to Extreme Emergencies: The Victorian Bushfires of 2009

By: Dutch Leonard and Arnold M. Howitt
  • Format:Print
ShareBar

Abstract

How can people and organisations best respond to emergency events that are significantly beyond the boundaries of what they had generally anticipated, expected, prepared for-or even imagined? What forms of organisations are likely to be best able to cope with such events-and what procedures and practices will aid in their ability to do so? Obviously, extreme events-events that are in scope or scale or type beyond the range of our ordinary experience and expectations-by definition will occur only relatively rarely (and very rarely to any given emergency organisation). Nonetheless, when they do occur they tend to be of defining importance to the people and institutions that are thrust into them and that must find their way through them. September 11, 2001 in Manhattan and at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004; Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of the United States in 2005; major earthquakes like the ones in Pakistan in 2005, Wenchuan in 2008, Haiti in 2010, Chile in 2010, and Christchurch in 2010-these and other catastrophic events catapult people and response agencies into a new, unfamiliar, and largely unexplored dimension.

Keywords

Organizations; Management Practices and Processes; Natural Disasters; Crisis Management; Boundaries; United States

Citation

Leonard, Dutch, and Arnold M. Howitt. "Organising Response to Extreme Emergencies: The Victorian Bushfires of 2009." Australian Journal of Public Administration 69, no. 4 (December 2010).
  • Find it at Harvard

About The Author

Dutch Leonard

General Management
→More Publications

More from the Authors

    • 2022
    • Faculty Research

    Key Success Factors in Environmental Entrepreneurship: The Case of Wilderness Safaris

    By: James E. Austin, Megan Epler Woods and Herman B. Leonard
    • November 2020
    • Faculty Research

    Wilderness Safaris: Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis

    By: James E. Austin, Megan Epler Wood and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard
    • November–December 2020
    • Harvard Business Review

    The Risks You Can't Foresee: What to Do When There's No Playbook

    By: Robert S. Kaplan, Herman B. Leonard and Anette Mikes
More from the Authors
  • Key Success Factors in Environmental Entrepreneurship: The Case of Wilderness Safaris By: James E. Austin, Megan Epler Woods and Herman B. Leonard
  • Wilderness Safaris: Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis By: James E. Austin, Megan Epler Wood and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard
  • The Risks You Can't Foresee: What to Do When There's No Playbook By: Robert S. Kaplan, Herman B. Leonard and Anette Mikes
ǁ
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→Map & Directions
→More Contact Information
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Accessibility
  • Digital Accessibility
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College