Friend and colleague Louise Elstow is currently undertaking a 6-week research trip in the United States and Canada as a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellow looking at approaches to Urban Community Resilience.
If you’d like to find out more about her trip, follow her adventures, or get in touch, then head over here.
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.
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!
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?
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!)
I was browsing the interwebs last week and came across webdesigner Christian Annyas’s site, specifically this post about 9/11 Newspaper headlines: design and typography. His observation that newspapers have shifted away from text in favour of large format high-quality photographs is interesting, and is certainly evidenced in my collation of Boston Bombing frontpages.
The Seattle Times frontpage was typical of the sample he looked at. A single word headline, with the rest of the page given over to an evocative image.
The Wall Street Journal was a notable exception, at least managing to string together a sentance headline which summarised the story. However, the page was still dominated by a photograph.
During the media coverage of the London Bombings in 2005, there were frequent calls for viewers to “submit their pictures and video”. We had entered the age of the Citizen Journalist (a term which has fallen out of favour since). As cameraphones and smartphones have became more pervasive, it has become increasingly easy for any member of the public to have their images syndicated across the mainstream media. I’d thought this was the driver behind this trend in newspaper front pages.
However, what Christian’s article demonstrates is that this was happening in America in 2001. That’s before Apple released the iPhone, before Facebook launched and before we had the ability to tweet. So if it’s not the ability to source pictures quickly from the scene of an emergency then what is behind this change?
There have been developments in paper and printing technology which have enabled full colour high resolution images to be reproduced. Or perhaps developments in printing technology have allowed for higher fidelity reproductions of photos. However, the cynical side of me feels that this could all boil down to economics. A good front page sells papers.
What do you think? Are newspaper publishers playing to our emotive side? How does this affect how we consume news – have you bought a paper on the basis of a good photo? Is this a trend which spills over into other forms of media? I’m interested in your thoughts – leave them below!
Image Source: annyas.com
Regular readers will be aware that I’ve been working on a project called Anytown over recent months. It’s a project looking at complexities and interdependencies between systems and how that can impact on resilience. Previous blog posts about it are here…here and here.
Rather excitingly, you can now find out about Anytown in Resilience, the magazine of the Emergency Planning Society. Yes, there is now a remote possibility that I will be quoted on BBC prime-time programming, having been published in a niche trade magazine! (I’m hoping Charlotte Church might make a reprise as host for ‘my’ episode….)
They saved the best until last, so head to pages 38 and 39 (but then take a look at the rest of the mag). Even if you don’t learn more about interdpendencies, you’ll have an edge over the missing words round, and everyone likes winning.
As always, comments appreciated either in the box below or direct to my inbox over here.
With thanks to colleagues at the EPS for publication
I was in San Francisco earlier this year, and met with Rob Dudgeon (Director of Emergency Services at San Francisco Department for Emergency Management) who showed me around the Emergency Operations Centre, a facility which I expect has been very busy over the past couple of days, following the Boeing 777 crash on Saturday.
With the NTSB investigation is still in progress I don’t want to comment too much, other than sharing this interesting Forbes piece Why Did So Many Passengers Evacuate With Bags?
It’s something that I think about every time I board a plane. I know that the correct thing to do is to just get out as quickly as possible without being slowed down by rummaging for bags. However, I’m sure we all have experience of workplace fire drills in the cold or rain where just a split second to grab a coat or umbrella could have made us much more comfortable in an unpleasant situation.
Moreover, for an emergency planner, not taking the Grab Bag that I have packed ready for these sorts of occasions seems to be contrary to their purpose.
I’m not bothered about my valuables – I know that the contents of my hold luggage is insured and that I can get them replaced. I’m also not going to need the latest holiday read, but some of the items in my hand luggage could be genuinely useful in the event of an emergency.
Plane crashes, thankfully, don’t happen frequently. I’d estimate that I’ve deplaned in excess of 200 times and none of these have been under emergency conditions. We know that under stress people revert to what they know, which could explain the number of passengers who picked up their belongings.
Naturally there is a dynamic risk assessment which must take place. If the fire is raging towards me then I can forego the above, but if I have a couple of moments to grab some essentials without causing a blockage for other passengers then I think that’s a useful activity.
With airlines, particularly budget ones, forcing passengers hands into taking all their luggage as hand luggage (to avoid additional charges) are they contributing to increased evacuation times? Encourage people to bring hand luggage, but keep it to the small essentials in a soft sided bag (so that it doesn’t puncture the escape slides). Don’t tell people to have a grab bag but not to grab it.
Image Source: pprune.org
Displaying complex or detailed information in a digestable way is always an interesting challenge. It’s certainly s certainly one of the challenges that I’ve had with Anytown, my project to better understand interdependencies and complexities within and between systems.
