Disasters overwhelm plans and collapse government organizations, which sometimes manage to rebuild into something new. Using the cases of Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in northeastern Japan, this dissertation looks at how local and meso-government structures reorganize themselves, and at what that tells us about the State’s role in disaster response. Crisis management centers (CMCs) may lose control entirely for part of the response, but in most cases they reorganize and rebuild their way into relevance. Through doing so they express, and to some extent create, the State’s idealized image of itself responding to crisis. Many operational teams start with makeshift organizations, and gradually build more elaborate structures. As the disaster continues and their processes become more routine, operational teams often find themselves faced with decisions for which they have no formal basis, and their choices reflect ad hoc, personal conceptions of the State’s role. While evaluations project professionalism, completeness, and stability, a review of the processes shows that in these cases they were divergent and improvised. There was no standardization across any of the jurisdictions studied. Moreover, most of the reports elided the emergence that had occurred. What we see at all of these levels was a struggle to rebuild a normalcy. There were striking similarities, but also significant variation in the areas that were left undefined by the permanent organization. Disasters both reaffirm government – by demonstrating why stability is to be prized – and threaten it on an existential level. As a result, disaster response is not being treated as a public policy area.