A Futurist’s Guide to Emergency Management, by Adam S. Crowe. CRC Press, 2015. Reviewed by William Flagler, Jr., Deputy Director of the Arlington County VA Office of Emergency Management.

This book provides a realistic vision for the emergency management field. This book is an excellent resource to students who want to enter the emergency management field and also a resource for those that are currently practicing as it helps to show how change can be embraced and not shunned.

Professionals in the field of emergency management routinely look to past disasters to help plan responses to future ones. Many times the look into the future is not very far and narrowly focused on issues of the day. This book goes further by allowing the reader to think about social, political, and economical challenges among others that will face emergency managers in the future.

Emergency management as a discipline is shaped by hazards specific to local communities and now in 2016, terrorism. The tools and methods used to respond or prepare people to respond may not be adequate. Who knew ten years ago that crowd sourcing data from social media could one day be effectively applied in damage assessments after a disaster?

This book will help a practitioner start to think about how to operate an emergency operations center differently or better ways to prepare the population. This book was an excellent read and does not go into a land of “make believe.” It is grounded in facts and a down-to-earth, common sense look into the future.

I recommend this book without reservation and look forward to the next book from Adam Crowe.

• These two pending crisis events are the types of hazards/disasters that should keep you up at night:

1. Los Angeles, CA Gas Leak – This past week the State of CA declared an emergency for a major gas leak, occurring since Oct. See:

•  California governor declares LA-area gas leak an emergency.
• LA-area residents implore officials to approve plan to mitigate gas leak

2. The Drinking Water Situation in Flint Michigan.

• Flint Wants Safe Water, and Someone to Answer for Its Crisis
• Dear Gov. Snyder: You Have to Go to Jail – by  Michael Moore
• Federal Emergency Management Agency to monitor Flint’s water crisis
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As you might expect from Michael Moore, here is his unique perspective on the Flint water problem:

Your staff and others knew that the water in the Flint River was poison — but you decided that taking over the city and “cutting costs” to “balance the budget” was more important than the people’s health (not to mention their democratic rights to elect their own leaders.) So you cut off the clean, fresh glacial lake water of Lake Huron that the citizens of Flint (including myself) had been drinking for decades and, instead, made them drink water from the industrial cesspool we call the Flint River — a body of “water” where toxins from a dozen General Motors and DuPont factories have been dumped for over a hundred years. And then you decided to put a chemical in this water to “clean” it — which only ended up stripping the lead off of Flint’s aging water pipes, placing that lead in the water and sending it straight into people’s taps. Your callous — and reckless (btw, “reckless” doesn’t get you a pass; a reckless driver who kills a child, still goes to jail) — decision to do this has now, as revealed by the city’s top medical facility, caused “irreversible brain damage” in Flint’s children, not to mention other bodily damage to all of Flint’s adults. Here’s how bad it is: Even GM won’t let the auto parts they use in building cars touch the Flint water because that water “corrodes” them. This is a company that won’t even fix an ignition switch after they’ve discovered it’s already killed dozens of people. THAT’s how bad the situation is. Even GM thinks you’re the devil.

From the OECD, this new book: The Changing Fact of Strategic Crisis Management. The 138 page book is available to read online. You will have to purchase the hard copy. 

Thanks to Eric Stern, one of the authors, for the citation.