Review
Every day we are hit with something rather it’s a disease, fire, weather, or HAZMAT train derailment disaster whose impacts know no limits we need to be prepared for them. The devil truly never sleeps, but too often we do when it comes to preparedness. We really should not be surprised anymore when disasters happen. There are not many Black Swans out there but there are plenty of Grey Rhinos that decision-makers choose not to invest in preparing for. Now preparedness is a tough sell for Emergency Managers. We ask for funding to improve preparedness where the return on investment at best is that hazards have no impact on the community (which can seem like a waste of time or investment, a Preparedness Paradox) or at worst, preparedness efforts fail to protect the community (levees during HC Katrina). To best serve our communities, we must do everything we can to build capabilities on both sides of the disaster framework, left of boom (pre-disaster) and right of boom (response), this is not an all-or-nothing endeavor. Every mitigation effort matters and the goal is to reduce the impacts of disasters, not prevent them.
Disasters require good leadership left and right of boom, good leadership is knowing that the boom is coming. As leaders we can't afford to put our heads on the sand, we played the ostrich paradox game with COVID and hoped it would not come, as we saw hope is not a plan (at least not a good one) and now we are reaping the outcomes. Leaders need to constantly develop capabilities to mitigate the impacts of the next boom and the root cause. Just like teaching our soldiers to ably, tourniquets saved lives on the battlefield, applying mitigation measures at the connection points of our infrastructure may save our communities. Sudden loss of blood was a killer on the battlefield, tourniquets slowed the blood loss buying more time for casualties to reach hospitals for surgical intervention. Just like the tourniquet we want to build systems that can fail safely in a way that buys us time to pivot and delay again and again to slow the cascading losses and buy us time to stop the bleed.
Takeaways for Emergency Managers
The devil is indeed always awake, and she(he) sings a sweet lullaby waiting for us to sleep so he(she) can strike. If the devil never sleeps neither should we, lest stay woke and ready for the BOOM!
Takeaways for Emergency Managers
Disaster (the BOOM) is not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when and we must be ready on the left and right of the boom.
Avoid the preparedness paradox and the all-or-nothing evaluation of disaster when in fact disasters have many dimensions.
The goal of preparedness is to lessen the impact of disaster not to prevent it, we should develop mitigations with this mindset. Don’t fight the BOOM, get your head around it. There will be losses in a disaster, but we can lessen the loss through preparedness.
Be aware of the six leadership biases that can plague preparedness management.
Myopia
Amnesia
Optimism
Inertia
Simplification
Herding
Maintain good situational awareness (SA) by leveraging the SA elements of Perception, Comprehension, and Projection. Do not get caught off guard.
Believe the improbable can be possible, you cannot wish away the boom that is already here.
You have only nine meals of time (3 days) to get resources, especially food and water flowing to disaster survivors before people start acting in destabilizing ways, so plan for it!