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30 Days, 30 Ways: Day 1

30 Days, 30 Ways: Day 1

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The origins of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge are unclear. The details aren’t important here, other than to note that what started as an awareness raising campaign in the United States reached ‘viral’ levels in July/August 2014; even I recently joined in.

But what does any of this have to do with emergency management I hear you ask?

Well, September is national preparedness month in America. It’s an event that I’ve been keeping an eye on for the last four years but has yet to make the transition across to the UK in the same was as the Ice Bucket Challenge.

With a relatively benign risk environment and high degree of political reticence I can’t imagine the same type of event would have much traction this side of the pond. However, that doesn’t make it any less interesting to follow the activity of stateside emergency management colleagues and consider what could be appropriated!

One of my favourite elements is the 30 Days 30 Ways preparedness game, which invites members of the public to undertake 30 relatively simple readiness tasks, one for each day of the month. This year, rather than simply being a voyeur, I’ll be joining in the game and using my blog to capture how I get on!

Today’s task is right up my street…

What do you think is the best “pop culture” reference to disasters in our current culture?

My answer would have to be Zombies. In true zombie style, the undead have popped all over the place

Pervasive across all media, if I had to choose one specific thing it would be AMC’s The Walking Dead. I still have some episodes of Season 4 to watch, but I’m hooked.

To watch from the perspective of an Emergency Manager is perhaps unique. Is it just me that sees the examples of information vacuum, constantly evolving strategy, improvised response and differences mismatch between capacity and capability? These are elements can be common in ‘real’ emergencies and therefore to see them portrayed in such an engaging television series is interesting.

The thing I think The Walking Dead teaches us the most – that people actually have a greater capacity for resilience than we often give them credit for. That Rick and the gang have survived four seasons in the face of zombies, resource constraints and other survivors is a reflection of their resilience.

Pin the Risk on the Register

Pin the Risk on the Register

Reading Time: 3 minutes

It’s been a while since I last blogged. I’d like to say that I’ve been busy with other things, or have been honing and fine-tuning this update for months. I really would like to say that.

Pin The Tail On the Donkey

However, reality is that for a while there wasn’t anything I was finding particularly sharable, and then because it’d been a while I forgot my password to login! However, I am back with renewed passion, and a plethora of things that I want to get off my chest about emergency management and resilience. *pauses for whooping*

Earlier in the year I attended the International Pint of Science Festival 2014 in London, where “interesting, fun and relevant cutting-edge science talks are delivered in an accessible format to the public – in the pub!”. That sounded like my kind of event, and even better, the pub in question was a boat! So I headed below deck ‘below deck’ on Thamesis Dock (a converted Dutch barge moored just between Vauxhall and Lambeth Bridges) and propped up the bar!

First up was Faith Turner talking about the mechanics of landslides, which was particularly pertinent as the Oso landslide in Washington had just happened. With a nod to the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, Faith revealed her demonstrator “Andrex Mountain”, to show some of the mechanics in play. However, this was essentially the warm up act…

Next was Professor Bruce Malamud from Kings College London talking about risk and how the public and experts can have different perceptions.

In preparation for the TV programme Perfect Storms: Disasters that changed the world (Yesterday 2013), the producers contacted Bruce to consider the results of a survey that they had undertaken. In what I expect was a bit like Family Fortunes, a group of 2000 people were asked ‘how risky’ they thought a number of scenarios were. The results of this survey were then compared to the ‘expert assessment of risk’ in the form of the National Risk Register.

What the study revealed (putting methodological flaws to one side) was that in some cases the expert and public perceptions of risk line up quite well, but for other scenarios there is a dramatic difference of opinion.

I spoke to Bruce after the talk, and we’re now looking at conducting some further research using the Talk London platform to see if there are wide discrepancies in risk perception specifically in London. essentially I want to play a game of Pin the Risk on the Register!

Awareness of what people are concerned about (and what they’re not) as well as a deeper understanding of factors that influence risk perception will then hopefully be useful in making our risk communication more effective.

For example – Heatwave is assessed as a High Risk, yet routinely people don’t take too much action either in advance of or during a heatwave. What factors influence that behaviour? How can we better understand the public perception of Heatwaves, and use that to target communications more effectively? (this particular example comes from a conversation with my parents late last summer when I ‘got it in the neck’ with questions like What does a Leave 4 Heatwave mean? and Can’t you find something better to say than keep cool when it’s hot?).

