The emergency called into action a wide variety of existing plans, programs, procedures, and relationships. In some cases, these served the effort quite well. In others, they revealed historical problems that had been taken for granted, or showed how some long-established ways of working needed to be revised for better performance.

"We do a lot more drills. We invite a lot more people to our drills.... And also during those drills every aspect of the response is drilled, which really wasn't the case in the past."

There was universal agreement among the interviewees that emergency response plans are important, but they do not guide specific action in a specific event. Planning provided participants with the opportunity to identify likely threats, think through their capabilities, identify key resources, explore contingencies, and develop action scenarios. This thinking process prepared them with a general framework for action, rather than a blueprint for specific actions.

Most responders have neither the time nor the inclination to pull out "The Plan" when disaster strikes. Rather, they rely on what one respondent called "muscle memory" to know what to do in an emergency. This "muscle memory" is built through practice and drills that involve multiple organizations, and at least one respondent noted that active involvement of related organizations was a key feature of post-9/11 planning for his organization. Most respondents emphasized that practice for emergencies was by far the most important form of preparedness. Whether through drills or actual experience in smaller events, the organizations that had practiced response and recovery activities were better equipped to act decisively and effectively. For some, like the NYPD and FDNY or the State Police and National Guard, this meant carrying out their regular missions on a larger scale. For others, such as the NYC HRA, Consolidated Edison, the City's huge electrical utility, and Verizon, the largest telecom provider, frequent "mini-emergencies" associated with keeping complex operations operational had given their staff the knowledge and experience to act quickly and decisively. NYC OEM is responsible for organizing drills for dealing with possible risks. As a consequence of one of these planned exercises, Pier 92 was empty and available to become the substitute EOC because it had been reserved by OEM for a bio-terrorism drill on September 12.

The response to the September 11 attacks showed that the City of New York did not have in place a coordinated incident command system (ICS) as this concept is generally understood in the emergency management community. Its absence became manifest in the immediate response to the attacks on September 11, when the FDNY and the NYPD established separate command posts and were unable to effectively communicate with each other. As a consequence emergency response organizations that were well-trained and able to act individually are now concentrating on better coordination with other responders.

"When the people who are in command aren't there, are we prepared to handle that?...Continuity that includes a succession planning process is vital. And we never had needed to do that before...where organizations were gone or people who made the decisions in organizations were gone, on the private side as well as the public side."

One outcome of the loss of the WTC was the stark realization that succession planning is important to any organization at risk of losing a substantial number of its top managers. For example, the executive director and several top level staff of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PA)—the developer and owner of the WTC and a key agency in the regional economy—were lost in the collapse, as were key personnel in many of the businesses housed there. Many government officials we interviewed mentioned new efforts to build succession into their contingency plans and business continuity strategies.

The death of the top executives of the PA was clearly a loss of strategic leadership, which remained a void for several months. However, the PA also provides an example of a resilient organization that was able to carry out its normal functions despite the loss of its top headquarters staff. A key feature of the PA is its remarkably decentralized structure, both organizationally and geographically. The PA runs four airports, port facilities, office and telecom facilities, a rail transit line, and other facilities in the New York-New Jersey metro area, and thus facilities leadership was in place to manage and secure those places not immediately struck in the attack. The PA has long been known as an agency that promotes from within, so this combination of managerial talent and decentralization provided a pool of expertise from which to draw as it recovered from its losses. This decentralization mirrors large firms that have staff in multiple locations, which can create redundancy and resilience in the face of disaster. Smaller organizations or those operating in a single location regardless of size, such as many of those housed in the WTC, did not have decentralized data and work locations. Organizations like these need to carefully consider succession planning and the delegation of authority to manage and lead the firm in a crisis.

"The team started forming with people from the GIS community in New York City, from the private sector, . . . City employees and volunteers as well. We all just showed up; nobody waited to be called; everybody brought what they had."

Some of the most successful activities rested on years of relationship and trust building among key individuals. Familiarity and trust in the competence of people who had worked together for many years helped the work move smoothly and quickly in the absence of formal procedures. In the GIS effort, a community of practice, called GISMO, had already existed for many years. Its members were immediately mobilized as a volunteer data analysis team that worked for weeks on Pier 92, gathering and managing data, conducting analyses, and producing and refining maps for every organization involved in the EOC.

Key private sector executives had spent substantial parts of their careers in City government. Starting in the earliest hours of the crisis, these individuals volunteered or were tapped by the City staff who knew them. These professionals not only knew their current business capabilities, they understood how the City government worked and could therefore direct and deploy the resources of their companies in ways that were immediately and lastingly useful. There are many examples of this kind of relationship, but one of the most visible and significant was the rapid and sensitive work by Accenture (with no initial contract) to lead the design and implementation of the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94.

Because these professional networks existed, consultants were able to offer their services to the City, and the City was able to tap these services in very short order, without lengthy negotiations. In many cases, consultants and vendors, particularly in information technology and telecommunications, were willing to aid the City with free or reduced-price goods and services, and, in the short term, City staff were able to shortcut the usually cumbersome procurement and contracting systems.

