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Berlin, Haiti and A Lesson From History

I've frequently said that there's really nothing new under the sun and that we can learn valuable emergency management lessons by studying history, particularly the history of crisis. We emergency managers often think almost exclusively in terms of natural disasters, a tendency that is probably as frustrating to our Homeland Security colleagues as is the perception that they think solely in terms of terrorism is to us. So we sometimes need to stretch ourselves when it comes to our research and not just look at historical natural disasters.

During the past week I've been following the operations in Haiti, as many of my friends and colleagues have been doing. Over the years, I've learned that most emergency management issues are logistical in nature - you have to identify what is needed, find it, and get it to the right people. We are certainly seeing this in Haiti, where logistics is hampered by the use of a single airport and limited infrastructure.

It occurred to me that we have faced this situation before, albeit in a very different environment, in Berlin in 1948-49. Following World War II, Germany was divided into four occupation zones and Berlin, which was about 100 miles within the Soviet Zone was divided into four sectors. After a series of escalating crisises, the Soviets halted all surface transport to Berlin in June 1948. Only two air corridors guaranteed by treaty remained. Some two million people were cut off with limited supplies.

The Allies responded by mounting the most ambitious airlift ever attempted. Berlin need some 1,534 tons of food daily, plus another 3,475 of coal and gasoline. This would increase by another 3,000 tons as winter approached. To meet this need, the Allies improvised a system that was delivering some 8,893 tons per day by April 1949, more than had previously been brought in by rail before the blockade. The system relied on a single point of control, maximized use of limited numbers of aircraft, and quick ground turnaround times.

Now clearly there are tremendous differences between Haiti in 2010 and Berlin in 1948. While Berlin still had significant damage from the war, it had been on the road to recovery for three years. Templehof airport was in much better shape than the one at Port au Prince. More importantly, for all their squabbles, the Allies were more cohesive and more hierarchical than the vast array of international aid groups trying to get into Haiti.

Still, much of what was done to streamline operations during the Berlin airlift might have helped the situation in Haiti. The airlift was run like a railroad, with a single point of control for determining flight schedules. Each aircraft got only one chance to land and were turned around if they missed it. Aircraft were limited to a specific type that could be loaded and unloaded quickly. Crew remained with the aircraft and took off as soon as it was unloaded. Supplies were consolidated and prioritized at staging areas. Heavy equipment was disassembled and flown into improve and build new airfields.

We have done this before. There is a lesson in the Berlin airlift that could help inform our planning for future catastrophes. We would be foolish not to add it to the lessons we're currently learning (or relearning?) in Haiti.

January 2010 Newsletter: Learning from TSA's Failures

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And A Child Shall Lead Them: What A Toy Can Teach Us About Security

In my last blog, I talked about the diminished respect that the Transportation Security Agency was experiencing as a result of their reactive and ludicrous policies. I based my comments on a sampling of media reports and comments to various professional email lists and blogs. However, I overlooked a very interesting source for gauging public opinion on TSA - the customer reviews at Amazon.

It seems Playmobil issued a toy set in early 2008 called the Playmobil Security Check Pointthat comes complete with a passenger with roll aboard luggage and two security screeners. Leaving aside the strange choice of theme for a children's toy, what is really instructive are the Customer Reviews. Every one of the comments I reviewed used humor to send the same message (and not always in a nice way!): we don't take TSA or their procedures seriously. Here are some samples:

• It's too bad that they never came out with the "Pat-Down" edition, where fat guards are groping women for weapons, and turning customers away who refuse the degrading method of search.
• This toy would be a lot more realistic with about 350 people standing in line for an average of an hour.
• I especially appreciated the enclosed signed photo of Michael Chertoff and his letter explaining how necessary it is to start educating today's youth early with toys like these, especially as their elders just don't seem to be taking the whole thing seriously, what with posting snarky reviews on Amazon and all...
• I'd like to see some diversity in one of the guards and perhaps the other guard could have some drool dripping from it's lip to reflect the extremely low IQ needed to obtain this type of position.

Note that these comments were posted in early 2008, before TSA's latest fiasco. One wonders what these folks would say if this toy were being issued now. It might be tempting to dismiss these comments as attempts at humor by marginal elements of society but when you hear the same message from professionals in security and emergency management and read reports by reputable journalists and publications, you have to believe that something is wrong with TSA's approach to security.

Enough Terrorist Theater?

Like many of you, I have been following the Christmas Day terrorist event and the resulting political theater that has resulted from it.What has been interesting to me is not the the event itself but rather the public outrage that is being directed at the Transportation Security Administration.