As the project develops I’ll keep you updated on what we find out and how it influences our thinking!

Events: another horn on the same goat?

Events: another horn on the same goat?

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I’m going to put myself out there and just say it…emergency planning in isolation is pointless. If this goat only had just one horn, it would be more vulnerable. By working with other risk reduction initiatives, emergency management can help reduce vulnerability more than it could working in isolation.

Goat

I could come up with the most fantastic plans and develop the most immersive training programmes in the world, but doing that all by my lonesome would be a waste of time. One facets of emergency management that I enjoy is the ability to work with a diverse range of practitioners who know everything from GIS to Chemical Hazards and Triage to take-downs. The skill of the Emergency Manager is bringing those different strands together so that if needed there can be a coordinated response.

However, what bugs me is when people don’t see the connections. I expect this will be a situation I find myself in tomorrow.

I will be proposing that as well as considering the risk of ’emergencies’ such as natural hazards, industrial accidents or malicious attacks that we should consider risk posed by ‘events’ like sports matches and concerts. I already expect to face a hard time with this suggestion.

I know it’s not the case across the board in the UK, but in my recent experience emergency planning is quite strongly divorced from events.

What do the following have in common?

Mass Crowd Incidents

Soomaro and Murray identified 156 incidents at planned events between 1971-2011. Of these, the 21 listed above identified specific lessons for disaster preparedness. Admittedly different degrees of planning are required for a wedding compared to a music festival, but none of these events or similar events since (Boston Marathon etc) could be considered spontaneous.

Evidence demonstrates that emergencies can, and sadly do, happen at planned events. Whilst it’s true that there is Health and Safety, Licensing and a whole host of other policy areas working to control risks associated with events, what harm could it cause for events to be considered by the resilience community?

Just in the 21 examples above a staggering 3,758 people died and 4,508 were injured at events where, I suggest, they expect to be safe. Surely in inclusion of emergency management professionals in the event planning process could help manage some of the inherent risk in bringing large numbers of people together?

Whack-a-Mole Resilience

Whack-a-Mole Resilience

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I don’t condone mole-whacking and here’s why…

Whack a Mole

Blog posts have been a little sparse recently. Since the St Jude storm in October 2013 the weather in the UK has been ‘freaky’ (this was a comment made by a colleague at the Met Office, there’s no arguing with insight like that!). Storms, gales, unprecedented rainfall, flooding…you name it, it’s battered our green and pleasant land!

London has largely escaped the worst of the weather. There have been some issues relating to groundwater flooding in susceptible areas, but nothing on the scale of what has been seen in Somerset or Surrey. (Incidentally. whilst this is terrible for those people affected, I do encourage people to occasionally pause, look at international incidents, and try to maintain a degree of perspective). However, an absence of significant impact hasn’t meant that a lot of work and long hours haven’t been necessary.

Since early February people have been beavering away (yes, another mammalian metaphor!) both on the ground and in offices to try and mitigate the impacts that flooding is having, or could potentially have in London.

Risk management is a funny old thing, and not dissimilar to that whack a mole game.

Take flood defences, massive investment like the construction of the Thames Barrier brings flood risk ‘under control’. This, combined with continually changing political drives, means that resource and attention is then focused elsewhere; counter terrorism perhaps, or protection against space weather. However, a combination of changing science, political oscillation and adjustment to resourcing mean that at some point the ‘control’ offered by the intervention diminishes and the risk returns. And whilst the risk returns to the same level, the vulnerability to it has increased, often because there has been development in that area.

The mole has popped up again, this time bigger and angrier. While our natural reaction, and that observed in the current flooding is to whack the mole (“we need to prevent this from happening again“) inevitably that will mean that attention is taken away from managing some other risk, providing an oportunity for a different mole to emerge.

Whilst I’m not surprised about the forward-leaning nature of politicians and senior leadership that has been seen recently in the UK (this seems to be an international trend) I think it’s important to stand far enough away from each mole individually to see when the next one is about to pop up.

Also, moles are undeniably cute, and don’t deserve to be whacked!

UPDATE: it looks like I’m not the only one to have observed this whack a mole effect. CNN reported a similar situation when talking specifically about the Fukushima response late last year

Image credit: technabob.com

Tales from #UKGC14

Tales from #UKGC14

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I’m back at my desk after a busy week learning about Civil Protection in Croatia and then UKGovcamp14 on Saturday.

