9/11: Twenty-five Years Later (2026)/Part 2
An Op-Ed by Michael Prasad
Thank you to the alumni who have submitted articles. Further contributions or comments should be sent to news@chasealum.org.
preparing for a future such catastrophe, from a Chase alumnus who became an emergency manager because of 9/11
It is now 25 years after 9/11, and in a month, it will be that long since I separated from Chase. For the Chase Alumni Association, I've written a 9/11 piece, covered a bit about the big merger years leading up to 9/11 in a rebuttal to Don Layton’s piece, entitled “The Merger Name Game”, and even had my free e-book, about my tenure at the American Red Cross, highlighted in a “Life after Chase” segment. My book, Leadership Lessons Learned and Applied: In Emergency Management and Beyond ,has a whole chapter on 9/11 and mentions the prior attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. (I was at the 1 CMP cafeteria when that happened, it felt like an earthquake.)Today, I am still in the field of Emergency Management, researching, writing and advocating for a better understanding of our profession by the public, politicians and even other emergency managers. If one thinks of Emergency Management as the tactical and operational application of Risk Management strategies, it might be easier to understand.
The United States is entering an era in which overseas wars, cyberattacks and simultaneous disasters could reach into daily life at home — and this time there will be a demand of sacrifices from civilians and public institutions that we have barely begun to debate. If we wait for the next catastrophe to confront those choices, we will have waited too long.
The attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and what I believe was to be an attack on the U.S. Capitol, were, no doubt in my mind, an act of war – a war we are still in today. One can parse the legal definitions of ‘war’, but for those of us who survived 9/11, from an Emergency Management perspective, it’s a disaster that has become systemic – and one we need to deal with on a whole of government/whole community basis. War is an extinction-level event, just as a global pandemic like COVID-19 was. For 9/11, in New York City, it was a battle we as Americans lost. Have we now won the war? I do not think so. We have built systems throughout our lives to try and protect and prevent against the adverse impacts of terrorism and enemy attacks, but I do not know if there will ever be a time when we can truly live in peace.
9/11 did of course, make me very angry. It also made me resolute. I live in Fanwood, a small town in New Jersey with about 5,000 people back then. While we did not lose any residents, Scotch Plains which is the town next door with which we share a school system, lost three people. Two were in the World Trade Center that morning, and one was on United flight 93. One was a parent whose daughter is now 27. There’s a 9/11 memorial park to those three people, which I pass on regular walks I started taking during COVID in 2020. There are 9/11 memorial parks in all the nearby towns where I live, as many if not more than the all the war memorial parks combined.
I felt very helpless that day, I also felt like I didn't know how I could help anyone else. I channeled that resolve and started a Community Emergency Response Team – known as a CERT - and I joined the American Red Cross as a disaster volunteer. I eventually completely reimagined myself as a professional emergency manager, becoming certified and also getting a master’s degree in this field. While the U.S. emergency management construct has its roots in civil defense, it has since transformed into something else, and moved away from national defense aspects. More on that in a moment.
Since 2006, I have responded to everything from small emergencies like a single-family home fire to big disasters, including Superstorm Sandy in New Jersey. Many people come from other fields and professions to emergency management roles because of a catalyst catastrophic incident. For some it was the national response to Katrina in 2005.
Did you know that all 50 States sheltered evacuees from that catastrophic disaster?
For me, the reason I became an emergency manager was 9/11.
Between 2001 and 2006, I floundered in the financial services field. You can read those gruesome details in my e-book. I have spent the last 20 years in Emergency Management. Today, I am on the board of the International Association of Emergency Managers, and I also serve as a Red Cross leadership volunteer supporting FEMA’s Region 2. In both roles I help coordinate federal and national resources for New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and eight federally recognized sovereign tribal nations in and around New York State when presidential emergency and disaster declarations are issued, or the disasters are that big. When activated, I work with federal response leaders in a New Jersey location to support federal and state/territory teams out in the field, sometimes helping resolve problems more than a thousand miles away. That overwatch vantage point has shown me both the reach of our disaster response and recovery systems and how quickly its capacity can be strained.
It is now 25 years beyond that fateful day. We have many axioms in emergency management, two immediately come to mind, applicable for this anniversary. The first is that “all disasters start and end locally.” This was not the case for 9/11 because 9/11 was not a disaster for which emergency management was the method to respond to it. Armed conflicts/wars, global pandemics, a meteor strike – as I wrote earlier, these are extinction-level events. They can be described as truly catastrophic disasters. And while the attack in New York City was localized to one square block of downtown Manhattan, it became a global war on terror which still is in effect today.
