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Author: mtthwhgn

What’s in a name?

What’s in a name?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Don’t worry, my knowledge of Shakespeare runs to just two quotes (both from Romeo and Juliet). David Alexander posted recently about the origins of the word ‘Resilience’, however, today I caught a blog post from Durham IHRR and it got me to thinking…does it matter what we call what we do?

In the office we often have conversations about what ‘Resilience’ means. I think we’ve finalled settled on a definition, based on the UK Civil Protection Lexicon, which includes the ability to detect, prevent, handle and recover from disruptive challenges. Whether this is my preferred definition or not isn’t so important (I’d actually have prefered something more reflective of the Latin eymological root of the word resilire “to rebound, recoil”).

I found the Google Ngram graph for ‘resilience’ interesting, although the scale of the graph probably runs the risk of us reading too much into the patterns. The period of growth since the 1960’s is particularly interesting and probably reflects the term being used by a wider range of fields (ecology, psychology, climate science etc).

Resilience 1800-2008 Google Ngram

Time Magaine called it the buzzword of 2013, so I took to Google Trends to see if there were any more recent pattens. Whilst there is a definate upward trend, to me it’s still inconclusive.

But the actual issue here, is does it matter? Call it resilience, call it Emergency Planning, call it Disaster Management, and the rose still smells the same, even if it doesn’t smell sweet.

I’ve always found definitions restrictive. Perhaps embracing the malleability and imprecision of the definitions could be a good thing? After all, in the event of an emergency/disaster/crisis/catastrophe/act of god, do we, as individuals or communities really care about definitions?

Guess who’s back, back again…

Guess who’s back, back again…

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piggy

Actually, that should be guess who never really went away. After 16 months of pandemic activity during 2009-10 rates of infection declined, vaccines were made available and the story received fewer and fewer column inches.

Influenza though, hasn’t gone away. Occasional peaks in influenza activity have been observed since then, however anyone with a Google Alert for ‘pandemic flu’ would have noticed, as I did, a relative inundation today; with reports out of China of a strain of flu previously undetected in humans.

The H7N9 strain appears to have been initially identified in eastern Jiangning District of China, and the reports that I’ve read so far (news wires or machine translated Chinese pages – full list below) seem to indicate a small number of cases with no epidemiological connection, which could indicate that the virus has already started to spread.

Many of the initial stories were based on anonymous sources or messages on social media sites (which make validation tricky), however as ‘more official’ sources come forward the story is gaining traction.  That said, the current message from the WHO is of no evidence of human-to-human transmission, so there certainly no need for any alarm at this stage.

From my experience, with what started of as “Mexican Flu” and later became “Swine Flu” in 2009, flu is a very tricky virus for global surveillance teams to track, and there are often outbreaks which look significant yet disappear almost as quickly as they arrived. It’s perhaps too soon to say whether this new starin represents a risk, however it does serve as a reminder that the potential for a flu pandemic is real, and although out of the headlines, hasn’t subsided.

A lot of these outbreaks come to nothing, and this latest example could turn out to be just another ‘footnotes in the varied history of bird flu’ (to borrow a phrase from Micheal over at A Flu Diary). However, I follow all of these stories, as speed of identification and reaction to outbreaks puts organisations on the leading edge and better able to initiate plans and take preventative actions.

If nothing else, this has given me an idea for another blog post about tools and processes for situational awareness…keep your eyes peeled for that one!

Sources

Image Credit: Zap2It (chosen as a result of the Bloomberg headline!)

Resilience Fieldtrip 2013

Resilience Fieldtrip 2013

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Did you notice the lack of blog posts over the last few weeks? Well, here’s a long read to make up for it (and official work post over here)!

I’ve just got back from my holiday to Iceland, New York and San Francisco (which, right from the outset, is quite the Disaster Tour!) and I managed to meet up with some resilience colleagues along the way. Each of these places has a strong history of disasters so it was a great opportunity to investigate similarities and differences.

Regardless of where we are in the world, or what our risks include, resilience specialists face common challenges. Whilst volcanic eruptions, super storms and earthquakes feature low down on UK risk registers, I could relate to the complexities of working with large organisations and the grey-space between politics, strategy and operations.

I was interested to learn about emergent community responses to volcanic activity, and how that is being encouraged in Iceland. The impact of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption in the UK (see below) was mainly confined to economic losses (estimated at US $5bn), however, future eruptions could have more direct impacts, both for Iceland and internationally. In fact, I was surprised by just how much ash is in the atmosphere, even in non-eruption conditions (it had recently snowed so it was easy to spot the ash accumulations).

rsz_1iceland1

In New York, signs of Hurricane Sandy were still evident. I was told about the phenomenal coordination effort by City officials both during and in the recovery phase, which far exceeded my expectations. However, after nearly 6 months, there are still signs of the impact the storm had on Manhattan; escalators awaiting repair, felled trees and signs explaining that public art had been removed for restoration. This demonstrates the length of time required to recover from incidents, and I shared experience from the 2011 Public Disorder which took considerable time to get back to normal, and indeed some of the premises affected are still unoccupied as we approach the second anniversary.

