RAPID: The Tohoku Catastrophe: Volunteers and Non-Profit Organizations in Post-Kobe Japan

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) provides funding to explore the emergence and reliance on volunteer groups and organizations following a catastrophe. On March 11, 2011, the nation of Japan experienced a catastrophe - a great earthquake of M9.0; a near-shore tsunami, 10 meters high, that reached the coast in less than 30 minutes and traveled inland four miles in some locations; and a nuclear emergency in six reactors on one site, releasing significant amounts of radiation into the air, land, and water. These events resulted in difficult and delayed search and rescue efforts, extremely short warning periods, evacuation and sheltering of over 500,000 people, heroic efforts to stop the melting of cores and spent fuel rods at nuclear power plant reactors, and confusion in risk communication to the public. Given the enormity of the Tohoku destruction and the evident inventiveness that was required at all stages of response, it will be argued that an entirely different framework is needed in responding to catastrophic events. This RAPID project will investigate one of the components of that framework - the emergence and reliance on volunteer groups and organizations. Moreover, with what is likely to be a many-years-long and very uncertain process of recovery, volunteers and non-profit organizations are likely to continue to be heavily involved in a variety of capacities over a long period of time. This RAPID project will tackle a principal question and related concerns regarding volunteers in catastrophes: how do volunteers (or do they) work with, coordinate with, and share information with other organizations that are deemed to be more established or "official" as well as with each other? What conditions facilitate different kinds of coordination in a catastrophic milieu? What functions do volunteers undertake when formal response systems are overwhelmed and dealing with the multitude of subsidiary crises that comprise a catastrophe? Emergency managers and other public officials look to the research community for guidance on responding to disaster and catastrophe. Data-gathering methods for this project include observation of field sites where volunteers are working; formal, semi-formal, and unstructured interviews; and analysis of primary documents as well as media reports. The research team will emphasize gathering of ephemeral data: that is, data about agencies and organizations that may not exist after the passage of time. The main analytical approach will be inductive qualitative analysis in the grounded theory tradition, where scientific theories are built in a repeated process of analysis, theory-building, and theory refinement. Findings from this study will form the basis for new theories that will make sense to the user community in building disaster and catastrophe response organizations. Because the findings will build on organization theory, it is anticipated that the findings will be useful in private sector settings, where building organizations in quickly-changing, ambiguous, and politically contested environments is a main challenge, especially in international and cross-cultural applications.