Spontaneous Volunteers in Emergencies and Disasters

Abstract

Spontaneous volunteers are often involved in response and relief efforts during and after emergencies and disasters. These volunteers perform various tasks: search and rescue, first aid, response to fires, distributing food and water, cleaning debris, and caring for animals. It is clear that spontaneous volunteers have played a vital role in preventing the loss of life and property following emergencies and disasters in the past. However, the lack of organization and knowledge about emergencies and disasters among these volunteers creates challenges and risks like liability and security issues. These factors make professional responders reluctant to use spontaneous volunteers in emergencies and disasters. By completing a literature review on the benefits, challenges, and risks of spontaneous volunteers in emergency and disaster response and relief activities, we aim that this study will speed up the fundamental studies on the topic. Creating strategies for these volunteers’ efficient usage and incorporating them into the current emergency and disaster management systems can significantly reduce disaster risks.

1. Introduction

The frequency and effects of disasters are increasing globally. This increase parallels the increase in human–environment interaction, the number of persons exposed to hazards, and the increase in asset values. As of the 21st century, natural and man-made disasters such as September 1, 2001 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the 2011 East Japan earthquake, the Syria Crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic and climate migration, climate refugee, flood, drought, and desertification caused by climate change have had a global impact [1]. According to a report published in 2020 by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, there have been 7348 natural disasters in the past 20 years (2000–2019), and as a result of these disasters, approximately 1.23 million people have died, 4.2 billion people have been affected, and 2.97 trillion US dollars have been lost to global economic losses. According to the same report, disasters have become far more frequent and severe than they were in the past 20 years (1980–1999) (while 4212 natural disasters occurred, 1.19 million people died, 3.25 billion people were affected, and 1.63 trillion economic losses were caused globally) [2]. Emergency and disaster authorities worldwide and scientists in the field of emergency and disaster place a strong emphasis on the disaster risk management approach, in contrast to crisis management-oriented disaster management approaches [3, 4, 5, 6]. Making societies disaster-resistant is a crucial component of disaster risk management, in addition to reducing structural risks. There are many instances where emergencies and disasters outstrip a nation’s response capacity. Volunteering is thus one of the key initiatives for enhancing societal resilience to disasters [3, 4, 7, 8].

Volunteering plays a significant role in many countries’ response and recovery efforts during emergencies and disasters. When a disaster strikes, volunteers help in various fields, such as technical rescue, fire response, medical response, debris cleaning, logistical support, and transportation [8]. According to the World’s Volunteerism Report, millions of volunteers participate in activities across a range of sectors, and their economic impact is equivalent to almost 61 million full-time employees per month based on the number of full-time employees [9]. These statistics show that volunteering activities are important for achieving sustainable development goals.

Volunteering activities in terms of emergencies and disasters are carried out in two ways as formal and informal [10]. The activities of the Red Cross or the Red Crescent organizations can be examples of formal volunteering. On the other hand, informal volunteering is when people go to the affected area voluntarily and engage in response and relief activities after an emergency or disaster event, called “convergence reaction” [11] in the literature. This has been happening instinctively since the existence of human beings. These volunteers who participate in emergency and disaster response and relief activities are referred to by several terms in the literature, including spontaneous volunteers, unorganized volunteers, unaffiliated volunteers, or informal volunteers [12, 13]. These volunteers are referred to in this study as “spontaneous volunteers”. Various definitions of spontaneous volunteers can be found in the literature. Generally, they are defined as: “spontaneous volunteers are individuals or groups of people who seek or are invited to contribute their assistance during and/or after an event, and who are unaffiliated with any part of the existing official emergency management response and recovery system and may or may not have relevant training, skills or experience” [14]. During past emergencies and disasters, it can be argued that these volunteers performed crucial roles. Below are some of the disasters that spontaneous volunteers participated in:

• The majority of rescue efforts following the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed 242,000 people, was carried out by survivors [15, 16], and approximately five months after the earthquake, 420,000 temporary shelters were completed, with an estimated 100,000 voluntary citizens participating [17].