As someone who has worked in local government, I know that there are times when it is politically important to be seen to be doing something, anything, to react to a crisis, even if that action is really meaningless. This sends a message that you are 1) taking the event seriously and 2) doing everything possible to deal with the crisis. However, this time TSA has just gone too far.

When the terrorists of September 11th seized planes using box cutters, TSA missed that they were successful because of the element of surprise, not their weapons, and took away our pocket knives, knitting needles, and other sharp, pointy objects. This despite the fact that not even Chuck Norris could hold off a hundred angry passengers with a one-inch Swiss Army Knife while he whittled his way through the reinforced cockpit door.

When another terrorist tried to light his shoes on fire, TSA required us to remove our shoes for inspection, forgetting that the limited amount of explosives that can be contained in a shoe has to be carefully placed to be effective and that there are generally two other passengers in proximity to the terrorist.

Next came the scare that terrorists would use binary explosives and TSA took away our water bottles, perfumes, and 4.5 ounce toothpaste tubes, despite arguments by experts that binary explosives are complicated and unstable and unlikely to be used successfully by terrorists.

We went along with all of this because it seemed to make sense at the time. After all, the people charged with our protection were being cautious and reacting to actual events. But this latest knee jerk reaction goes too far. Does anyone feel safer because you can't go to the toilet, work on your projects, read or watch a program for an hour before landing? How do you feel about a pat search?

In putting such ludicrous procedures in place, TSA is sending the wrong message and calling into question all of their procedures. It suggests that TSA cannot think creatively or pro-actively and can only react to past events.  The result is a considerable loss of reputation and respect. We are now seeing airports refusing to implement the new searches and articles in the media comparing the number of terrorists caught to the number of TSA employees arrested for various crimes. People are viewing TSA, rather than terrorists, as the problem.

What ever happened to the concept of risk analysis? TSA continues to view passengers as problems rather than allies and insists on perpetrating the myth that we can be protected from everything at all times. The simple fact is that terrorism, like crashes, are a risk that we take every time we travel by air. We need to accept it and move on. TSA does a decent job of keeping us safe but it is unrealistic to expect that they will be successful every single time. TSA needs to make us partners in their efforts to keep us safe, not treat us likethe enemy - passengers have demonstrated on several occasions, starting with September 11th, that they are willing to be part of the solution. Knee-jerk reactions create more disruption in an industry already on the ropes and, far from keeping us safe, actually furthers the terrorist goal of destroying us economically.

Electronic Cockroaches? What next?

No, this is not another one of those zombie-related blogs we've been chuckling over for the past year. It's actually about something that could help save lives in a structural collapse.

Those of you who have been involved in urban search and rescue know that the likelihood of someone surviving in a collapsed structure significantly decreases after 72 hours. Locating the victim quickly is absolutely critical to their survival. We've got a lot of tools to help, such as camera probes, sensitive listening devices, and trained dogs, but it's still a slow and painstaking process.

Imagine if you could just upend a bucket of tiny electronic cockroaches that scramble through the debris and precisely locate a victim by detecting the carbon dioxide in their breath. And imagine that these tiny helpers were cheap enough to be considered disposable.

Sound far fetched? Not to the researchers at UC Berkeley's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab. They've got a working prototype called DASH (dynamic autonomous sprawled hexpod) that mimics the movement of cockroaches, allowing it to crawl over objects twice its height and survive a four story drop. The unit is cheap (less than $50 in parts) and easy to reproduce. Researchers are hoping to have a unit that is smaller and able to scale walls in production within the next three to five years.

For more information, see the article by David Downs in the San Francisco Chronicle. Be sure to to check out the video of DASH in action.   

December 2009 Newsletter: Guess What's for Dinner?

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Causing Panic?

In today's paper there was an article about a revised report on the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. Among the criticisms leveled against the university was not issuing timely warnings about the incident. The report did acknowledge, though, that university officials hesitated in issuing a warning because of a desire not to create a panic.

This is a fairly common thread that runs through after action reports. Officials hesitate to provide a warning because they fear creating a panic. Yet starting with the work of Dr. E.L. Quarantelli in 1954, research has continually demonstrated that panic occurs only under very specific circumstances and people do not generally tend to panic when warned of a crisis. So why do we keep doing this?

The answer is simple: fear. We are afraid of making a decision until we have all the facts because we are worried that we will make a mistake. In some cases, those mistakes can cost lives or result in significant costs, so this is not just a case of nervous jitters. In other cases, it could result in public embarrassment. It doesn't help that we were raised on stories like Chicken Little and the Boy Who Cried Wolf that pre-dispose us to hesitate and second guess ourselves before giving warning.

