[Exercise Notes] Are We Drilling “Urban Resilience” or?

I recently participated in a local-level urban resilience exercise. On the surface, the terminology was cutting-edge, the slides were polished, and the leadership speeches were impeccable. However, if you strip away the outer veneer of “resilience” and “cross-domain coordination,” the skeletal structure underneath remains the same old departmental silos and administrative red tape we have been accustomed to for thirty years.

The irony is that this gap does not exist due to a lack of exposure. For years, various local governments in Taiwan have proactively sought international disaster management expertise. For instance, Taichung City’s disaster rescue and prevention teams have explicitly undergone professional training in the U.S. FEMA ESF framework, attempting to internalize these modular, function-based concepts. Yet, despite these training initiatives, when it comes to actual implementation during major drills or real-world operations, many municipalities still instinctively default to their traditional, rigid bureaucratic unit groupings.

This brings to mind the true operational essence of FEMA’s Emergency Support Functions (ESF) framework. Its core logic is to abstract communication and information functions away from individual agencies and establish them as an independent, operational brain.

During the exercise, it became evident that Taiwanese local governments excel at certain functional groupings, such as emergency repairs of municipal utilities (water, electricity, gas), maintaining public order, or social welfare sheltering. The common denominator among these successful functions is clear: they fall either under the absolute enforcement power of local authorities (such as the police and environmental cleaning crews) or under highly regulated, state-owned enterprises (such as Taipower and Taiwan Water). A single administrative order from a local chief executive, or long-standing open contracts for emergency repairs, allows for an exceptionally smooth, linear deployment of physical resources.

However, the moment the scenario touches upon ESF #2 (Communications), ESF #5 (Information and Planning), and ESF #15 (External Affairs)—the very core of the U.S. ESF mechanism—Taiwan’s system immediately plunges into an awkward vacuum. These three functions involve the exact digital and social networks that represent the weakest links in Taiwan’s emergency response, areas that cannot be resolved simply through central centralization or local administrative decrees.

The exercise exposed three structural blind spots in the field:

1. Communications Treated as “General Logistics”

In one specific scenario during the drill, a sudden concentration of personnel within a short timeframe caused mobile networks congesting to a grind halt. The field solution? A single mobile communication vehicle from Chunghwa Telecom was rolled in, left isolated to support the site. As a result, when first responders attempted to connect back to their internal agency systems, network speeds remained agonizingly slow, making real-time data transmission almost impossible. Worse still, when the site urgently needed to scale up response capacity by integrating alternative military service (conscription) personnel or external civilian volunteers, it was discovered that internal core systems could not grant access permissions to these “non-staff” entities.

Ultimately, the exercise floor witnessed a stroke of dark humor: with information systems inaccessible and telecom networks bottlenecked, responders abandoned the high-tech digital dashboards and quietly reverted to paper-based operations. To maintain field coordination, everyone ultimately relied on the LINE chat groups on their personal smartphones.

Compared to the straightforward path of power grids—where a blackout prompts the immediate dispatch of a utility truck—the telecommunications market is heavily privatized and commercialized. In the logic of FEMA’s ESF #2 (Communications), communications are tactical infrastructure. It requires cross-carrier roaming coordination, switching between public and private networks, and even international integration with low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. This involves complex commercial interests and central ministry regulations; local governments have no jurisdiction over this, and the central government cannot simply command private enterprises to surrender bandwidth. When the information and communication architecture lacks dynamic provisioning of permissions and bandwidth elasticity, high-pressure testing instantly strips away the high-tech veneer, forcing a regression to raw paper and unencrypted commercial messaging apps.

2. EMIC Designed for “Ticketing and Closure” While Civic Tech Data Drifts in Parallel

Taiwanese local governments are highly efficient at environmental cleanup and shelter placement because those operations follow a rigid, top-down administrative chain of command. Inside the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), personnel fluidly type away at the EMIC (Emergency Management Information System): village chiefs report incidents, the fire department inputs them, the system dispatches a ticket to the public works bureau, the public works bureau clears the fallen tree, and the ticket is closed. The essence of this system is administrative document workflow management, used primarily for post-incident audits, tracking accountability, and verifying “closure.”

True resilience, however, requires the concept of FEMA’s ESF #5 (Information and Planning)—extracting fragmented data to conduct big data strategic assessments and generate a standard Common Operating Picture (COP).