The facilities of the New York Office for Emergency Management were impressive, and outstripped any that I have seen in the UK. The department was directly affected by 9/11 and subsequently relocated to new facilities in Brooklyn and I was lucky enough to get a tour of their award winning emergency operations centre; which although similar in principle had some marked differences to UK operations rooms.

rsz_ny1

eoc_birdseye_499

As I was wandering around Manhattan, there were traces of emergency planning from days gone by. NYC fallout shelters have long been decommissioned, although it’s estimated that there were up to 200,000 such designated facilities by the mid 1960s. Whilst the specifics of the response to such an incident may have evolved, it’s a reminder that there has been a sustained threat to many places around the world.

rsz_ny2

The final leg of my travels took me to San Francisco. It’s been some time since they’ve experienced a significant earthquake, however they take their preparations extremely seriously, and signs of the 1906 quake are evident in their approach to resilience and land use planning in the city. Much of the city was destroyed by the earthquake and subsequent fire – the area highlighted in red on the map below shows the areas affected.

1907-San-Francisco-Earthquake-Map-4_0

Indeed, even their offices are designed to withstand high magnitude earth movements using a what was described to me as a simple roller system (although I’m sure the reality is far more complicated!).

rsz_sf1

As well as being affected directly by earthquakes, San Francisco is also at high risk of the after effects of submarine earthquakes – tsunamis. There has been considerable investment to protect vulnerable locations, prepare emergency services and raise public awareness. In fact, this week 24-30 March is Tsunami Awareness Week 2013 and there are some good resources and links to local activities listed.

rsz_sf2

Another commonality which struck me, was that all of the places I visited were beginning to think seriously about the implications of climate change. Whether it affects the rate of glacial melting (Iceland) or sea level rise (New York, San Francisco), it’s an area which is increasingly being picked up on the resilience radar. Rather than enter into my thoughts on this issue here, I’ll save that for a future post.

I’d be very interested in the thoughts of any international colleagues reading this blog on their view of the similarities and differences in approach. I decided that I quite like field trips, so if you’d like to invite me to your country please get in touch!

 

Emergency Planning – why bother?

Emergency Planning – why bother?

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I never forget the reason for my personal passion in emergency preparedness. However, like all of us, I have the occasional fleeting moment when my inner cynic rises a little closer to the surface, and all I have to do is cast my mind back…

Conceptualised as The Decade of Disaster, there was a period in the late 80’s/early 90s when sadly there were a series of emergencies within a short space of time. The majority of these were transport, sport or industrial process related. I remember sitting in presentation after presentation being reminded of these horrific incidents.

However, what I’ve come to realise is that no matter where you draw the line, you’re always able to find evidence of a ‘Decade of Disaster’. There are some statistics which suggest that disaster risk is increasing. I have no doubt that, on an international scale this is indeed the case. As the world’s population both increases and agglomerates, phenomena will have greater impact on people; and it’s probably a given that man-made disasters, with increased reliance on technology and no end in sight to economic inequalities, are also here to stay.

So, what does this mean? Why am I blogging about it? Well, the compilation of news clips above comes courtesy of the Emergency Planning College and just goes to show that we can’t stop emergencies. They will continue, and sadly, in another few years we’ll be able to pull together clips from a different decade. However, each of us, whether as individuals, members of local communities, emplopyees or employers can take action to reduce the level of impact that emergencies can have.

We have a choice, either take action, or accept that one day, it could be us in the video clips.

Complexity & Interdependency

Complexity & Interdependency

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tt19-Interdependency

I’m currently working on a project investigating Infrastructure Ecology, although that’s not how I describe it at work for fear of alienating the audience! It’s a fascinating area of enquiry, which the diagram above only partially articulates and I’d need more than one blog post to do it justice. So I thought I’d start with why I think it’s fascinating.

When we flick on a light switch, twist a tap or pick up our phone we expect those services to work. We’ve come to rely on them, and largely that doesn’t cause us any issues – the lights come on, water comes of ouf the tap and we hear a dial tone. However, incidents (Gloucestershire flooding 2007 and Hurricane Sandy 2012 to name just two examples) and exercises that I have either participated in or facilitated consistently reveal that these systems are far from 100% reliable.

