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CBRN = HazMat = CBRN

CBRN = HazMat = CBRN

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Sometimes when I bite my tongue it is an accident, and it hurts. Other times it’s quite deliberate, yet it still hurts. I had to do that today, and then realised it was a metaphor for why I was biting it in the first place!

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I’ve mentioned it before, the somewhat false distinction which is drawn between hazardous materials and…CBRN. The later is deemed so important that it gets a sexy abbreviation, which incidentally is all in capitals, serving to further emphasise it, to separate it.

I wholly understand that there is a difference between an accident (Although in reality even accidents usually end up apportioning blame somewhere) and a deliberate act – I remind you of the tongue biting! However, for the public, and for the majority of emergency responders, I think the distinction is unnecessary jargon.

There is a false assumption that the deliberate use of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear materials would be more impactive than an incident where these agents are released via accidental means. I took a look at some historical examples in a previous post which demonstrated this not to be the case.

As recent events in Syria have shown, the malicious use of chemicals (what has been reported today as the nerve agent Sarin) is extremely significant and I in no way wish to belittle that. However, daily 72,000 gallons of radioactive water are being poured into the sea following the Fukushima earthquake (2011). The Fukushima incident is categorised at the same scale as Chernobyl (incidentally also an accident, and therefore hazmat incident).

Read these three statements:
1) The incident is complex and requires a multi agency response, nobody can solve this on their own.
2) It could take a long time for the area affected to get back to normality, there could be long term consequences.
3) Those responsible should be caught and punished appropriately.

Which of the two incidents above am I talking about? I’d be really interested if anyone reading this blog is able to tell me why they don’t apply to both.

Fine, keep the distinction internally if that helps certain agencies (I expect the assistance relates to setting budgets), but ditch the elitism. Lets talk about incidents involving those agents and what actions are required to minimise the impact, not about who done it.

Who you gonna call (Part 2)

Who you gonna call (Part 2)

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Recently I was talking to a colleague about the value (or not) of social media as new ways of communicating and engaging the public. Social networking is the way of the world now. One of the main challenges for emergency managers is to keep arrangements grounded in reality. If that’s how people are communicating in disasters, which we know it is, then we need to embrace it to get authoritative messages out there.

Accepting that I was preeching to the converted I took to twitter to get a reaction, and my favourite was from Rob Dudgeon, Director of Emegrency Preparedness at San Francisco Office of Emergency Management:

smemhappens

If we need to join the conversation, we need a better understanding of how people use social media organically.

CAVEAT – Despite being interesting, I’m not sure with a sample size of 8 that my results are any more conclusive than those adverts claiming 97% of people would recommend a particular shampoo. However, the results of my recent survey are in!

“How many of your Facebook friends do you think you could call on in an emergency, perhaps to provide you with a bed, or a sofa, for a couple of nights?

I don’t want to prejudice the results of my survey, but here’s my hypothesis for ‘Average Joe’

  • 140 x 10% (who he feels he could contact) = 14 Facebook friends that he can contact
  • 14 x 50% (who live locally) = 7 of which live locally who could help Joe out“

How did the results comapre to my predictions? Well, first, here’s a graph of the results. It’s interesting to see the difference between the responses in terms of how many people they would be comfortable asking for help. I’m sure there’s a lot more social analysis that could have been done to look into this – is it a product of age, gender, profession, or a combination of these and other factors?

There is significantly less variation between the friends that could help that live locally, which is euqlly interesting, but I’m not sure what that indicates. facebookwygc

Now, let’s use this crowdsourced data to update our details for Average Joe:

  • He has 272 friends on Facebook (greater than the 140 Facebook average)
  • Of those, he feels like he could call on 8.4% of them – that’s 23 friends
  • Of the 23 that he could call, the data suggests 2.41% live locally (this is far less than my estimate)
  • This means that Joe has 1/6th of a friend locally that he could pre-plan with – let’s be optimistic and round that up to one whole friend!

The main observation is that the number of people that users would be comfortable in asking for help, isn’t too far away from my 10% hypothesis, but that they might not necessarily be the people who are locally able to assist. This is interesting, becuase lots of other data suggests that Facebook is highly localised into geographic communities – yet are these communities that we would/could turn to in an emergency? From this rudimentary data collection, it looks like the majority of Facebook friends that we’d turn to for help are those who live further away from us.

What does all this mean? We got a pretty graph, and perhaps we identified that social media (or Facebook at least) doesn’t spell the end of the need to develop relationships and networks locally which you can use in an emergency.

The main lesson – social media is here, and it’s here to stay, but (at the moment?) it’s an addition rather than a replacement.

