Canton on Emergency Management

Power Point - Too much of a good thing?

At the invitation of a colleague, I spent this morning at an emergency management "summit". Unfortunately, as someone with aspirations of being a professional speaker, I have the tendency to not only listen to what is being said but how it is being said as well. The messages presented by the speakers were good and they seemed to be competent in their subject areas. However, in every case, they sadly diffused their message by misusing PowerPoint.

It was the classic "death by PowerPoint" syndrome. There were too many slides for the time alloted, too much information on slides, minuscule point sizes on the text - just about every mistake that you can make in a PowerPoint presentation, including reading the slides to the audience.

I might have shrugged it off, but this evening I received an email from my friend Hal Weston about a New York Times article called We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint. In the article, reporter Elisabeth Bumiller discusses how senior military leaders are becoming disenchanted with PowerPoint, finding that it, "stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making."

This is not a new idea. Many years ago I was fortunate to attend one of Edward Tufte's seminarson presenting data and information and he made the same observation about Power Point as well as presenting some very compelling evidence of how PowerPoint has led to some pretty spectacular failures. His essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within should be required reading for anyone thinking of using PowerPoint.

So what's my point? As a speaker, I use PowerPoint and there are certainly situations where it is both expected by the audience and useful in conveying themes. But PowerPoint does not convey data well nor does it help communicate complex situations or ideas. Used incorrectly, it can diffuse the impact of your presentation, something I found out the hard way recently when my slides were converted from PowerPoint 2007 to an early version and I failed to double check them before the presentation. So use PowerPoint sparingly, use it wisely, and remember that the audience came for you, not your slides!

Oil Explosion in the Gulf Offers Case Study for Emergency Managers

One of the things that we have trouble dealing with as emergency managers is the slow-onset incident. This is an event that starts out so slow that no one takes it seriously until it's too late. In fairness, they're not always easy to spot and we have a built-in tendency to normalize events, so it's easy to identify the problems after the fact but hard to anticipate them during the incident.

There's a good case study playing out in the Gulf of Mexico. It hasn't got a whole lot of media play, but on Tuesday a deep-water drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon, exploded and caught fire, killing 11 workers and injuring many others. Yesterday, it collapsed and sank. The rig is (or was) located 50 miles from New Orleans and produced over 300K gallons of crude oil a day from the seabed located 5000 feet below.

So imagine for a moment a leak that could not be capped, sending over 300K gallons of crude oil a day towards the US coastline. Did anyone consider this scenario when they heard the rig had exploded? How many days has it taken to realize and react to the potential threat?

Fortunately, the Coast Guard is reporting that oil does not appear to be leaking from the well head and the weather forecast is keeping the spill from the coast, at least for the time being. There's a lot of clean up underway for the fuel oil on the platform and the crude spilled during the explosion and fire.

Two thoughts to take away from this:

1. It's not really over yet. That's the bad thing about slow-onset events. It's easy to ignore them, particularly if you're afraid of crying. "Wolf!"

2. This is a great opportunity to activate emergency operations centers in potentially affected communities and states to develop contingency plans. Even if they are never needed, this is an opportunity to train on a real potential crisis, not just a fictional scenario. And speaking of scenarios, this is one that could be translated to other locations. 

April 2010 Newsletter - Risk Management 101

Download Newsletter April 2010

Volcanic Ash Disrupts European Airspace

Here's an example of the type of cascading effect that is hard to predict when you're doing a risk analysis. The eruption of a volcano in Iceland created an ash plume somewhere between 20,000 to 36,000 feet in height very close to the Atlantic air routes that link the United States and Europe. The drifting cloud forced closures of airports in England, Ireland and France resulting in thousands of flights being grounded indefinitely.

Think beyond just the many travelers that have been affected by this. Just as on 9/11, this type of mass grounding will have an impact on air cargo, mail, and shipping.

How do you predict his sort of thing? Well, you don't. However, since we do have the example of 9/11 and now the volcano at Eyjafjallajokull, we can predict that a disruption to supply chain can and will occur. Are you ready?

A Solution to Terrorism Theater?

In a field filled with so-called "security-experts", I have always found Bruce Schneier to be one of the few voices of reason on security issues. In a recent article in the New York Times, he makes the case for what we emergency managers would call an "all-hazards" approach to security.

As we have learned over the years, scenario-based planning has its uses but can be too specific and therefore limiting. Instead, we have tried to develop a flexible response capability using a functional approach that addresses response-generated needs rather than focusing solely on specific agent-generated needs. In other words, we really don't care whether the incident was caused by a natural hazard or by a human agent - tasks such as rescue, evacuation, and sheltering will still be accomplished in essentially the same way.

Schneier makes the case that we have let our response to terrorism be influenced by very specific scenarios, creating a situation where our security is actually less effective than we would like. In Schneier's words:

"A far better strategy is to spend our limited counterterrorism resources on investigation and intelligence - and on emergency response. These measures don't hinge on any specific threat; they don't require us to guess the tactic or target correctly. They're effective in a variety of circumstances, even nonterrorist ones."

Schneier is proposing a strategy of mitigation (prevention to you Homeland Security types) and preparedness. Sure sounds familiar...

Terrorism Theater at Its Finest

In keeping with the foolishness of April 1st, the hot story circulating on the Internet these days is about the supposed attempt by terrorists to insert explosives in breast and buttock implants. The story apparently originated with a Sun article published in March. Considering the Sun's penchant for sensational stories, I was a bit skeptical.

However, what is instructive is how fast and far even a silly story can spread. Maybe it spreads because it is silly. Fortunately, the Sun has given us a marker for tracking the spread of this particular story. In the story, the chemical name for the  explosive PETN is given as pentaerythritol tetrabitrate. Since the name is actually pentaerythritol tetranitrate, it's easy to spot how many bloggers picked up on the story without doing even limited fact checking. A quick Internet search shows over 3500 stories with this misspelling.

In addition, the story has found its way not only into the National Enquirer and Fox News, as one would expect, but into major newspapers and wire services around the world.

It took about a minute to track down the Sun's "terrorism expert", Joseph Farrar. Mr. Farrar is actually a journalist and editor of the WorldNet Daily, the website that "broke" the story in February, supposedly based on reports from MI5. Mr. Farrar has never claimed to be an expert on terrorism and has said he was misquoted.

The trouble with stories like these is that they contain just enough truth to make people nervous and start the folks at Homeland Security looking for new toys and techniques to counter this latest "threat". So when they surface, let's do our homework and try to stop them before they grow - we've got enough real problems without adding someone's fantasies into the mix!

But I do wonder how they planned to detonate such a device....