Beyond the Rule

In today’s society the presence of safety risks and hazards like wildfires, pandemics, industrial activities and an increasing population combined with a more demanding environment demand a lot of the Dutch emergency response organizations or safety regions. Safety regions comprise the regional fire service and the regional medical service and stand in relationship with a large array of stakeholders like law enforcement, public administrations and the Dutch Department of Defense. The regions play a key role in risk and crisis mitigation. This raises the question whether the safety regions are organizational-wise sufficiently prepared to mitigate existing risks/hazards and possible black swans.

In this book, John van Trijp investigates from an organizational resilience perspective how safety regions perform before, during and after a crisis. He finds for all 25 safety regions organizational resilience for six crisis types is an average of 60%. This was even less in case of the Moerdijk industrial blaze in 2011: 18%. Suggestions are made to improve the region’s organizational resilience to enhance mitigation possibilities. For this to happen, a new Safety Regions Act 2.0 should be adopted. A key factor in this new act is the objectives safety regions have to meet instead of the current practice where safety regions are prescribed by what means they have to perform. Those objectives are related to the region’s risks and hazards. Furthermore, to become more resilient it is concluded safety regions should be more open to societal input. While the use of a quality and or safety management system is of no influence on organizational resilience.