Here’s my latest attempt at showing some of this information, which I developed for an NHS England briefing today, using information from the Hurricane Sandy report “A stronger, more resilient New York.”
Nodes of different ‘city networks’ are shown in thematic colours (Gas, Electricity, Fuel, Water, Telecommunications and Wastewater). Please note that this is an illustration not a schematic of each network. The connections within networks are shown with black lines, and where there is an interdependency with another network it’s shown in red.
I’m now working on a way of using this alongside the previously developed ripple diagrams to better articulate interdependencies, ideally in an interactive way. If you have any thoughts on how this could best be achieved, drop a comment in the box below, or get in touch directly via Contact Us.
This post needs three caveats. First, I’m by no means a zombie expert. Second, I have not read Max Brooks’ novel, although appreciate the narrative device is dramatically different.
Finally, at just shy of 1000 words, it turns out I have a lot to say about zombies! My guess is that this stems from a traumatic experience as an 8 year old watching a cannibalism story on BBC’s Crimewatch. I still get the shivers on hearing the theme tune.
Valerie over at Emergency Management suggests that Zombies could be considered a Disaster Preparedness Meme; having appeared on official channels such as the CDC blog.
I’m not sure I’d go as far as to say that we’re in meme territory here, but we’ve certainly got a lot of zombies about at the moment. Here’s my take on what World War Z tells us from a resilience perspective.
Establishing what happened
Prior Levels of Preparedness
We begin in the middle of the action – as a result, examples of emergency preparedness are scant, but I did make a few observations
Response
With much of the US Government taken out early on in the film (the film makes a stong mention of the UN – an organisation to which Pitt is connected) it’s down to Brad and dude on the boat to try and save humanity. Whilst this is probably a stretch of the imagination, it reinforces the point of ensuing resilience and sustainability of your own team, an important business continuity consideration.
I did think it was interesting to see cordons being used for containment. There are very few occasions where this is permitted in the UK. However, a double line of police cars is no match for Pitt’s RV, which effectively conveys the lengths people will go to not to be contained.
Unlike other disaster films, there are no casualties. You’re either alive or undead. This means we don’t see too much in the way of how medical facilities cope with a surge in demand.
The Science Part
As is often the way in these films, the young virologist who is confident of finding the solution, manages to accidentally shoot himself. A reminder about the risks associated with a single point of failure.
From soldiers in South Korea, we’re told that that Jerusalem has isolated itself by building a large wall (surely this is a topical reference to Israeli/Palestinian policies? Turns out Al Jazeera made this connection too). This reminded me to the small Derbyshire village of Eyam, which successful avoided the Plague. Simultaneous infection of cities all over the globe seems a little unlikely. However, real-life experience from H1N1 flu was that many large urban centres identified their first cases within a week of the declaration of an event of international significance.
The 12 second ‘conversion’ from human to zombie is incredibly quick. The timescales and convulsions shown present more like nerve agent exposure than bacteria or virus. Whilst the ‘flocking’ behaviour of zombies toward the source of noise isn’t new, the collective emergent response to form a pyramid of zombies to breach the wall was interesting (and technically not unfeasible).
Communications were a dominant theme in the film. The trusty satellite phone made an appearance; I must have missed the part where they realise that it’s cloudy so it won’t connect, or how Brad was able to recharge his device. I thought perhaps the filmmakers glossed over the true impact that a loss of telecommunications would have. We’re now so used to texting/emailing/tweeting/skype-ing (and yes, even phoning) that the distress caused when these systems are not available would be significant. It seemed overly convenient that the family groups depicted were all together, rather than being separated.
I did think it would be unlikely for a research facility of that nature to store all their ‘deadly’ samples all in the same fridge, but I guess it makes for an easier storyline.
The part that I found hardest to believe (apart from Pitt’s hair) related to the ‘cure’. Let’s give the whole population a disease to ‘camouflage’ ourselves. Whilst giving ourselves disease is nothing new (vaccination) I’d expect it would be more thoroughly assessed before inducing meningitis. Did they consider just using the pathogen as an aftershave? Eau de Ebola? Perhaps they did, but with Brad beard never getting past ‘rugged’ it was difficult to tell how much time was passing.
Other observations
Brad Pitt’s hair. Need I say more?
Whilst he might have had irritating hair, I liked Brad Pitt’s cautiousness. Too often the leading man just goes in all guns blazing. Brad was a (slightly) more considered hero, resourceful and aware that there were no second chances.
Verdict
(4 brains)
Final Word: Not a cross bow in sight and another innovative use for duck tape (surely a staple of anyone’s Grab Bag?!)