"There were hundreds and hundreds of partnerships. . . starting the second or third day of the operation. People who could help, people who wanted to do different things, community organizations, governmental units, private businesses."

Formal organizational structures and procedures are inherent in large organizations of all kinds and these formed a backdrop of stability and predictability throughout the response and recovery period. For the most part, organizations played their expected roles according to their formal missions. Yet, respondents described a remarkable willingness by all parties—government at all levels, the private sector, and nonprofits—to abandon or circumvent needless hierarchy or the routine chain of command and do the job as they perceived it. This was not true in all cases—and in some, maintaining the chain of command was essential—but where routine "bureaucracy" would have prevented quick action, key officials at various levels were often able to make use of their experience, network of contacts, and the willingness of both organizational and individual volunteers to obtain information, equipment, supplies, and other resources.

Nevertheless, the notorious "stovepipe" programs and funding streams of government were very much in evidence. Many of the success stories had to do with efforts to overcome or work around them, at least temporarily. Some of the more difficult situations were a direct result of this traditional structure. For instance, the traditional separation of public safety agencies meant no single communication mechanism connected them during the response period. Different radio, telephone, and e-mail systems kept them from sharing early information about the situation and from working in coordination, especially during the immediate response. Since that time, several local, state, and national efforts to build integrated emergency communications systems have begun.

In human services, nearly every service organization, whether public or nonprofit, is organized and funded to carry out specific, stand-alone programs. Their organizational structures, policies, processes, and incentives all reinforce this way of working. Existing procedures and their natural reluctance to share confidential information further emphasized barriers to collaboration. Ironically, interviewees from service organizations involved in the WTC recovery process often recognized that their structures and incentives were working against their goals to serve people quickly and compassionately. A number of them described the frustration of having to ask grieving families to supply information and documentation that had already been provided to at least one other organization. On the positive side, human service organizations clearly recognized how sharing client information could help them deliver better, faster, more compassionate service. As a result they have begun a longer term effort to build an information sharing mechanism that supports both service quality and client confidentiality.

Emergency contracting and procurement mechanisms appeared to be used to great advantage throughout the response period, using established State and City purchasing vehicles where they existed and informal arrangements when they did not. The State Ethics Commission issued an opinion, requested by the State Office for Technology, that under the circumstances the ethics provisions of the Public Officers Law would not be violated if state agencies solicited or accepted gifts from the private sector. Knowing that an eventual accounting would be needed, agencies made some attempt to document the equipment and services they acquired. The state government also established a database for tracking the more than 50,000 offers received from citizens and businesses. This tracking system was operational by September 13. This was easier in Albany, removed from the event itself, than in New York City where the outpouring of assistance was difficult to comprehend, much less manage. One City official described this as "one of our biggest challenges" and noted "initially we realized we were going to need to [account for] this, we tried to set things up with sign out sheets . . . towards the end, looking back, trying to figure out what did we buy, what was donated . . . that was a huge task. . . . Having the ability to put an emergency inventory system in place is really critical." However, from a consultant’s point of view the City’s willingness to forgo routine processes was essential: "it didn’t require that you follow the normal procurement process, which would have crippled everything. It caught up to the process. . . down the road [by] monitoring what was going on." While this relaxation of rules was hailed by nearly everyone we talked to, they all agreed that the whole weight of the former process moved back into place within a few months.

Some unexpected needs, such as the need to fly over Ground Zero to capture remote sensing and visual data, were so unusual that no existing legal procedures or routine relationships could be immediately invoked. The process of securing permission and resources to carry out this effort was invented as it unfolded, with frustrating gaps in understanding and overlaps of authority among people and organizations that had never met or worked together before. Because the fly overs involved civilian, military, local, state, and federal authorities, delays and misunderstandings added to the confusion. One person recalled that it took days to get the effort up and running. "I think everyone now recognizes that we'd like to set up contracts in advance, and specs, and have a company ready to go, so that when something happens, [you] lift up the phone, fly, no questions, everyone knows [what’s happening], and they're up in the air and we're getting that intelligence back to us." This interviewee and others recommended that sample contracts and specifications be set up in advance so in an emergency this kind of work can begin immediately.

In a related situation, long-standing traditional tensions between government and the media prevented collaboration for gathering needed data. Almost immediately after the attack, a news organization offered the City a helicopter with a stabilized camera platform for aerial photography but the unprecedented offer was bounced from one organization to another and eventually refused because the aircraft was not a government-controlled asset.

Tensions also surrounded the need to serve immigrants and undocumented aliens in a situation that was considered a crime perpetrated by foreign nationals. Nonprofit organizations, especially, voiced concern that the threat of law enforcement prevented people from seeking the help they needed. In response, the Red Cross set up a large tent in a park across the street from the official Family Assistance Center on Pier 94. No law enforcement personnel provided security services in the tent, so assistance and translation services for people speaking more than 50 languages could be provided in a less threatening environment.