The second axiom is, “When you have seen one disaster, you have seen one disaster.” That has never been the situation for me. I certainly had a “failure of imagination” for this threat to our nation back then: I was uninformed about homeland security and homeland defense. I now believe surviving 9/11 can provide a unique perspective for any aspiring emergency manager. There was most certainly wisdom to be gained. As emergency managers, we apply our lessons learned and do so quite literally and seriously; when we are given the opportunity. Every plan I write or review, every exercise I facilitate, and every single time I now respond in support of FEMA, has “what if” consequence management aspects on the scale of the next 9/11. My mind goes right to the worst-case scenario possible.
In 2001, before 9/11, we were enforcing no-fly zones over Iraq, as a result of the 1991 Gulf War, in what was known as Operation Southern Watch. Today, the United States is involved in multiple international armed conflicts around the globe, multiple U.S. states are constantly experiencing large-scale disasters simultaneously, and war risks in Asia, Europe and the Middle East can now adversely and directly impact our own homeland.
Our nation’s Homeland Security – which, as I noted previously, in the federal model has emergency management captured within it – may soon become Homeland Defense. Meanwhile, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that “the Federal Emergency Management Agency has faced longstanding workforce management challenges, including staff shortages, that make supporting disaster response and recovery difficult.”
Staff cuts or departures at those other federal agencies in addition to FEMA, have also limited their support and participation in disaster response and recovery work – as well as for the much-needed training and exercising required to response to these large-scale incidents. Compounding all of this, are the states and territories who do not have their own robust emergency management and homeland security teams themselves. Add to it the current cuts to their federal disaster grants and assistance, should war come to our homeland, and it will become catastrophic, once again.
If our military – the full-timers, reservists and National Guard units - is fully deployed outside of the continental United States (OCONUS) and at war, they will be unavailable to support civilian operations, such as domestic disaster response. There will be no troops left to patrol lower Manhattan or defend the skies over our cities. Our domestic defense industrial base sector (as one of 16 officially designated national critical infrastructure sectors – JPMorgan Chase is in the Financial Services Sector) may be designated to become prioritized above all the others, in order to support the war effort.
The U.S. Army is proposing “Multi-Domain Resiliency Zones” which combine elements of national defense, homeland security, emergency management and a potential reincarnation of civil defense. This is for places like Omaha, NE and Colts Neck, NJ – not big cities like Los Angeles or New York City. It is not your grand-parents’ version of civil defense from the Cold War and World War II – not with today’s autonomous military drones capable of traveling anywhere into CONUS and cyberattacks on all 16 sectors from multiple threat actors. If the vast majority of our military defense is OCONUS, who will be supporting homeland defense – and where - are open questions.
I believe Congress and the White House should require a public national preparedness review for large-scale homeland conflict, including the division of civilian and military responsibilities, minimum staffing for emergency response agencies, protection of civilian infrastructure equally prioritized such as water treatment plants, hospitals and schools, and ensure safeguards for civil liberties. States and municipalities should exercise those plans with the impacted communities (public and private sectors inclusive), not merely circulate them among officials. Preparedness cannot mean asking the public for obedience after decisions have already been made; it must mean inviting the public’s civilian emergency managers into those decisions beforehand. Especially if, as civilians, they will be asked to do something they have never done before: defend our homeland against all enemies foreign and domestic.
When the United States in the past has been kinetically attacked by our enemies including on 9/11, we have made sacrifices for the greater good of our country. Those sacrifices have also included the loss of civil liberties for some, including the forced loss of freedoms of American citizens whose heritage is that of our perceived enemies. Thanks in part to the current threats to our country previously noted, those who will potentially be under scrutiny, are now part of a long list of Americans today.
Emergency managers hold one axiom above all others: life safety is the highest priority in any response. That command intent – through a unity of effort - must guide civilians supporting emergency management in wartime just as it guides their support of responses to fires, floods, cyberattacks and other disasters.
But protecting lives cannot require surrendering the freedoms that define our country. Twenty-five years after 9/11, honoring those who died demands more than resilience after a catastrophe. It requires preparing to save lives without sacrificing the democracy they lived in, and that we as Americans pledged to always preserve.