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Starting this month, EM Solutions includes articles by two colleagues who are experts in emergency and crisis management. Articles this month include:
10 Strategies for Improving Emergency Management by Timothy (Tim) Riecker
The 3 Most Important Things to Do When A Crisis Hits by Erik Bernstein
Effective Plans Are Toolboxes: Five steps to a better plan by Lucien Canton
Posted by Lucien Canton on 03/30/2019 | Permalink
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Posted by Lucien Canton on 03/29/2019 | Permalink
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Cartoonist Walt Kelly’s beloved character Pogo is credited with coining the phrase, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Although Pogo was referring to pollution, it applies equally well to disasters where we are almost always our own worst enemy.
Disasters are a social construct. That is, they are created by the interaction of impact of the event on our vulnerability. The issue is that we frequently create conditions that increase both the impact of the event and our vulnerability. In Rising Tide, his study of the Mississippi flood of 1927, John Barry notes how the commitment to levees as flood control measures increased rather than reduced the risk of flooding. In The Big Burn, Timothy Egan describes how a major firestorm in 1910 caused the fledgling Forest Service to adopt a policy of total fire prevention, a policy that actually increased the fire danger in national forests. Both policies were well-intentioned but flawed and had consequences with which we still deal today.
History is replete with other examples, some of the them the result of government decision making but many others caused by greed or expediency. San Francisco suffered in 1906 because a system of emergency cisterns was allowed to fall into disrepair because it was viewed as outdated and no longer needed. The Johnstown flood of 1889 was the result of shoddy dam construction. The same could be said of the holding tank that burst and flooded Boston with over 2 million gallons of molasses in 1919, killing 21 people.
We cannot eliminate all vulnerability. It is too late to move major cities such as San Francisco or New Orleans to safer ground. The Portuguese government considered such a move in 1755 following the great earthquake, fires, and tsunamis that destroyed Lisbon and discarded the idea as unworkable and fraught with political consequences. But we can be vigilant about resisting development that creates new vulnerabilities and we can mitigate the hazards we know about.
Surprisingly, mitigation is many times a hard sell, even though we have evidence that every dollar invested in mitigation yields $4 in societal savings and almost the same amount in savings to the US Treasury. That’s an incredible return on investment. The barrier is not financial or even the adequacy of the proposed mitigation. It comes down to the sociopolitical environment and cultural acceptance. In other words, people need to commit to mitigation. Given our track record to date, that’s a major obstacle to overcome.
Posted by Lucien Canton on 03/27/2019 | Permalink
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Posted by Lucien Canton on 03/07/2019 | Permalink
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Developing an effective mission statement
Posted by Lucien Canton on 03/07/2019 | Permalink
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