The Velocity Problem: Why Emergency Management Hit a Ceiling in 2025

Emergency management hit a ceiling in 2025. Not the ceiling of effort or dedication, but the ceiling of what traditional response systems can handle when crises move faster than the protocols designed to manage them.

The Crisis Lab Podcast year-end panel assembled six hosts tracking the profession from different angles. The conversation revealed patterns that transcend individual disasters: LA wildfires, Texas floods, cascading infrastructure failures, and the persistent question of what emergency management can realistically accomplish when everything accelerates.

Kyle King opened with the velocity problem. "What happens when a crisis can actually move faster than our own internal response systems?" In West Altadena, 17 people died when evacuation orders arrived late. Water systems failed not from lack of water but from demand that exceeded any reasonable design standard. Public information struggled to keep pace with the information environment itself becoming a secondary disaster.

This pattern isn't unique to fire. Floods in Texas moved faster than evacuation orders. Resource deployment couldn't match the pace of need. Traditional protocols assume time to coordinate that modern crises no longer provide.

Matt Green brought data. The Argonne Labs study shows most local emergency managers are under-resourced. They lack capability and capacity to do the work as currently structured. When given more resources, they would spend it on community preparedness-getting to know their communities, building capacity with rather than for them.

"It is always a capacity issue before it becomes a capability issue," Green stated. "The major indictment after nearly 20 years of doing this is we keep doing emergency management at our communities instead of with our communities."

Todd DeVoe provided context. LA County has roughly 40 emergency managers. LA City has 40. Most of the 88 jurisdictions in LA County have one emergency manager, some have half. Compare that to New York City's Office of Emergency Management with over 100 staff. The disparity reveals governance decisions about what gets resourced.

Laura James described the operational reality. Canada experienced winter storms, spring flooding, and forest fire season with no time for thorough after-action reviews between events. "We were already in the field doing the next response." This back-to-back pattern leaves no space for the learning cycles emergency management depends on.

The planned events add another layer. Todd noted the World Cup spans 16 cities, not just the West Coast. Toronto hosts games. San Francisco and Los Angeles juggle World Cup, Super Bowl, and Olympics. Emergency managers must plan for these global events while simultaneously preparing for the natural disasters that don't pause for international spectacles.

Ralph Bloemers reframed the LA water system debate. Eight hours into the fires, the system still functioned. Nine hours in, it depressurized. Water systems are designed primarily to provide drinking water, not fight fires across entire hillsides simultaneously.

"You go get a coffee and that coffee shop can serve 300 to 400 cups in a day. Can it serve all of a sudden 30 to 40,000 cups? No." The analogy cuts through the finger-pointing to reveal unreasonable expectations.

Bloemers crew filmed houses burned to the ground with water lines still spewing 20 gallons per minute with nowhere to go. The failure wasn't water availability. The failure happened before the fire arrived—in the millions of embers descending on communities where houses weren't prepared to prevent ember from becoming flame.

"The game is what happens before the fire comes. How do we support firefighters? How do we support water managers? By as a community owning our hazard, owning our risk well before fire comes."

Anastasia Maynich reinforced the planning gap. Altadena, an unincorporated area belonging to the county, had evacuation routes that weren't integrated into connecting cities' plans. "City and county planning - they have to manage it together when it comes to those areas."

The community preparedness conversation revealed tensions. Emergency managers want communities to prepare, but then label those who actually prepare as "preppers" with negative connotations. The preparedness community knows how to prepare, yet sits outside mainstream emergency management thinking.

Kyle King shifted to governance. Who decides about infrastructure investment after disasters reveal failures? Who determines water system capacity? Who makes decisions about managed retreat from flood plains or fire-prone hillsides?

"All of these things happening all at the same time draws into this question of how do we govern societies?" The decisions remain siloed, don't always involve the communities affected, and get shaped by politics as much as by physics.

Laura James described Canada's approach. Ontario has regulated people out of the floodplain. You cannot build new homes there. The government compensates at market value where possible and conservation authorities purchase land to keep it natural. "Water is going to engineer itself around what we've engineered. So let's try and start keeping people out of the risk."

Todd DeVoe raised the California complication. Palos Verdes Estates has homes on bluffs slowly falling into the ocean. Power got cut off. People chose to live off-grid rather than leave. The buyback question becomes explosive: purchase at the multi-million dollar home value or at the true property value of land sliding into the sea?