Signs of a past disaster

Signs of a past disaster

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At University I was introduced to two opposing geologic paradigms.

  • The Uniformitarianism made popular by Charles Lyell, which holds that the present is the key to the past; that processes in progress now have always been in progress in much the same way
  • This was in contrast to the idea of Catastrophism – the idea that Earth had been shaped by sudden, short-lived and violent events

These were presented to me as a dichotomy, you were either on one side of the fence or the other. A notion which seemed absurd to me – why couldn’t you have gradual change punctuated by more rapid events? And this is something which I think transcends the world of geology, with parallels in our own societies.

Each of us go about our daily business, we get up, go to work, pay taxes and go home. There’s a slight change every day which gradually changes the world around us, we recognise this as development or progress (or indeed decline). In addition to that, we occasionally experience more catastrophic events in the form of disasters, which exert massive change over comparatively short time-scales. Change results from both of these, there isn’t one dominant paradigm, but a combination of factors which shape both our world and our lives.

The signs of past disasters are all around us. Especially if you live in or visit London.

fireoflondon

Today marks the anniversary of the ignition of the Great Fire of London in 1666 (play the game here!). This fire razed 80% of the walled city to the ground (however, it’s worth acknowledging that by this time, London’s conurbation had grown extensively and in total only around 25% of ‘London’ was affected). Over 13,200 buildings were destroyed, over 100,000 people made homeless. This was 347 years ago, and there have been many period of rebuilding, subsequent incidents and further rebuilding since then. Yet the scars of the Great Fire, which is commemorated by The Monument (you can climb the spiral stars to the top – I’d recommend it!) can still be seen in a few locations, if you know what to look for.

With a 2000 year history, London bears the scars of a variety of incidents which have befallen her. Some tangible, some less so, but there’s no shortage of reminders around you in London that as much as things might evolve day to day, there’s nothing like a catastrophe to bring about change.

DisasterTours can point out some of those scars, and give you some tips of preparing for London’s next emergency. Join us on our first tour on 19 October to uncover London’s disaster past.

Facebook Emergency – who you gonna call?

Facebook Emergency – who you gonna call?

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How many of your Facebook friends do you think you could call on in an emergency, perhaps to provide you with a bed (or at least a sofa!) for a couple of nights? Complete the 3 question survey!

What’s this all about?

I finally managed to watch The Social Network this weekend. Whilst not the most exciting of films, it provided time to appreciate how much ‘social media’ has changed how many people do things.

As I mentioned previously in my post on the Boston Bombings, I’m no stranger to the digital world and have been instrumental in the implementation of corporate social media presence for two employers – recognising and emphasising the potential benefits for emergency planning and response at an early stage.

I avoid watching the news unless there is a story I’m following, and I can’t remember the last time I read a newspaper (bar a quick flick through the Metro to pass time). In general, my news consumption is now predominantly Twitter and the links it provides to other content.

The average Facebook user has 140-150 friends. To someone who was clambering at the doors to be a member when it was still exclusive to colleges in America, this seems counterintuitive. I believe there are two phenomena at work here:

  1. Simple maths (my favourite kind), as explained in The Anatomy of Facebook and
  2. The changing demographics of Facebook – as older generations embrace it, they potentially have less online friends and therefore reduce the average number of friends?

So back to my survey – how many of your Facebook friends do you think you could call on in an emergency, perhaps to provide you with a bed, or a sofa, for a couple of nights?

I don’t want to prejudice the results of my survey, but here’s my hypothesis…I expect that there are probably 10% of my friends who I wouldn’t feel too uncomfortable in contacting for assistance. Of those, I’m going to guess that 50% are local, given that Facebook is primarily locally clustered.

So for ‘Average Joe’,

  • 140 x 10% = 14 Facebook friends that he can contact
  • 14 x 50% = 7 of which live locally who could help Joe out

Joe could then approach these friends and they could plan together to support each other – what we in the trade call “Community Resilience”.

I’m going to leave the survey open for 2 weeks and then report back on how results compare to my prediction. If you want to leave any thoughts on the rudimentary maths on show here, just pop a comment in the box below.

Mix’n’match Emergency Management

Mix’n’match Emergency Management

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In 2007 I did some work on Hospital Evacuation, which is a throughly complex problem. I won’t go into the detail here, suffice to say that it brings some real ethical issues and logistical challenges. I mention this, because way back in 2007 someone that I spoke to described their Hospital Evacuation Plan as “planned improvisation”.

mixnmatchI remember recoiling at this. Here I was trying to document every last detail of how wards should work together with central hospital functions to expedite a swift evacuation, yet over here was someone essentially saying “we make it up on the day”.