If you haven’t heard of UKGovCamp before, it’s pitched as “a self-organised unconference for people that work in or around government.” Simples! I’d describe it as a participatory TEDx – it’s about ideas and discussion not information transmission. As well as being generally interested in the discussions, I was curious to see how it linked in to my passions in resilience and SMEM.

This was my first unconference event and I had no idea what to expect, but there was sufficient buzz on twitter before the event to get me up early on a Saturday morning! I attended four sessions, and also got to meet @ceetownsend for a brief demonstration of MusterPoint.

Session 1- BitCoin and Peer-to-Peer lending (Lead by @RichardVeevers)

I’d heard of BitCoins, but if I’m honest I wasn’t at all au fait with the detail (and you can see me frantically wikipedia-ing during the session below!). After 50 minutes of conversation I have more questions than I do answers, but what was clear was that BitCoin (and other global digital currencies) have the potential to bring change, both economically and socially. Unfortunately we ran out of time to talk about peer-to-peer lending more generally. There seem to be some intersections with Community Resilience and emergent volunteer responders, so it’s something I’ll probably explore a bit further.

Session 2 – Datastores and Dashboards (Lead by @MsSaraKelly)

Whilst, I think, the focus of the session was on repositories of information, I attended from the perspective of real-time situational awareness. Many of our city systems are monitored, but what I’m interested in is bringing together diverse information streams into a single platform – like the UCL CityDashboard and Siemens City Cockpit. I think that having a dynamic view of what is happening in a place brings potential advantages for managing and coordinating emergency response and recovery.

Session 3 – Futurology (Lead by @markbraggins)

Emergency Planning is all about considering the future, but what we tend to do is forget that the future is different to the past. Rarely do we sit and consider the longer-term trends – what does it mean for resilience that people are living longer, that the climate is changing, or that many people now have access to the internet? Emergency planning can get caught in the trap of “well this worked in 1973 so it’ll work now” without always recognising that the world is in constant change.

Session 4 – Sketchnoting(Lead by @micheleidesmith)

I’ve tried to find a resilience connection, but failed for this one! I take pages and pages of notes, but it’s always good to challenge your own methods and as they say a picture says a thousand words, so I attended a brief lesson in sketchnoting; essentially the power of the doodle to capture information. I found it interesting, and am planning to trial my skills at an ODI conference tomorrow, but I have some reservations about how well I’ll be able to interpret my visuals a year/month/week down the line (below is my ‘attempt’).

sketchnote

ResilienceCamp?

The event was fantastic (and spectacularly well organised), I’m definitely sold on the format and look forward to next year’s event. I would love to see something similar for resilience – I wonder if I’m alone in that, or if other people would find it interesting?

 

Image Credit: W N Bishop

Community Mechanism Introduction – #11CMI8

Community Mechanism Introduction – #11CMI8

Reading Time: 5 minutes


Introduction

This week I’m honoured to be a participant on the European Union Civil Protection Mecanism Introduction course. This is a pan-Europe course being held near Split in Croatia, and I’m one of 24 experienced delegates from a wide range of different European countries.

20140121-000747.jpg

The course is fairly intense, with working days from 08:00 to 18:30 nearly every day, so I’m not going to get as much time to blog as I anticipated. Instead I’m going to capture my questions and reflections each day and then summarise the course as a whole when I’m back in the UK.


Day One – 20 Jan 2014

It was in at the deep end today starting with a self assessment, and then three lectures on various aspects. My questions from today:

  • Why isn’t there a better level of general awareness of the EU Civil Protection Mechanism within the UK emergency planning community?
  • What is the best measure for
    a) assessing impact of emergencies and
    b) demonstrating ‘progress’ in terms of Civil Protection
  • Actually, when we say Civil Protection, how does this link to identical/related fields of Resilience, Disaster Risk Reduction and Emergency Planning?
  • How can we maintain perspective when talking about international disasters? Is the UK ‘too safe’ to have a conversation as peers on this issue?
  • Are emergency planners in the UK typically Malthusian or Cornucopian, or somewhere in between? Does that have a bearing on the processes we develop? Should it?
  • How does the EU Civil Protection Mechanism link to the HFA and HFA2?
  • Is exposure the same as vulnerability in a disaster risk reduction context?
  • How aware of wider geopolitics does the UK emergency planner need to be in 2014?
  • Is food security the new cloud on the horizon in developed countries?
  • At what point does ‘crisis’ just become normal? (This was after a discussion about Somalia where there has been an ongoing humanitarian crisis for 24 years)

A thoroughly interesting day, and I’m excited about learning more from colleagues who have worked on overseas deployments far and wide, and hopefully getting some way towards answering the questions I’ve posed myself above!