• Most rescue activities after the 1980 Southern Italy earthquake were carried out by local citizens [18, 19].

• After the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, almost ten percent of the city’s two million residents participated in recovery efforts [20].

• After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, seventy percent of the population of Santa Cruz and sixty percent of the population of San Francisco participated in response efforts [21].

• After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, approximately 630,000 to 1.4 million people are estimated to have engaged in various voluntary activities [22, 23].

• After the 1999 Turkey Marmara earthquake, most of the initial responses, especially search and rescue, were done by spontaneous volunteers [24].

• After the September 11 attacks, approximately 30,000 to 40,000 volunteers went to Ground Zero in New York for relief work, while the American Red Cross recruited 22,000 spontaneous volunteers in the two-and-a-half weeks following the attacks [25].

• After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Harris County received an average of 3500 spontaneous volunteers’ registrations per day during emergency operations [26], while American Red Cross used 50,000 spontaneous volunteers [27].

• After the 2013 Khartoum flood, with the initiative of a Sudanese group, more than 7000 volunteers and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of aid were collected quickly [28].

• After the 2013 Canadian Alberta flood, approximately 15,000 spontaneous volunteers were used [29].

Although spontaneous volunteers participate in various activities and make financial contributions during emergencies and disasters, their lack of training and skills in response and recovery activities might provide obstacles rather than benefits. Alexander [8] defined the reasons for this situation as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Barriers that unorganized volunteers may create in emergencies and disasters [8].

According to the historical experiences above, spontaneous volunteers have significantly contributed to response and recovery studies, both qualitatively and quantitatively. For the reasons outlined in Figure 1, these volunteers nevertheless posed threats to not only the affected individuals but also the professional responders in the same disaster events. For instance, it was determined that 2.2 rescuers per person pulled alive from the debris in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake died because they lacked the necessary skills, knowledge, and tools for urban search and rescue [30]. Similar obstacles prevented emergency response teams from reaching the scene following the 1999 Turkey Marmara earthquake because spontaneous volunteers caused a 32-kilometer traffic jam [24, 30].

The function of spontaneous volunteers in emergencies and disasters is discussed in this paper. The study aims to advance fundamental research on spontaneous volunteerism in emergencies and disasters. The study is divided into the following sections: volunteers as human resources in emergencies and disasters, spontaneous volunteers, benefits of spontaneous volunteers in emergencies and disasters, challenges and risks of spontaneous volunteers in emergencies and disasters, and conclusion.

2. Volunteers as human resources in emergencies and disasters

Disasters are becoming more frequent and more severe, which has an increasingly detrimental impact on human life and the environment. Additionally, it is becoming more challenging to predict and manage the effects of disasters due to various factors, including the growth in human population, technological advancements, greenhouse gas emissions, excessive consumption habits, destruction of forest areas, and inappropriate use of land. Therefore, studies on disaster risk management are the main emphasis of the integrated disaster management system that is employed in the majority of countries. However, it is clear from past disasters that governmental resources alone were insufficient to manage disasters in the nations where the disaster happened. For instance, the cascading disasters that occurred in 2011 in Japan, which has one of the greatest models for disaster management, resulted in almost 22,000 fatalities, and the country went through its worst crisis since the Second World War [31]. At this point, emergency and disaster management organizations require both human resources and modern technologies in addition to a strong institutional structure. In summary, human resources are one of the crucial components of the integrated disaster management system.