Today I was having an unrelated conversation with a colleague about Command and Control (for non experts, that’s the systems and structures by which an emergency is managed). We were talking about the need to planned arrangements to have sufficient felxibility as to be applicable to a variety of circumstances. Without the ability to accurately predict the future this felxibility is vitally important.

However, you also need to balance that flexibility, with having coherence and structure, to try to bring the emergency under control as quickly as possible. I was reminded of one of those mix’n’match childrens books.

I wonder if there might be something in this approach for emergency management? Could you have a variety of planned components which all fit togther ininfinite complementary combinations?

I’m a big fan of recognising the emergent behaviour of systems and communities when under stress, but do I bring that do the formal responder organisatiopns I work with? Probably not as much as I could. There is definately a degree of creativity involved in sucessful emergency response – how can we create an environment which nurtures this without abandoning the important act of planning?

I’m going to give this some more thought over the weekend and come back with some more well rounded thoughts and suggestions – until then, I’m off to read an article about Collaborative Adhocracies….fun!

Image source: Edward Gorey via goreyana.blogspot.co.uk

CBRN vs HazMat – essential distinction or elitism?

CBRN vs HazMat – essential distinction or elitism?

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It’s something which has been bugging me for a long time, but today I feel compelled to form some coherent thoughts and put them out there, partly as catharsis, but also in the hope of instigating some debate.

I don’t see an valid reason for a distinction between CBRN and HazMat.

cbrnheader

For non-specialist readers, this translates as “Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear” and Hazardous Materials”. Traditionally, these are largely considered separately by the Emergency Services and other responders. CBRN incidents being those of a deliberate or malicious nature, and HazMat the accidents. Even acknowledging that police and security services may find this distinction useful, even accidental incidents will be treated as potentially deliberate initially and will be investigated as crimes, albeit for civil rather than criminal prosecution.

Wikipedia, starting point for the masses, provides this info in it’s Google snippit.

CBRN Wiki

Essentially saying that in addition to the intent aspects, that CBRN causes a larger number of casualties. Well, any emergency planner worth their salt will tell you that scale is just once facet of an incident. So lets have a look at some numbers…

I appreciate that non-emergency planners might not be as deeply familiar with the incidents in Bhopal (1984) and Chernobyl (1986), however, these were accidental (and therefore HazMat) incidents which caused extremely significant numbers of casualties and fatalities.

Firstly, looking at reports of casualty numbers from Bhopal…

Source Casualty Estimate
Supreme Court by the Union Government 558,125
Indian Council of Medical Research 50,000
New York Times 12,000

Even the lower estimate here, reported at the time of the event, would certainly be considered a mass casualty incident in the UK.

Assuming that if a CBRN incident can cause mass casualties, it also has the potential to cause mass fatalities. For variety, here’s some fatality statistics from Chernobyl, (also a HazMat incident).

Source Deaths Estimate
Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment  985,000
International Atomic Energy Agency 4,000
International Agency for Research on Cancer 16,000
Russian academy of sciences 200,000
Belarus national academy of sciences 93,000
Ukrainian national commission for radiation protection 500,000
Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts 50

It’s not quite as simple to infer from these figures as some are projections and others studies into the cumulative number of fatalities since the incident (which raises interesting questions, perhaps for another post, about when is an incident truly over). However, virtually all of them represent a significant number of fatalities.

Lets now take a look at arguably the most high-profile “CBRN incident”, the 1995 release of Sarin in the Tokyo subway. This information is from the Tokyo Metro Company in 2005.

Fatalities 12
Casualties 5642
(of which hospitalised) 999
(of which outpatients) 4643

I’m aware that I’m not comparing like with like here, but I think it goes someway towards demonstrating that in terms of consequences, those resulting from non-malicious means can be just as significant as those from terrorism.

Referring to these incidents with a special name seems to imply that there is something special about them, and encourages elitism. Regardless of whether they are used maliciously or not, hazardous materials are precisely that, hazardous.

There may be some very specific operational responses which are different, however generally speaking, the response principles and resources are identical. We should try to avoid confusing the public (and responders) by having two terms which essentially mean the same thing.

3D Resilience

3D Resilience

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I recently discovered news aggregator Feedly. Having been released in 2008, I’m a little behind the curve!

For some time I’ve seen the inherent value of RSS feeds, but haven’t been able to figure out a way of making them work for me. However, Feedly (I’m not on commission, I’m sure other products are available!) seems to do just what I’ve been looking for. I have begun using Feedly to collate resilience blogs that I regularly check in on, and it’s really handy to have summaries available on the go without having to navigate to particular blogs.

