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This page is a running collection of the key things that emergency managers should know.

It’s drawn from the blog posts in 2020 and 2023.

1. The capacity of wetlands to attenuate flood waters.
2. How to guard a house from floods.
3. How to correctly describe wind directions.
4. The difference between radius and diameter.
5. Henry Quarantelli.
6. How to use the photocopier.
7. Germ theory.
8. How to give directions.
9. Why Chernobyl was like that.
10. And why Hurricane Katrina was like that.
11. And why 9/11 was like that.
12. And why Grenfell was like that.
13. The NATO phonetic alphabet.
14. A bit about genealogy and taxonomy.
15. Wren’s rebuilding after the Great Fire of London.
16. The history of the fire brigade.
17. The history of the police service.
18. Where to get good late night food near where you work.
19. What makes you happy.
20. Recognising burnout in yourself and others.
21. Geography.
22. Some geology.
23. A bit of chemistry and physics.
24. Capability Brown.
25. Burial practices in a wide range of cultures.
26. Serious doesn’t have to equal boring.
27. What to refuse to do, even for the money.
28. Three good lunch spots within walking distance.
29. The proper proportions of your favourite cocktail.
30. How to listen.
31. How to behave with junior members of staff.
32. How to manage upwards.
33. Seismic magnitude scales.
34. Wind speed scales.
35. Air quality indicators.
36. A bit about imperialism.
37. The wages of construction workers and nurses.
38. How to get lost.
39. How to (politely) tell somebody to get lost.
40. The meaninglessness of borders.
41. Normal accident theory.
42. How maps lie.
43. A bit about IT disaster recovery.
44. What went wrong with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
45. John Hersey’s Hiroshima article.
46. Tuckman’s stages of team development.
47. What your boss thinks they wants.
48. What your boss actually wants.
49. What your boss needs.
50. The airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.
51. The rate at which the seas are rising.
52. How children experience disaster.
53. How disability affects disaster experience.
54. Why women and girls experience disaster differently.
55. How to quickly synthesise and draw meaning from multiple sources.
56. How to corroborate information.
57. Who you can turn to for help.
58. How to respect what has come before.
59. How to give a METHANE message.
60. Kubler-Ross stage of grief model.
61. The difference between complicated and complex.
62. How to create an Ishikawa diagram.
63. A bit about crowd dynamics.
64. Which respected disaster researchers resonate with you and why.
65. How to think critically about the status quo.
66. How to perform CPR.
67. Advanced google search techniques.
68. Local emergency management and adjacent legislation.
69. The seven principles of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement.
70. The difference between the Hyogo and Sendai Frameworks.
71. The link between John Snow and modern epidemiology.
72. Lord Justice Clarke’s four principles for disaster victim identification.
73. How failures of imagination have had consequences.
74. How to foster reciprocity.
75. How to challenge disaster myths and Hollywood disaster tropes.
76. Gestalt theory.
77. Kahneman’s decision making heuristics.
78. Swiss cheese model of safety.
79. ‘No ELBOW’ contemporaneous record keeping.
80. How to use conditional formatting in Excel.
81. Murphy’s Law.
82. The key languages spoken in your relevant communities (and ideally a greeting and thank you in each).
83. Resilience direct/platforms to share docs or maps.
84. How to provide and take information in a clear structure way (eg. METHANE or IMARCH).
85. How to say no politely (at first) to things that aren’t your remit.
86. A sense of humour.
87. The best snacks to keep you going at 2am.
88. How to ‘lower your hand’ on teams/zoom etc (see also: how to use mute/unmute).
89. The key roles and ranks indicated in emergency service and military uniforms (tabards, rank markings, what that gold string means etc).
90. Key acronyms, when to use them and when to avoid them.
91. That senior management likely won’t be interested until the wheels are starting to fall off.
92. How to think outside the box and capture the rationale for doing so.
93. Who you can call when you don’t know who else to call. And what number to call them on.
94. Know your local significant infrastructure and the risks presented by its failure.
95. Limits of any delegated decision authority.
96. Understand the direction of the wind (both literally and figuratively).
97. Water (and blame) flows downhill.
98. The sticky bun that nobody else has eaten will come back to haunt you 2 hours later.
99. You are not an island.
100. Requirements of the COMAH and Pipeline Safety Regulations.
101. Turner’s Disaster Incubation Theory.
102. Who the FEMA Administrator is.
103. How to make use of ‘screenshot’ to share information without having to wait for it to be circulated by the originator (and when not to do this too).
104. How to turn a document in to a PDF, and how to reverse it if needed.
105. ‘You can’t fix stupid’.
106. Something (anything!) about bioterrorism.
107. The importance of infant feeding in emergencies.
108. The difference between personal safety and process safety.
109. The most dangerous place is between the fire service and the catering van.
110. A brief history of civil protection and the formative events in it’s evolution.
111. How to recognise signs of trauma (and vicarious trauma) in yourself and others.
112. At least 4 different routes to your place of work, using different means of transport.
113. That COBR doesn’t have an A.
114. Key response operation names and what they mean.
115. 1917-1920 flu epidemic.
116. Basics of crowd psychology.
117. A rough idea of what different 999 service specialists/vehicles do.
118. A rough idea of what happens behind the scenes when you call 999.
119. Where to find the keys.
120. Read old Inquiry/Inquest/prevention of future death reports like they’re your favourite genre.
121. How to spot and counter a microaggression.
122. Respect the news images, they have different access to information to you.
123. The importance of searching out lived experiences.
124. Vital importance of effective communication.
125. Something about structural stability and the technical terms for standard building components.
126. Something about asbestos.
127. Know what you don’t know.
128. Know that there is no accounting for politicians.
129. Remember that saying it once is usually not enough, repeating it frequently helps.
130. Know the history of your profession in your country (and elsewhere).
131. Find ways to cope (or thrive) in the messiness of trans-disciplinary working.
132. Take time to reflect, and understand your own ethics and the ethics of the organisation(s) you work with.
133. How to be open to challenge and constructive criticism.
134. How to defend yourself against criticism which is just mean.
135. Decision makers won’t always follow your advice – figure out how you deal with that.
136. There is always something you won’t know so you should always be looking to learn.
137. What spolia is.
138. A bit about the insurance industry.
139. How to forward your phone.
140. How to block your number from coming up if you have a suspicion somebody is screening your calls.
141. A little about the ‘chain of custody’ and steps to preserve evidence if required.
142. How to communicate when normal methods fail.
143. Grounding techniques that work for you.
144. Tips to keep your typing speed at a minimum of 60 words per minute.
145. An understanding of the difference between prudent business continuity and panic buying.
146. The maturity of language to talk about crowd incidents whilst being aware of the myth of panic.
147. What the Sphere standards are.
148. Signs of organisational trauma.
149. Lencioni’s 5 disfunctions of a team.
150. The difference between important and urgent.
151. A little about disaster capitalism.
152. There isn’t always a single right answer, but there can be many wrong answers.
153. Why it’s important to read the detail of the forecast, not just reach to the ‘colour’ of the warning.
154. The difference between a lesson identified and a lesson learnt. 
155. How to describe what your job is succinctly at social engagements.
156. What happened in the Carrington Event and why it’d be different now.
157. How El Nino and La Nina have global effects.
158. The pros and cons of lean processes and efficiency.
159. Know when a situation needs simplicity and when it needs detail. 
160. Enough about your stakeholders to be able to manage the politics of seating plans
161. How to connect the projector/printer/label making machine to your computer.
162. Parkinson’s Law of public administration.