Dynes’ classification of these structures in his “Organized Behavior in Disaster” study [32] is the most well-known when it comes to the organizational structures associated with emergencies and disasters. In this classification, which provides a valuable framework for comprehending the various categories of emergency and disaster volunteers [12], there are four types: Type I (established organizations), Type II (expanding organizations), Type III (extending organizations), and Type IV (emergent organizations). Type I organizations perform regular tasks within existing structures, such as police forces routing traffic in the affected area when the disaster occurs in a region or the firefighting personnel responding if a fire has occurred. Type II organizations are often formed due to a community or organizational planning and perform regular tasks. Examples of these organizations are the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. These organizations are defined as organizations that carry out humanitarian aid activities other than disaster events and undertake various tasks in disaster situations. Type III is defined as organizations that undertake non-regular work. These organizations are not expected to participate in emergency and disaster responses but can operate in the crises in their area of expertise. For example, in an emergency and disaster, a sports club or a faith group may mobilize its members to distribute clothing and food to people in the affected area, or a logging company may send the machines and their staff for post-disaster debris removal work [12]. Although Type III organizations can work in coordination with Type I and II organizations, they do not operate under the effective control of these organizations. Finally, Type IV organizations perform non-regular tasks as Type III and generally assist affected people before Type I and II organizations reach the affected area. This group is the group that is not included in the official emergency and disaster management systems, has a lack of information about disaster responses, and makes the first response in matters such as search and rescue and first aid.

In the most general sense, volunteering is defined as “any activity in which time is given freely to benefit another person, group, or organization” [33]. Types of volunteering in the literature are broadly considered as formal and informal. Formal volunteering is considered as the activities carried out actively through a formal organization or government program, while informal volunteering is defined as the activities carried out without the umbrella of a formal organization or government [10]. Regarding emergencies and disasters, it is possible to see that volunteering is classified differently [34, 35]. Shaskolsky [34] discussed volunteering in disaster situations in four forms. According to these:

1. Anticipated individual volunteers—those who individually meet broad expectations of society—for example, doctors using their expertise to respond to disaster-affected people medically

2. Anticipated organization volunteers—those who are regularly associated with an organization, such as volunteer Red Cross or Red Crescent, whose participation in these organizations is expected and planned

3. Spontaneous individual volunteers—those who provide individual assistance in the emergency and early stages of a disaster—for example, individuals who conduct search and rescue activities or first aid

4. Spontaneous organization volunteers—those who join an organization themselves following an emergency or disaster. These spontaneous volunteers can be connected with four separate organizations:

   1. Those who help a regular emergency and disaster organization;

   2. Those who are in an ad hoc organization formally created to deal with specific disasters;

   3. Before the disaster, those who use an organization not related to disasters for disaster assistance;

   4. Those who respond to disasters as part of an informal group.

Volunteers play a crucial role because of the uncertainty of the effects of emergencies and disasters that occur today and the limited capacity of nations to respond. For instance, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies reported that their organization’s “disaster response and early recovery program” had a reach of 650.2 million people in 2020 and that they had roughly 14.9 million volunteers [36]. In 2018, more than 12.7 million Canadians (aged 15 and over) officially spent 1.6 million hours for charities, nonprofits, and community organizations. This number was said to be equivalent to about 858,000 full-time jobs [37]. This shows that volunteering increases social cohesion and is a significant labor and economic resource for societies.

Volunteers typically perform a variety of tasks in the wake of emergencies and disasters, including search and rescue operations, technical assistance, and psychological support [8, 13, 38, 39], and they can offer support to those affected outside the local area, mainly through social media, with materials that the society may require and fundraising campaigns. As previously mentioned, these volunteer efforts for people affected by emergencies and disasters is carried out by expanding organizations or spontaneous volunteers.