"These are deep conversations with emotional attachment to these homes. It's a little more complicated than saying hey, you can't build here."

Ralph Bloemers added the financial reality. "California doesn't have the treasury printing press. The scope and areas at risk are growing." Investment-backed expectations collide with physics. The reinsurance world in Switzerland, Munich, and London won't cover unreasonable risk through private contracts no matter what laws get passed.

Kyle King introduced the concept rarely discussed: context switching. Emergency managers jump between disaster response, planned events, mitigation planning, long-term recovery, community engagement, and grant management constantly. Research shows that more than an hour of context switching drops cognitive performance by 20 IQ points.

"Emergency management as a field is absolutely the worst in terms of context switching. We are effectively by profession making ourselves dumber the more we work."

This reality forces the uncomfortable question about responsibility distribution. How much stays with emergency management? How much shifts to other government departments? How much gets offloaded to individual and community responsibility? The work has to go somewhere.

The context runs against the backdrop of crumbling infrastructure. The United States will invest a trillion dollars into AI while roads and bridges deteriorate. Organizations develop tunnel vision around cyber threats and forget the physical threat environment.

The panel's predictions converged around forced evolution. Todd DeVoe predicted increased public awareness of local emergency managers. "You're going to see an uptake in local emergency managers—people actually knowing who we are."

Anastasia Maynich predicted growth in emergency management departments as cities recognize the gap. Even preppers, if they want to serve as emergency managers, should be welcomed for what they can teach communities about preparation.

Laura James expressed hope grounded in new tools. AI enables access to information impossible before. "Tell me every time this particular place has flooded in the last 50 years and all the data you have on that. That can be on a board for me in less than 30 seconds."

Matt Green predicted continued shift from hierarchical emergency management to distributed models. "We are going to continue to decolonize the practice of emergency management by giving our communities more agency and more authority and more empowerment."

Ralph Bloemers predicted shorter, more engaging communications. "Less 90 minutes of emergency responders talking to the public, more 10 minutes of choose your own adventure." Make wildfire-prepared homes the cool thing to do through humor, culture change, and messaging tied to keeping insurance and mortgages.

The common thread: emergency management cannot be everything to everyone. That limitation forces offloading responsibility to communities, which requires honest conversation about what government can and cannot guarantee.

Todd DeVoe noted the strange positioning of emergency management. "We are truly the only profession where we look at the federal level to prove who we are. Fire departments don't say look at the federal fire department. Law enforcement doesn't point to the FBI."

The profession's identity crisis compounds the practical challenges. If FEMA gets restructured and responsibilities shift to states, who absorbs the work? If emergency managers already switch contexts constantly while under-resourced, where does additional responsibility land?

Matt Green's observation about doing emergency management at communities instead of with them captures the fundamental shift required. "What if there's no best practice for emergency management planning and policy within a community because each community is so unique? The best practice for us is to understand and engage our community within the context of themselves."

This means governance decisions about alert systems, warnings, and community engagement should happen as close to the problem as possible, not from 30,000 feet down.

The panel closed on an uncomfortable truth. Emergency management reached the limits of what centralized, protocol-driven response can accomplish when crises cascade across multiple domains simultaneously, moving faster than coordination structures can adapt.

The redistribution isn't a choice. It's already happening. Communities communicate with each other through social media during disasters because official channels can't keep pace. Content creators aggregate information faster than press conferences. Watch Duty provides wind layers and aircraft positions for individual planning beyond emergency management scope.

Ralph Bloemers summarized the culture change required. "We have to figure out how to make having a wildfire-prepared ignition-resistant home the cool thing to do. Nobody wants to be the owner of the house that burns up the neighbor's house."

The question for 2026 isn't whether emergency management changes. 2025 answered that. The question is whether the profession leads the change or gets forced into it by repeated demonstrations that traditional approaches can't keep pace with modern crisis velocity.

For senior emergency managers, the panel offers strategic validation. The challenges you face aren't unique to your jurisdiction. The resource constraints aren't your failure. The impossible demands placed on the profession reflect systems designed for a different era of crisis management.

The path forward requires honesty about limits, investment in community capacity, governance decisions about infrastructure and managed retreat, and professional networks that provide peer validation for the strategic isolation many senior leaders experience.

The emergency management community isn't waiting for permission to evolve. It's building networks, bridging technology with equity, and reimagining relationships with hazards and communities. That's the work that matters going into 2026.