Image Source: Plan B Entertainment
Yesterday a report was released which called for a “Major overhaul of emergency services…to increase U.K. resilience and security“.
Proposals in this All-Party Parliamentary Group on Homeland Security report (which is highly provocative, perhaps deliberately so?), include the establishment of a Department of Homeland Security and a merger of fire services and ambulance trusts.
This would represent a paradigm shift in not just how the emergency services opperate, but, I feel, also opens the door to more collaborative styles of working across other agencies. Federation is an interesting approach, and one which should not be dismissed without consideration. However, understandably, the emergency services will be concerned about what these proposals mean.
Setting up a UK-DHS, wouldn’t be without it’s complications (one of which would certainly centre around ‘Americanisation’), and may strain or fracture some existing relationships in an attempt to build others. The Ambulance Service, for instance, currently works very closely with hospitals, and this is facilitated to some degree by ‘answering to’ the same Government Department. The future of these relationships would need careful consideration.
The diffuse structure of public services in the UK, as with most things, presents both challenges and opportunities.Establishing an umbrella structure and a Chief of the Emergency Services (a further proposal) could reduce the current relative autonomy. The report suggests that this would be similar to how the Chief of Defence Staff currently provides coordination and consistency for the military. I don’t have extensive experience of how the military works internally, but externally it certainly appears to provide a ‘united front’, and perhaps there is value in looking into this model.
A merger of fire and ambulance organisations in the UK has been suggested before, by the Chief Fire Officers Association. Providing that this proposal is around shared costs, rather than competencies I think there could be benefits. All organisations are looking to make savings without impacting on front line services, and this suggestion shouldn’t be discounted just because it’s unpalettable. However, I think the inherent risk, for example, of getting fire fighters to do the jobs of medical professionals, or visa-versa; would be far too great.
I wonder if the review group looked at benefits from further centralisation? Do we really need 43 Police forces, 46 Fire Services and 11 Ambulance Trusts? Could we not just have 1 of each, with local delivery units? It’s vital that the emergency services continue to provide first class responses to the public, that has to be their priority. But it’s surely worth looking at all potential methods to deliver those services, even if they challenge the here and now?
I’m sure there will be much discussion on these recommendations. Whether there is any resultant change is almost not the point, it’s more important that debates and discussion continue to happen about how we can ensure the best possible provision of emergency services.
I was at a JESIP event earlier this week and it seemed to me that the overarching objective of the programme is to develop a better answer to the question “Why do you do things like that?” than “Because we always have done”. Seems to me that this report is looking to do similar.
Image Source: standford.edu
Apocalyptic movies are a sucessful genre, 2012 took $769,679,473 at the box office. By my rudimentary maths, working on an average ticket price of £8, this means 64,456,930 people (globally) have seen John Cusack fly a plane through tumbling skyscrapers (if you haven’t there’s a still below). Anyway, what’s the point of this…well, despite movie success, getting the public to appreciate real risks of emergencies is often a challenge.
There are a number of reasons for this, not least that the range of heuristics and biases which limit all of our abilities to accurately percieve risk (and which are partly shaped by movies). However, the aspect that I’m focusing on here relates to accessibility, by which I mean the ease of understanding information, not whether it’s available in large print and different languages.
To be clear, I don’t advocating “dumbing down” content, but I do think that there are ways of presenting information which facilitates it’s ease of use. Too often we conceptualise ‘the public’ as abstract dimwits with a reading age of 7 and no ability to have their own thoughts. I firmly oppose this stance and we should remember that “out there” are incredibly inteligent business people, entrepeneurs, professors, doctors and whole swathes of people exposed to complex information on a daily basis.
Having a lead responsibility for risk assessment in London means I spend much of my time thinking about how we can communicate risk information both to professional partners, but also to the public. We’ve certainly seen the Rise of the Infographic over the last couple of years, as shown in the Google Trends graph below. I’m currently playing with some thoughts on how this infographic approach could be used in the context of risk assessment.
Another recent approach that I’ve been trying recently is to avoid sending people directly to a risk register. A 40 page document doesn’t sound like something even I want to read, so why would anyone else? I discovered Prezi about 2 years ago, and have recently developed the presentation below to outline the London Risk Register. It’s already had nearly 1000 views, which is significantly more than the number of hits the London Risk Register has recieved. I’m not saying that’s an indicator of sucessful risk communication, but perhaps it indicates that proving risk information in a non traditional ways (by which I mean, not a document) is preferable?
Take a look, what do you think? Is this a more convienient way, for the public and community, to recieve risk information? Does it break down any of the barriers associated with traditional methods, or are people just interested in the novelty of Prezi’s zooming?
Image Credit: Columbia Pictures