This fear goes beyond just warning. I've noticed a tendency among new emergency managers to hesitate to activate plans during a potential crisis for the same reasons. I know - I did the same thing when I started out in this profession.

However, the problem with a fast moving crisis is that you never have all the information you need. Sometimes, you just have to go with your gut. There are two things I tried to keep in mind when making decisions about issuing warnings or activating plans. The first is to remind myself that the risk of my personal embarrassment is vastly outweighed by my duty to protect those in my charge. Personally, I'd rather be pilloried for being overly-cautious than for failing to warn people who were later harmed by the crisis. The second is that the best test of plans is an actual activation in a real crisis. Activating your crisis team in the early stages of an incident is better than trying to do it in the middle of a full crisis and you can always conduct a brief "what if exercise" and debriefing if the incident is resolved without intervention.

So if you find yourself hesitating whether or not to issue a warning, remember that it's not really about creating a panic, it's about your personal fear of failure. Once you understand this, you'll make the right choice.

It's the End of the World as We Know It!

I haven't had the chance to see 2012 yet. I'm not particularly fond of disaster movies - I either find myself laughing at times that make the rest of the audience uncomfortable or bore my family with running commentaries. I did, however, catch a History Channel show that purported to have some science behind it. In fairness, after an hour of hype (more fun than most disaster movies, by the way), they actually did air the parts of the interviews where the scientists say that the triggering events on which the film was based have no actual impact on the earth.

The show reminded me of a historical lecture I once attended. The speaker hammered us on the importance of dealing only with facts. He then speculated about a document whose existence he felt could be inferred from existing documents and built up a whole theory leading to some controversial conclusions based solely on this non-existent document. So much for dealing with fact.

Like most of you, I end up having to answer questions about potential events like 2012. (I actually don't get asked much about 2012 after I point out that the Gregorian calendar ends on December 31, 2009.) I think it is important that we as emergency managers maintain our objectivity about the "disaster of the month" and use it as an opportunity to emphasize personal preparedness. We need to be the voices of reason by demonstrating an understanding of the true risks associated with the current media-driven fear and putting those risks in context.

One of the reasons that I suggest that emergency managers study historical disasters is that there truly is nothing new under the sun. Pick your disaster. Earthquakes? A recent book, Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archeology, and the Wrath of Godby Amos Nur, breaks ranks with traditional archeology to suggest that the destruction of early civilization by earthquake was much more prevalent than we previously thought. Floods of biblical proportions? Read Ryan and Pitman's Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History. Super-volcanoes whose explosions cause year-long winters? Try Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization by David Keys. Plague? Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe by William Rosen demonstrates the impact of worldwide pandemic. Climate change? See Brian Fagan's The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations or any of his other books on historical climate change.

It really has all happened before. Even so-called "unthinkable" events such as a reversal of the earth's magnetic poles or asteroid strikes have occurred in the past, some fairly recently (the 1908 Tunguska event was believed to be caused by a meteor or asteroid) . Are there risks associated with potential catastrophic events? Of course there are. However, it is important to put those risks in their historical context - it's all happened before, it will happen again, and we as a race will most likely survive. The human race is remarkably resilient. The only real question is do we live in fear or do we put those fears to rest with facts and get on with our lives?

November 2009 Newsletter

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Professional Organizations

My apologies  for not posting for the past few weeks. I was preparing several presentations for the International Association of Emergency Managers conference in Orlando FL last week. I piloted a new workshop I've been developing on the fundamentals of emergency management programs and presented a breakout session on the use of the administrative plan (those of you who are IAEM members can see my article in the October issue of the IAEM Bulletin). I was also asked to deliver one of the plenary sessions, speaking on the 1927 Mississippi flood and its social, political, and economic impacts.

I always look forward to the IAEM conference. It's a time to recharge my batteries, so to speak, by connecting with friends and colleagues who remind me why I'm in this profession. It's also a great opportunity to learn new skills, hear new ideas and to network with potential partners.

Like many of you, I belong to a number of associations and professional societies. I believe that such membership is important for continued professional development. But I believe a professional association should provide value to its membership, so I'm pretty picky about the ones I choose to join. Unfortunately, I occasionally meet colleagues who belong to no professional organizations. If you're not in touch with the recent developments in your profession and do not have a network of proffessional contacts to back you up, how can you be effective in your profession?

If you're not in a professional organization like IAEM or a local group like the California Emergency Services Association, give some thought to what you're missing. You don't have to be the Lone Ranger!