3. Spontaneous volunteers

The term spontaneous volunteer [26, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45] used in this study is also widely used in the literature with different terms such as helpers [46, 47], unaffiliated volunteer [48], informal volunteer [12, 49], walk-in disaster volunteer [50], and emergent groups [25, 51]. It is possible to say that the use of these various terminologies typically developed as a reflection of people’s actions following emergencies and disasters. People frequently go to the affected area in a converging reaction to take part in response and relief operations when an emergency or disaster event happens. Given that the topic is how people behave after a disaster, it shows that sociological research constitutes the earliest study on the behaviors that literature refers to as “convergence” and “emergent” [11, 14, 20, 32, 46]. While Dynes et al. [20] claimed that the majority of people’s activities following the disaster were a significant and positive impact on civic responsibility, Fischer [52] classified these actions as “altruism” in his study on people’s behavior following the September 11 attacks. Disaster volunteers may participate in crisis response and relief efforts for various reasons, while altruism is often a major driving force for those who have experienced a crisis [53]. There are three ways to observe convergence behaviors: personal convergence, informational convergence, and material convergence [46]. The direct physical human movement to the disaster-affected area is represented by the personal convergence form mentioned here. According to Fritz and Mathewson [46], there are five different types of motivation for this personnel convergence reaction following a disaster: “the returness” (victims or survivors at the time of crisis), “the anxious” (those who want to be empowered through mobility, such as by learning about family or friends), “the helpers” (people who are motivated by altruism), “the curious” (disaster tourists), and “the exploiters” (opportunistic individuals looking to gain recognition or, at worst, access to vulnerable individuals to exert power in any number of ways). Kendra and Wachtendorf [54] added to these types of personnel convergence the motivations of “the supporters” (encouraging and expressing appreciation to first responders) and “the mourners or memorializers”. Although the reasons people move to disaster-affected areas can vary due to the unpredictable effects and consequences of modern disasters as well as the sociocultural differences of the affected communities, the types of personnel convergence discussed here act as an essential framework for comprehending these motivations.

Different definitions of spontaneous volunteering exist, similar to the terms that are used for these volunteers. One of the most accepted definitions of spontaneous volunteering in the literature is as follows: “spontaneous volunteers are those who seek to contribute on impulse- people who offer assistance following a disaster and who are not previously affiliated with recognized volunteer agencies and may or may not have relevant training, skills or experience” [14]. In their study, Whittaker et al. [12] defined spontaneous volunteering in a broader sense as follows: “people who work outside of formal emergency and disaster management arrangements to help others who are at risk or are affected by emergencies and disasters. Such volunteerism may take place before, during, or after an event. Informal volunteers may participate as individuals or as part of a group, on short or long-term basis, regularly or irregularly, and in situ or ex situ. Their participation may be spontaneous and unplanned, or deliberate and carefully planned”. According to the criteria provided, it can be concluded that following a crisis, spontaneous volunteers appear as a natural phenomenon with various motivations and can contribute significantly to the labor force and the economy through their activities. As an illustration, professional cleanup efforts following the Florida tornadoes of February 1998 were anticipated to cost $8 million and require 90 days to complete in Osceola County, but spontaneous volunteer efforts cost roughly $1.4 million and took 55 days to complete [55]. Modern mass media, such as today’s technologies and social media, play a significant part in the development of this reaction in addition to human instincts. For instance, 2.3 million people participated in the 2014 Malaysian Airlines search for the missing flight MH370 by scanning 24,000 square kilometers of satellite imagery published on the Tommod website [56]. After the crisis, it is also possible to argue that contemporary mass media has drawbacks. Even if the disaster is relatively modest, the media’s dramatization and exaggeration can turn it from a local emergency to a national or international event [11]. While the efforts of spontaneous volunteers during the times of crisis cannot be discounted, their lack of organization, planning, knowledge, and skills regarding emergencies and disasters and uncertainty regarding the legal responsibility of professional organizations can result in these volunteers doing more damage than good. The types of activities that these volunteers have participated in as a result of previous emergencies and disasters, as well as the benefits, challenges, and risks associated with these efforts, will be covered in the next sections of the study.

3.1 The benefits of spontaneous volunteers in emergencies and disasters

When countries’ disaster management systems are reviewed, it can be concluded that they are getting more specialized and that the response studies are being carried out more effectively. However, first response tasks are typically carried out by the locals who are already there in the period between the disaster’s occurrence and the professional disaster managers’ arrival at the affected area [12, 13, 55]. According to a Canadian research, 37% of people who experienced a major emergency or disaster resorted to family members, 24% to neighbors, and 15% to friends for assistance, while just 15% turned to the local government, 9% to first responders, 9% to the police, and 5% to the state government [57]. Undoubtedly, established organizations are essential in the times of crisis, but this study demonstrates how vital spontaneous volunteers are to response and relief operations.

