A community crisis is a potentially overwhelming situation that requires an urgent response to avoid severe consequences that exceed a community’s capability to absorb. Often its cause, effects, and means of resolution are ambiguous (Pearson and Clair 1998) because of its unpredictability, speed of onset, and scope and duration of impacts (Perry 2018). These event characteristics produce a sense of uncertainty and urgency as households, organizations, and government agencies seek to rapidly mobilize and deploy available response resources.
Community crises typically threaten both physical (casualties, damage to buildings, infrastructure, and agriculture) and social (psychosocial, sociodemographic, economic, and political) impacts (Lindell 2013, 2019; NRC 2006a). These potential impacts create agent-generated demands for actions to limit or avoid these impacts and response-generated demands for actions to coordinate all of the individuals and organizations that.