We saw the raw power of alternative data pipelines during last year’s Guangfu Flood catastrophe. As hundreds of thousands of digital “volunteers” suddenly mobilized online, dozens of crowdsourced disaster response platforms and makeshift dashboards sprouted overnight. Iterating rapidly based on immediate field feedback, these civic platforms utilized various algorithmic filters to aggregate, sort, and map massive volumes of citizen-reported data in near real-time.

Yet, as documented in international studies like the UN OCHA’s Disaster Relief 2.0 report, this kind of disconnect between digital humanitarianism and traditional command structures is a well-known systemic vulnerability. These civic systems and spontaneous instances of “information creation” are typically sporadic and remain entirely decoupled from the official public sector response apparatus. The bureaucracy clings to a permission-locked, bandwidth-constrained EMIC system, while the civilian sphere operates a parallel track of open-source maps and reporting tools. The two cannot interface at the data flow level. The information systems of various bureaus (water resources, transportation, fire) operate like feudal fiefdoms separated by administrative firewalls. Meanwhile, data collected spontaneously by the public cannot penetrate the official decision-making brain. Because these decentralized assets cannot be co-opted or centralized, the two information pipelines run in parallel, entirely isolated from one another. This deprives the overall disaster assessment of a holistic, global view. When the brain is starved of information and the limbs are disconnected, moving faster is simply futile.

3. Crisis Communication Reduced to “Leadership PR”

Another fluidly operating component of Taiwan’s EOC is the “Public Order and Traffic Control Group.” Under the command of local leaders, the police force executes road closures, area cordons, and disaster zone security with high administrative enforcement power.

In sharp contrast, the role of the “Press Release Group” during the drill remained confined to traditional media public relations—issuing press releases, organizing press conferences, and managing the leader’s public image. This runs entirely counter to the purpose of establishing a Joint Information Center (JIC) under FEMA’s ESF #15 (External Affairs). The core of a JIC is information equity and comprehensive coverage.

In today’s fragmented information ecosystem, when misinformation spreads uncontrollably across LINE, TikTok, or various social platforms, or when migrant workers are stranded due to language barriers, crisis communication expands far beyond a local news department’s capacity to issue statements. Research from organizations like the U.S. National Academies on Public Response to Alerts and Warnings Using Social Media highlights how decentralized media ecosystems render top-down, centralized information control obsolete. This modern crisis landscape cannot be solved by a top-down, centralized command over the internet. It demands a joint information framework capable of real-time coordination with multinational tech platforms, horizontally blocking political interference in rescue operations, and ensuring that vulnerable groups receive multilingual, accessible emergency alerts simultaneously. This is precisely the domain where the some of Taiwanese bureaucratic systems are most inexperienced and lacks both legal and governance toolsets.

Conclusion: Digital Transformation of Institutions Must Be Structural

“Urban Resilience” cannot be performed through a montage of trendy buzzwords.

As this exercise demonstrates, as long as an operation involves the linear deployment of physical resources under a “Command & Control” model—such as utility repairs or law enforcement sheltering—Taiwan’s simulations run flawlessly. But the moment the system encounters the non-linear flows of “Coordination & Integration”—such as telecom bottlenecks, rigid permission barriers for conscripted support, parallel civilian data pipelines, and multi-channel crisis communication—it suffers immediate paralysis.

The fact that cities like Taichung have undergone ESF training shows that the problem is not a lack of conceptual knowledge, but institutional inertia. If our response mechanism remains permanently defined by “Who” (which department you belong to dictates what you do) rather than “What” (what function the field requires dictates how we cross boundaries to reorganize resources), then when a true Black Swan event arrives, our prized EOCs will fail. Even with telecom trucks rolled in and alternative service personnel deployed, the system will devolve into a collection of individuals using ballpoint pens on paper pads and sending photos via LINE, operating a sophisticated bureaucratic machine where official and civilian information ecosystems continue to drift apart in parallel isolation.

I have seen huge progresses over this years, but Taiwan’s dedicated disaster prevention and response system still requires a genuine transformation of its organizational architecture and data flows. It is a painful process because it demands dismantling departmental firewalls and official-civilian barriers. Yet, it remains the only viable path toward true resilience.