Today Chris Bene’s article Making the Most of Resilience popped up in my feed, so I thought I’d check it out, and I’m glad I did.

Whilst primarily approaching resilience from a development angle, a diagram explaining resilience is applicable in an emergency management context.

3d resilience

Bene states that three types of capacity are important in living with change and uncertainty

  • absorptive capacity – the ability to cope with the effects of shocks and stresses
  • adaptive capacity – the ability of individuals or societies to adjust and adapt to shocks and stresses, but keep the overall system functioning in broadly the same way
  • transformative capacity – the ability to change the system fundamentally when the way it works is no longer viable

Im my experience, much of the work on resilience in a UK context is around developing the former, and it links back to an earlier post about developing a wider range of options for countering terrorism.

How can resilience professionals help to develop ‘softer’ approaches to preparing to emergencies which aren’t just about hardening, strengthening and fallback systems. How can we better embrace opotunities to transform both communities and places? I imagine that developing resilience is more likley to be sucessful where interventions reflect the three dimensions on the continuum.

Keep Ma’am and Carry On

Keep Ma’am and Carry On

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Emergencies, thankfully, don’t happen often. However, this means there are limited opportunities to validate the plans which are developed to determine whether they will be effective.

Exercising provides some level of validation, providing a realistic yet fictional scenario against which to assure organisations, governments and the public of the capability to respond to certain situations (that said, there are many alternatives to exercises, which can be time and resource intensive).

Exercise Wintex-Cimex was held in 1983 and looked at a Cold War scenario. Today, the text of a speech writen for the Queen was released from the National Archives – see the images below.

queens1 queens2

As you’d expect with a message from the Monarch on the announcement of World War 3, reassurance, solidarity and community emerge as key themes, as well as support to British troops. Whilst it was never officially used, the Queen’s message chimes very nicley with the Keep Calm and Carry On message developed during World War 2. I wonder how well this sat with the Protect and Survive messages?

I have developed, facilitated and participated in a wide range of exercises at local and national level. One of the exercises saw me undertake a very similar task, writing a statement for the Mayor of London. Who knows, maybe in 30 years that will be released to similar fanfare!

Should you worry about #SquirrelPlague?

Should you worry about #SquirrelPlague?

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I’m not sure if you’ve seen the news yet of the squirrel found in a Los Angeles park which tested positive for bubonic plague?

Squirrel

Avid readers may have been my recent Black Death post, but there’s nothing like a topical blog post, so I thought I’d come back to it in light of today’s news.

In schools across the (Eng)land, children are taught that between 1665 and 1666 anywhere between 15-50% of the UK population was wiped out by bubonic plague. However, this was just part of an extended period of intermittent plague epidemics which began in 1347, killing between 75-200 million people. Pretty significant!

So given the identification of Yersinia pestis in LA, should we be worried?

The simple answer is no (not least because in its Bubonic phase it is not highly contagious) . Sporadic cases of plague occur from time to time in both wild and domesticated animals. On occasion it is also found in humans, with 999 probable or confirmed cases between 1990 and 2010. The fact that Plague has been identified isn’t, in itself, a cause for concern. Early treatment with antibiotics, which weren’t available in the 1600’s, is very effective.

For outbreaks of novel disease, public health agencies take a number of proactive measures, such as the closure of the park and contact tracing of people potentially exposed, to try and reduce the spread of disease. From media reports, it looks as though all the measures that I would expect to be implemented at this early stage have been.

Plague is often high on the list of organisms that could be used by terrorists. This is nothing new, in fact, there is evidence that early Mongol armies casually tossed plague infected corpses over fortress walls in an effort to defeat their enemies in the 1346 Siege of Caffa. And there is certainly a general level of anxiety around the term, having even been incorporated into daily language “to avoid something like the plague” (although this probably owes to earlier use of the term plague in the medical profession in a more generic sense).

Plague has a complex biology; requiring the involvement of fleas and rodents and consequently on climatic conditions, as well as a relationship with social factors such as sanitation, healthcare and environment. Theoretically, the pneumonic plague form of infection has a potential for person-to-person transmission, however a relatively short infective period and poor adaptation to transmission by respiratory routes mean that it is still not highly communicable.

In 1994 in Surat in India, 52 people died from pneumonic plague. However, things quickly got out of hand, partly as a result of misinformation in the media. Therefore, whilst its right that health authorities in the states are talking this outbreak seriously, and it will be interesting to see how the media handle the story when eastern news agencies wake up. But, there really is little cause for alarm.

As my colleague John Twigg at UCL states, the most dangerous aspect today, would be unrestrained use of the word plague.

 

Image source: foxnews.com (I don’t think this is the squirrel in question!)