Impact of disasters on routine emergency service response performance

This paper provides substantive understanding of how routine emergency service performance is affected by diversion of resources to a disaster occurring concurrently in a surrounding area. Based on operations strategy models, this study identifies crucial infrastructural and integration components necessary to develop dynamic capabilities for the primary responsibility of responding effectively to routine emergencies during a disaster. A database from a local fire district is used to explore the impact of a wildfire disaster on the operational performance measures of response time and total time. The results of multivariate multiple regression show the impact of the disaster occurrence on these performance measures for a range of incident types in the time periods before, during, and after the wildfire. Findings suggest key drivers of dynamic resource capabilities necessary for improving routine incident operational performance. Implications for emergency services managers include the need to develop and implement data-driven investigation and review, focused responder training, resident and business engagement, and a tiered mutual aid system. Contributions include development of a framework explaining the impact of disaster occurrences and identification of important dynamic resource capabilities. This paper goes beyond prior research by exploring the impact of disasters on routine emergency performance measures and identifying resource capabilities necessary to alleviate the impact on performance.