Spontaneous volunteers participate in various tasks throughout emergency and disaster response and recovery phases. These activities may change depending on the kind of emergency or disaster and the location where it occurs. Spontaneous volunteers can be a valuable human resource for identifying vulnerable groups in the social structure, cultural content, and demographic structure and for more access to the necessary resources and geographic information that may be required by response teams and accelerate response efforts [13, 29]. Twigg and Mosel [25] presented the activities of spontaneous volunteers in emergency and post-disaster events in 9 main categories. Table 1 illustrates that these activities show that spontaneous volunteers are generally involved in basic or special skills. In particular, they play a significant role in carrying out many tasks that call for only basic skills, such as gathering, transporting, and distributing relief supplies and clearing debris, in addition to performing critically essential responses such as search and rescue, first aid, and firefighting until professional teams arrive at the affected area. According to emergency managers in the study by Daddoust et al. [13] on the use of spontaneous volunteers, they can be used for tasks such as “collecting and organizing donations”, “assisting with evacuations”, “food distribution”, “meet and greet”, “providing food and drink”, and “pet services”. As another illustration, following the 2009 “Black Saturday” bushfires in Victoria, Australia, more than 22,000 volunteers provided online support [27], and in response to the call of farmers whose farms were damaged, citizens helped to rebuild farms [12]. A community group called “BlazeAid,” which aims to carry out recovery operations and assist rural areas devastated by natural disasters, was founded due to these actions [12].

Disaster response activities of emergency groups and spontaneous volunteers
Medical; search and rescue first aid and emergency medical care donating blood	Shelter; shelter provision hosting displaced people
Information and communications; registration of victims, displaced persons, and evacuees making lists and searching for missing people translating issuing and sharing messages and information	Security and Coordination; informal coordination with other organizations and activities preserving the safety of property controlling traffic and crowds
Psychological and bereavement; psychological guidance handling the deceased ensuring proper rites are observed at burials	Preparedness; issuing warnings and helping with evacuation emergency safety (e.g., protective measures against flooding such as sandbags)
Buildings and services; removing debris and clearing streets damage assessment building inspection restoring services (e.g., communications) and equipment cleaning up after disasters	Advocacy; challenging actions and practices of official response organizations presentation of survivors’ complaints and compensation advocacy influencing policymakers to minimize disasters in the future
Provisions and Supplies; collecting, transporting, unloading, storing, and distributing relief supplies, clothing, etc. providing food and drinks to people and emergency responders (e.g., setting up kitchens and canteens)	Other; collecting funds for victims caring for animals

Table 1.

Activities of emergent groups and spontaneous volunteers [25].

Given that both the procedural restrictions of official organizations and the affected society may not be aware of these official procedures and rules, spontaneous volunteers can be tools that can lead to beneficial results for both groups after emergencies and disasters [13]. Effectively utilizing spontaneous volunteers can reduce the number of deaths and minimize labor costs [13, 55] while also bringing about intangible advantages for the affected community’s mental health, social cohesion, trust, and harmony [58]. Orloff [22] proposed that the efficient use of spontaneous volunteers will aid professional teams’ response activities. In view of this, spontaneous volunteers, who typically originate from the affected community, might be a valuable tool in response activities due to their familiarity with its linguistic, cultural, and structural aspects. Additionally, it is possible to make efficient use of community-based and religious leaders and organizations that can assist not only in the response effort but also in the procurement and evacuation for the organizations established pre-disaster and expanding organizations. According to Orloff [22], because spontaneous volunteers can provide advantages such as “local experts”, “cultural competency”, “language skills”, “specialized skills and resources from work or other experience”, “official responders capable of doing more advanced work”, “official responders capable of assisting community in healing and emotional recovery process”, and “savings money and time”, relevant institutions can perform more effective response and resource management if they are integrated into emergency and disaster management systems. There are guidelines and tool kits published by the US, New Zealand, and Australia [27, 59, 60, 61] as well as the “Security and resilience-Community resilience-Guidelines for planning the involvement of spontaneous volunteers” [62] published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for the effective use and management of spontaneous volunteers in addition to academic studies suggesting models [7, 13, 43, 44, 63, 64, 65]. It should be noted, however, that the process of integrating spontaneous volunteers into management systems is challenging and complex due to variety of factors, including emergency managers’ resistance to using them, the various personality traits and skill sets of these volunteers, the variety of disasters, and social and cultural differences.

