Snow and Local Governance

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From Politico, this analysis of why the small snow storm caused havoc in the DC metro area earlier this week. See DC’s Snow Disasters have Political Roots.

Don’t miss comment about local residents being intelligent, but self-serving, when it comes to failing to heed official warnings and recommendations!

Hopefully, when the predicted blizzard arrives later today, some lessons may have been learned by citizens and public officials.

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Updates:

In defense of the relative low level of experience and investment in Washington, DC. area see: It is totally rational to freak out about snow in Washington

 

Update on Flint Water Crisis

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In recent days, Flint Michigan received an emergency declaration from the President.  Here are some details, from CNN, on what is involved in remediating the crisis. No simple fix: Infrastructure, health issues loom large in Flint water crisis

Updates:

Book Review: A Futurist’s Guide to Emergency Management

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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.

Japan’s Emergency Management System

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Thanks to the author, Prof. William Siembieda, for an advance look at one chapter of a new book.  It is Chapter 6: Japan’s Megadisaster Challenges: Crisis Management in the Modern Era, in F. Baldwin and A. Allison (Eds.) Japan: The Precarious Future (2015). New York: Social Science Research Council and NYU Press. [It costs $35. from the NYU Press; see details here. ]

Usually I only share information about documents available at no change, but this book chapter is of special interest and I recommend it. Not only does it cover the recovery efforts after the Sendai Earthquake and related disasters of March 2011, but is also analyses the national emergency management systems of Japan, NZ, and China to a limited extent.

For those in the US who wonder how recovery could be managed in ways other than the system set out in the National Disaster Recovery Framework, this chapter will give you some ideas.  The Diva has been told that there are few articles in English that explain how the Japanese systems of crisis management works at the national level. Another good reason why the chapter is worth reading.

If you would like more information, or if you would like to chat with the author, who also has done extensive research on recovery in NZ, you can reach him here.

Two On-Going, Man-Made Crises

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  • 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:

2. The Drinking Water Situation in Flint Michigan.

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.

Issues re Housing Displaced Residents

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From a San Francisco newspaper article: Disasters are Coming, But There’s Nowhere to Stay. Most of us are familiar with the need to find temporary housing units, but how many emergency managers have estimated the staff needed to do the job?

Some excerpts from the article:

The constant threat of major disaster is a way of life in earthquake-, drought-, and landslide-prone California. In San Francisco, where civic leaders stress the inevitability of a temblor on the scale of the 1906 quake within the next 30 years, so is being unspeakably ill-prepared.

1906 was a 7.8 quake on the San Andreas fault. If that happened today, as many as 64,500 people would need immediate shelter — and another 250,000 would be displaced, but would somehow not need a bed — according to a recent city controller’s report.

Dealing with that mass of survivors would require more staff than the city’s Human Services Agency has handy — by a wide margin. To be precise, the city would be short 22,030 disaster workers.