Zbogom for now (bye in Croatian!)


Day Two – 21 Jan 2014

I’ve got a little longer to blog today so thought I’d explain a bit more about the course.

The EU Civil Protection Mechanism came into being in 2001 and is an agreement and set of supporting arrangements to enable pan-Europe coordination for Civil Protection. This includes things such as providing equipment and resources if an emergency goes beyond that which a country has capacity to deal with, but also includes information exchange and a programme of training and exercising to share ways of working with European partners.

The Community Mechanism Introduction is the first of 12 courses which train participants in the skills to manage, lead and support these arrangements, which can be deployed either within or outside of the EU.

Today’s lectures further explored the current and future challenges for disaster response, legal aspects of responding to disaster (which was fascinating and confusing in equal measure), and then group work using the tools of the Civil Protection Mechanism to ‘solve’ disaster scenarios and consider information management.

Again, some questions came up for me to investigate when I get home, and that will perhaps be of interest to other colleagues following my adventures:

  • Why is there a reluctance to consider Sphere standards in the UK (in my experience at least)?
  • We know the Civil Contingencies Act inside out (ish!) but what other national, European and International law should be taken into account?
  • How important is ‘being seen to act’ – do we acknowledge this?
  • Where is the balance between respecting cultural sensitivities and delivering services? (This was after a discussion on whether, in some countries, it was appropriate for disaster response folk to talk directly to women. My thought process was that women are typically disproportionately affected but if you can’t assess their need how can you challenge that?)
  • Is there a need for reference to models such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when trying to prioritise services? Focusing on output rather than process?
  • Disaster: many have tried and failed to define it, why is it so difficult to land on something we all agree on?

Tomorrow we’ll be investigating civil protection and crisis response structures in all of the 28 EU member countries, I’m looking forward to that as from conversations with the other colleagues there are some notable differences.

Zbogom!


Day Three – 22 Jan 2014

Today was hump day for the Community Mechanism Introduction course today. This meant two things, firstly that the instructors are turning up the heat but secondly, that we’re beginning to function better as a team generally and specifically within our groups.

Joining me in Team C (which we decided stood for Champion!) are

  • Elena, a Wildfire expert from the Ministry of Agriculture in Spain
  • Eero, an orthopaedic and trauma surgeon from Helsinki in Finland
  • Pavol, a Commander from the Bratislava area of the Slovakian fire service
  • Marco, an officer from the Italian Air Force and
  • Robert from the National Protection and Rescue Directorate right here in Croatia

Today our main focus was gaining an understanding of the national civil protection arrangements across the EU, and whilst there were many similarities to the UK, there were some interesting differences entering around structures and financing models (the picture below if me feeding back the discussion within our team!). We also spoke today about the operational management of EU resources in the field and participated in a number of exercises to put those skills into practice.

20140122-192937.jpg

Less questions came up for me today, but here were my key observations of the day.

  • The UN system is gigantic and incredibly intricate, and that’s just in terms of structure before considering inter organisational politics
  • There is a propensity for EU deployments outside of Europe to be longer duration, is this a product of need or does it also link to the politics of ‘being visible’?
  • How do/should Humanitarian Principles (Humanity, Impartiality, Neutrality and Independence) link to domestic emergency preparedness?
  • We’ve heard of lots of examples of where EU countries have provided support internationally, but very few of these have been from the UK. Is that just down to the selection of examples or do we not ‘give’ as much?
  • Why doesn’t the UK make use of protected symbols for Civil Protection?
  • There is a strong contingent of firefighters on the course, and today after hearing about different national structures that makes more sense, but I’d be interested in further exploring European national and sub-national structures
  • Are UK Airwave radios compatible with international/EU communication systems?

There we have it, some operational detailed questions, and some more fundamental ones to reflect on…expect a few more tomorrow!

Zbogom!


Day Four – 23 Jan 2014

The penultimate day of the course means that today mostly centred around putting into practice some of the issues we’ve spent the week studying. The scenario for our day long exercise was that our team was the first EU Civil Protection resources to arrive in Ukraine after some intense flooding. Our challenge – to liaise with the Ukraine government and the EU Commission; and coordinate the arrival and deployment of specialist European resources.