In summary, spontaneous volunteers are human resources that can help with a variety of problems during emergencies and disasters. At this point, it can be stated that societal resilience will improve and disaster damage will decrease if this unavoidable human resource can be integrated into the current emergency and disaster management systems and appropriately utilized.

3.2 The challenges and risks of spontaneous volunteers in emergencies and disasters

Without being a part of an established or expanding organization and going to the disaster area with various motivations, spontaneous volunteers cause risks and challenges to themselves, those affected by the disaster, and professional organizations. According to the research, these volunteers could present the affected area with a wide range of risks and challenges. They generally run the potential of being damaging due to several issues, such as a lack of coordination, knowledge, and skills; security issues; and legal liabilities. These factors make professional responders reluctant to work with these volunteers, and they refer to them as “disaster with disaster” [66].

Fernandez et al. [53] identified two main categories of risks: emergency and disaster response volunteers are not used effectively and they are unorganized and do not have adequate training. The first of these risks, ineffective use of spontaneous volunteers by emergency and disaster managers, may create a poor public perspective of emergency and disaster response and increase the probability of deaths, serious injuries, and financial loss [12, 53]. The second risk is that unorganized and untrained spontaneous volunteers can hinder the efficient use of resources and endanger both professional first responders and disaster victims as well as themselves. The rescue of 800 individuals from the debris following the earthquake in Mexico City in 1985 by untrained, spontaneous volunteers—100 of whom died in the process—is one of the most commonly mentioned instances of this situation in the literature [20, 30]. Another illustration is that after the Hebei Spirit oil spill in South Korea in 2007, physical harm and infections were brought on by volunteers taking part in the response operations without having the proper personal protective equipment and not knowing the toxic effects of the oil [67]. Integrating spontaneous volunteers into the current emergency and disaster management systems can reduce the abovementioned risks. As a result, professional organizations do not have the time during a crisis to identify who has the necessary abilities and to train them for field response activities [25]. On the other hand, if they can be integrated, both these human resources and other resources will be used efficiently, easing the burden on professional organizations that work in the disaster area.

Particularly for the people affected by a disaster, the first hours after it strikes are crucial. After a disaster, there is less chance of people being rescued as time goes on. Therefore, given the importance of professional rescue teams reaching and responding to the area as soon as possible, the presence of numerous individuals, equipment, support materials, and vehicles in the area can cause obstructions and hinder professional responders [25]. With more than 22,000 deaths, the 1999 Marmara earthquake (also called Gölcük) in Turkey is one of the deadliest disasters in history. International recovery was necessary because this disaster struck the most populated region of the country, which at the time had a crisis management-focused disaster management system. Spontaneous volunteers who arrived from the disaster’s area and other parts of the country were crucial to many operations, including search and rescue. However, professional disaster responders were unable to access the area due to a 32 km-long traffic jam caused by spontaneous volunteers who arrived in the area after the earthquake [24]. Nearly 20 years after this earthquake, on October 30, 2020, an earthquake hit in Izmir, one of the largest metropolitan cities. Since then, the country has adopted an integrated disaster management system and improved its organization and coordination of disaster response. However, as in the Marmara earthquake, the access of the emergency response teams was delayed as the volunteers came to the disaster-affected area with their vehicles and caused a traffic jam. These experiences demonstrate the requirement of incorporating spontaneous volunteers into the current disaster management system in order to provide the quick and efficient response strategy that is essentially intended.

