Disaster Recovery Journal Fall 2023

Post Disaster Lessons: What Should be Learned and How

By IHAB HANNA SAWALHA

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s the world today witnesses unprecedented disasters and crises of all types and sizes and at all fronts, it’s imperative to know how to cope with these incidents.

learning from experience is more effec tive because people are subject to actual circumstances than hypothetical scenarios. This argument applies equally to the soci etal as well as organizational contexts. Experiential learning allows decision makers and policymakers to make more realistic decisions and allocate resources more prudently. This allows them to serve critical business and social functions and enables people to observe, improvise, and become engaged in the scene of the inci dent more actively. In this article, I propose learning from disasters and crises should become a sys tematic and organized process rather than an activity based merely on observation or intuition. It should be made clear that lessons learned are different than damage assessment. Damage assessments focus

on identifying the tangible, or physical, damage which has already occurred to infrastructure and the built environment. Lessons learned should be extracted more comprehensively to cover all aspects of the incident, including an autopsy which identifies what went well and what went wrong. Accordingly, I classify the types of the lessons learned into four distinct catego ries based on the general impression about the outcomes of the management process and the type of intervention, as shown in the figure on the next page. In case the outcomes of manage ment went well as planned, the lesson learned is to adopt the intervention(s), or response mechanisms, which have been used as best practices for future purposes. In case the outcomes went well but were

It’s also important to know how to make use of the lessons derived from these disasters each and every time they occur, regardless if they are natural, man-made, or technological. Lessons learned are usu ally underrated due to a variety of reasons. But perhaps one prevailing factor is that in some cultures, disasters are considered inevitable occurrences – or acts of God – during which the only response from the people is total submission and the passive acceptance of the adverse consequences of these events. Each time a major incident occurs, new lessons can be learned. Experts argue

30 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | FALL 2023