I’ve participated in a LOT of tabletop exercises, but what surprised me most about this one was that it was so well organised. Essentially the instructors were running the same exercise simultaneously four times! It was really good to get see the operational side of the response, the combination of fast-pace and long gaps in activity reminded me very much of my role during the Olympics in the London Operations Centre!

No questions today, as the formal dinner of the course is in around 20 minutes, but after the recap tomorrow I’m sure there will be a few straggling questions which I’ll share, as well as my overall thoughts on the course!

Zbogom!

Sit in the messiness a while…

Sit in the messiness a while…

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’ve just listened to this In Our Time podcast from December 2013. I’m not normally a massive fan of Melvyn Bragg, but with Prof. Ian Stewart (who I met 5 years ago) and Prof. Eve Middleton-Kelly (with whom I worked in the run up to the Olympics) on the panel, I thought I’d take a listen.

Emergence

It sounds counter-intuitive , but most people are well accustomed to handling complex systems. Whilst the terminology is typically academic, I expect we can all relate to the idea of things happening as a result of unforeseen consequences. That is, to me, what complexity science is about; trying to better understand the factors which lead to things happening. My particular interest, of course, is in enhancing our understanding of how disasters happen.

I’ve blogged before about emergence (Pop Up Emergency Planning), as one of the facets which interests me most when looking at most disaster response case studies. Essentially it’s the idea that when a system is stressed, it can cope up to a point but then finds a new way of coping by developing new structures, relationships or rules. We see this when people on twitter reach out to people who are stranded at airports due to volcanic ash clouds, we see it when spontaneous Broom Armies take to the streets to clear up riot debris; and following conversations in December with @CazMilligan #SMEMChat colleagues – emergence also seems to underlie initiatives like Virtual Operations Support Teams.

Almost exactly 12 months ago I initiated Anytown for London Resilience Team. This was an attempt to look at the interaction of different city systems to see if we could model their interdependencies and better understand the likely and emergent consequences to improve future resilience to disruptions to these systems.

If we were designing a city from scratch then I expect many of its systems would look rather different. Out of the construction of individual buildings and infrastructure components emerges something which has structure (and, buy extension, traits such as culture, tradition and ‘personality’), which is partly planned and partly evolved. We need to embrace the messiness, work with it rather than trying to control it.

New Year is a time of resolutions, so I’m resolving now to take Anytown ‘to the next level’ in 2014. I’d be interested to do this in collaboration with others who are interested in similar issues – get in touch!

 

Image Credit: Doug Neil at TheGraphicRecorder (who has an interesting comment about the obvious spelling mistake!)

Curious Incident of the Apollo Theatre Collapse – 19 Dec 2013

Curious Incident of the Apollo Theatre Collapse – 19 Dec 2013

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Last night I was on my way home when I picked up news of the incident at the Apollo Theatre in London. This morning I took the opportunity to capture what I thought were the significant parts of the incident as it unfolded on social media. It isn’t necessarily in chronological order, as I wanted to bring some narrative to the story.

You’ll notice that I haven’t offered any opinions on the cause of the incident or the effectiveness of the response; that will come in time as investigations conclude.

This is the first time that I’ve used storify, and I actually found it incredibly easy to use and a great way of trying to organise my thoughts. It’s definitely something that I’ll be returning to.

 

How to lie with Flood Maps

How to lie with Flood Maps

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The title of this post is drawn from Mark Monmonier’s entertaining book, which I remember from my Geography degree. Maps can be fantastic ways of conveying complex spatial information. However, like speeches and presentations, maps can also be subject to bias, in both what is presented and what is ignored. Exercising a degree of skepticism when reading a map is good practice, and helps minimise misinterpretation.

Following severe storms and flooding in many areas of the UK last week the Environment Agency issued this tweet with a picture of a map (which I’ve included as an image so you don’t have to click away)…


withoutTB
At the time, many areas of the east coast were being flooded directly and consequently the level of media attention was relatively high, with several outlets picking up on this ‘good news story’. I’ve included a couple of lines from this Evening Standard article from 8 December which included this map.

Thames Barrier saved London from flood chaos in tidal surge

Submerged: vast swathes of London would have been underwater if the Thames Barrier had not shut. This apocalyptic picture shows the devastation London would have faced if the Thames Barrier hadn’t protected the capital from the worst tidal surge in 60 years.Vast swathes of London would have been submerged but for the defences, experts predicted.