According to Orloff [22], there are three drawbacks to using spontaneous volunteers during emergencies and disasters: “liability,” “physical and emotional concerns,” and “the potential lack of internal readiness within agencies”. First, liability is viewed as a drawback in many studies in the literature because of the legal uncertainties surrounding the use of spontaneous volunteering in emergencies and disasters. According to Twigg and Mosel [25], this circumstance is as follows. “There may be uncertainty about legal liability of volunteer responders (or official organizations they assist) for deaths, injuries or damages suffered by volunteers, or by disaster-affected people as a result of their actions. A related issue is lack of insurance cover for volunteers.” Liability is one of the reasons professional emergency and disaster managers are reluctant to engage spontaneous volunteers. In the study conducted by Daddoust et al. [13], emergency managers indicated “liability issues” as one of the most problematic and challenges, while “sued for spontaneous volunteer actions” and “sued by spontaneous volunteer” were the subjects they saw as the most potential risks. Additionally, the literature also discusses the problem of security [12, 13, 25, 39]. While spontaneous volunteers create a security problem for themselves and those affected by the disaster, they can also be seen as abusing the disaster situation. In addition to looting materials of economic value, they can also abuse the current situation differently. For instance, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, a group of Baptist missionaries from the US who had gone to the disaster area was apprehended at the Haiti-Dominican Republic border with 33 children [12, 68]. Later, this group claimed in their statements that they had taken orphaned and abandoned children to give them the opportunity to rescue, care for, and adopt. Eventually, it was confirmed that the children were not abandoned nor orphaned [68]. The dimension of physical concern is the situations that can hinder the work of professional organizations because spontaneous volunteers are typically unorganized and uneducated and can pose a risk of death and injury to both themselves and those affected by the disaster. On the other hand, the emotional component, the involvement of people who have already experienced emotional harm before an emergency and disaster or as a result of this event, and the work to overcome these feelings can both worsen one’s situation and cause emotional harm to those who are affected by the disaster. Emergency and disaster managers will need to be more careful about using spontaneous volunteers at this stage because their appearance on the scene is almost inevitable. Following the September 11 attacks, response and recovery operations involving 30,000–40,000 volunteers posed security risks, and a large number of the first volunteers who came on the spot to offer help were emotionally exhausted during the search and rescue operations [12]. A study on the management of spontaneous volunteers after the attacks found that emergency managers rarely take spontaneous volunteers into account when planning, and because they do not self-care, spontaneous volunteers may be traumatized, become victims of disaster, and need services [69]. Finally, it was stated that the potential lack of internal readiness within agencies, which is seen as a disadvantage, will be ensured by the inclusion of spontaneous volunteers in the studies and their use, if they are compatible with the current institutional structure. At this point, within the institutional structure, there may be preparation issues such as limited formal staff to manage spontaneous volunteers, limited affiliated volunteers to work with and mentor these volunteers, limited time to create and implement a management plan, language barriers between employees and the affected community, and existing organizational culture [22].

4. Conclusion

Volunteerism has a significant impact during emergencies and disasters. The significance of volunteering activities is emphasized in both scientific studies and initiatives to reduce disaster risks. Community resilience is crucial in reducing disaster risks considering the limited resources of countries and the increasingly complex effects of disasters. Therefore, spontaneous volunteers can be a valuable human resource in reducing risks. It is clear from the literature that this subject is gaining more and more attention [43]. In this study, which the spontaneous volunteers are in emergencies and disasters, what kind of activities they take part in, and the benefits, challenges, and risks they provide as a result of past emergencies and disasters are given as a result of the literature review. This study is aimed to contribute to the studies to be done on this subject. Spontaneous volunteers, who come to the affected region with various motivations after emergencies and disasters and operate in many sectors, provide tangible and intangible benefits. However, professional organizations are reluctant to use spontaneous volunteers because they have challenges and risks such as insufficient knowledge and skills, lack of organization, security and liability problems, and limited resources, equipment, and personnel in existing management systems. Because spontaneous volunteers cannot be ignored in the affected area and the response resources are limited, it is clearly seen that it is a critical requirement to integrate these volunteers into disaster management systems. It can be said that this integration is a challenging due to the complex nature of emergencies and disasters, different types of disasters, different personal characteristics and skills, and the social and cultural differences of spontaneous volunteers.

In summary, integrating spontaneous volunteers, who are essential human resources, into emergency and disaster management systems and establishing a legal framework will significantly reduce disaster risks.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.