"People had seen just horrible things and it gave everybody a way to channel their energies into something that was helping, a personal [way] to apply talents that you’re good at to something that’s productive. . . "

By community capacity we mean the collective ability of a human community, such as a city or a region, to sustain itself through crises that challenge its physical environment and social fabric. This includes the capacities to plan and protect, and to respond and recover a full range of functions. This kind of capacity goes well beyond emergency planning and management to include all the normal functions of the community.

Community capacity was evident in the wide range of activities and actors involved in the WTC response and recovery. Individuals and organizations used every available local resource and created new and slack resources by putting routine functions on hold and harnessing the outpouring of assistance that came from other places. Many kinds of information technology were provided voluntarily by the City's contract suppliers or others with no ties to City government. Sometimes these resources were requested by government agencies, often they were volunteered without request. At times more resources came forward than could possibly be put to use. For long periods, businesses hosted government agencies that had lost their buildings or access to their buildings. Individual professionals such as translators, psychologists, and counselors volunteered in the Family Assistance Center. Union members worked as volunteers to sift and remove the debris from the WTC site. Government employees and their business and nonprofit counterparts worked around the clock for weeks at time. Traditional procedures were cut short, often replaced by emergency processes and supplemented by temporary authorizations to allow the rapid acquisition of goods and services. And while this last item posed headaches for strict accountability in later months, there were very few instances of fraudulent activity by any person or organization.

Interviewees also emphasized that size makes a difference. One emergency management director in another large city said that in terms of local resources no other city in America was better able to respond to the crisis. In terms of first response capability alone, he noted that "the NYPD is larger than some standing armies." In addition, the City's public utilities are many orders of magnitude larger and more self-sufficient than in most other places.

By contrast, most local governments remain "have-nots" in terms of resources, technology, preparedness, and response and recovery capability. Small businesses and most nonprofit organizations have similar characteristics. These smaller jurisdictions and organizations seldom have the expertise, tools, or depth of staff that their larger counterparts do. As a result their capacity to respond and to sustain a response is relatively weaker and slower. Some, especially small businesses, cannot survive. The disparate capabilities of larger and smaller organizations and jurisdictions raise public policy concerns regarding the investment programs or infrastructures that might cushion smaller organizations from the worst effects of extreme crisis.