The original EA tweet is technically accurate, the shaded area shows the areaprotected by the barrier. However, to tweet it during active flooding may have led to some misinterpretation. It is NOT a map showing the area which would have been flooded had the Thames Barrier have been non-operational last week.

Whilst the events of last week were significant, they were not approaching the 1 in 1000 year flood events that the EA modelling is based on. Had the Thames Barrier not been in place last week, tide levels would have peaked at 0.2m below the top of flood defences. So rather than ‘vast swathes of London being submerged‘ actually, all of the water would have been confined to the river channel.

My main issue with the map is not that it exists, but the way in which it has been interpreted. It’s a useful planning tool to describe possible flood extent (which is one of London’s top risks), but don’t be fooled into thinking that because a map is released at the time, it represents the current situation.

And whilst I’m moaning about maps…why choose to only show that area? Predicted flood impacts clearly extend beyond the map view chosen, so why exclude the other areas? Yes, I expect people are familiar with those particular river bends from Eastenders, but it would have provided a more complete picture similar to that in the London Regional Flood Risk Assessment (although this shows flooding of mutiple types).

floodzones

Don’t be intimidated by maps – they can help uncover patterns and spot relationships that other ways of presenting data can’t, just keep a couple of things in mind when reading and interpreting them:

  • What does the map show ? – try to find out as much as you can about the data. When was the data collected? Was it summarised or simplified before being displayed?
  • What doesn’t the map show ? – this might be as simple as features, or in this specific case, it might be that it doesn’t show what other people have suggested it does
  • Who made the map? What are they trying to get you to take away from looking at it?

Have you spotted any misleading or hard to interpret disaster maps? I’d love to see other examples!

 

Banish the Hi-Viz Jacket

Banish the Hi-Viz Jacket

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Family stories and media-influenced interpretations of the past often depict communities coming together in times of adversity. Typically in Britain it’s referred to as Dunkirk Spirit, but I’m sure there are examples of it the world over.

banish the hiviz

Although we often have a positivist view of the past, one only has to look to the Good Deed Feed in London’s free morning paper or to the banding together of London’s communities after the riots in August 2011 to see that this trait remains just under the surface for most of us. I’ve mentioned that we, as emergency managers, shouldn’t forget about emergent behaviour, but we also should remember that people often have a way of coming together in response to an incident. None of these community responses arose because there was a ‘plan’.

With the threat of coastal flooding last week it’s taken me longer than I anticipated to get my thoughts on the first National Community Resilience meeting down on the blog. Firstly, I should start that calling it the first meeting is a bit of a misnomer. Since I’ve been working in this field in the UK there have been at least 3 attempts to ‘launch’ the concept. It’s currently defined as “Communities and individuals harnessing local resources and expertise to help themselves in an emergency, in a way that complements the response of the emergency services.”

In the past, my main bug-bear has been around the definition of community (people are simulatenously members of numerous communities, which onces are we talking about?), and whilst I think that remains an issue, there was another aspect which became apparent, which is aspiration.

There were a range of presentations from different areas of the UK, but what struck me most was the continued fixation on developing a plan. Whilst this may have been ok 30 years ago, the nature of modern life means we’re more Global Village than ‘Vicar of Dibley’. For me, the days of Community Resilience based on intricate hazard specific plans and networks of local wardens are long gone.

I’ve been searching for some time to find a phrase which, I think, more accurately captures what I think community resilience should be striving for, and I think I’ve found the answer. Optionality – the quality or state of allowing choice.

  • Less community plans, more people in employment and therefore better positioned to look after themselves should there be an emergency
  • Less high visibility jackets, more people focused on education (not necessarily just formal education either, it could be education on risk exposure perhaps?) thereby enabling choice between different options.
  • Less grab bags and wind up radios, instead a generation of healthier people less prone to illness and injury.

Developing a plan is easy, anyone can do it. Engendering change and instilling resilience into all aspects of society is a far greater challenge, but I believe that is where the focus of effort should be on Community Resilience. It might be aspirational and difficult to measure, but I have a feeling that it’d be a better use of energy than a community flood plan.

Alternative views welcomed – my ideas are in their infancy and constructive challenge will help me develop them!

 

Image Credit: Imperial War Museum