Too often we treat things in silos, but increasingly we need to consider how the different systems that we have developed and have evolved alongside over many years interact and depend on each other. In a previous role, I facilitated a business continuity exercise for a large teaching hospital. The scenario was pretty basic, but it revealed that all but 4 of the wards in the hospital had planned to use the same fallback space – in the worst case this meant cramming over 200 patients into a 30 bed ward. We find it difficult to think outside of our sphere; I’m not sure of the reasons why, but we need to recognise that it happens and develop a methodology which forces us to think more holistically.

Interdisciplinary approaches are the way forward. Involving a wider range of people and organisations is risky – and makes camels a more likely outcome – but it’s the only solution to get us out of our silos.

Previous attempts to ‘educate’ professionals about these business continuity challenges concentrated on presentations, and as the same lessons are still coming us, I think we can be confident that levels of awareness have remained largely static. My approach has been to redefine the problem (that non-experts don’t understand interdependencies and complexities of systems) and to look for other world solutions (which is where the ‘ecology’ in Infrastructure Ecology comes in).

Experts in biodiversity have known for a considerable length of time that the key to understanding the key to successful interventions is understanding the underpinning relationships between predator-prey-environment. It’s something that I vaguely remembered learning at school, and without much thought it was clear that it was a model which had applications in helping understand the infrastructure problems encountered.

Last week I ran two workshops at City Hall, with representation from a wide variety of sectors organisations and interests to harvest their experience and knowledge. This will be synthesised to produce a model of an urban area which ‘understands’ how the different systems are related and therefore what the consequences of interruption to one will be on other systems.

I’m now in the process of translating the data we collected into something meaningful. I have some grand aspirations for the project, and alternative between getting carried away and reigning myself in to concentrate on the practical! I’ll keep you posted!

Image Source: NARUC

Response – The Great European Stink

Response – The Great European Stink

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Now, this blog post is a bit delayed, more than a bit actually, nearly a month! But as well as my occasional musings on resilience and emergency planning, this blog is also a mechanism to capture the incidents that I’ve been involved with.

Just a week after the Helicopter crash, our team was called into action again, for a chemical release in Rouen, northern France.

Now, there are thousands of chemicals out there, probably more than that, so I’m not going to claim to know the response precautions for every one, however, thanks to some research I did following this episode of TV’s F.R.I.E.N.D.S, I did have a basic knowledge of Mercaptan! The smell that they add to odourless natural gas as a safety measure to identify leaks.

A quick call to expert colleagues in the Health Protection Agency (or Public Health England depending on when you’re reading this) confirmed my suspicions. Mercaptan is detectable by the human nose at around 0.27-0.93 parts per billion, whereas exposure limits are around 0.5 parts per million, and given the gas has diluted considerably as it crossed the Channel, no health concerns were likely; and the work for our team was relatively short-lived.

Meanwhile, in Norway, another incident was creating fumes of a different kind, as 27 tonnes of goats cheese caught fire!

These incidents gave me the impetus I needed to start a personal project to gather information on these ‘low end of the scale’ incidents. I believe that perfecting the response to smaller incidents will make responding to larger incidents more habitual.

ZombieLab

ZombieLab

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I realise that it’s been a few days since posting, that’s largely due to some exciting developments behind there scenes here at mtthwhgn.com towers. I’m not revealing anything just yet, but it’ll be worth it so keep checking back; until then, normal service will continue, this time with Zombies…

zombielab

Last week I went to Science Museum Lates for an adults-only event called ZombieLab: The science of consciousness. Combining my love of learning, my interest in the undead and my appreciation for wine, this seemed like a great way to spend an evening.

Zombies are nothing new, and once I get round to watching some disaster movies, there will be a fair few which are centered around them. However, there has been a rise, in recent years, of zombies being used by Emergency Planners to bring pop-culture relevance to the work we do. I first noticed this a few years ago with CDC’s Zombie Webpages, and Leicester City Council’s admission of unpreparedness. Whilst an outbreak of flesh-eating zombies might be highly unlikely, preparing for such an apocalypse has more than a few parallels to preparing to real emergencies too.

It was this in mind that I went to ZombieLab. Roaming throughout the museum were ‘infected specimens’ and ‘operatives’ who would check the crowd for signs of infection using a range of tests designed to filter out the undead, including

  • Memory
  • Hand-Eye Coordination
  • Stability
  • Accuracy
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Spatial Awareness

Granted, these didn’t have much to do with repairing for emergencies, however, during the course of the evening, members of the crowd were ‘bitten’ and became zombies themselves.

Now, I’d have liked there to have been more on the science of how disease, even unlikely ones, are spread. We’ve already seen examples of how air travel has speeded up the global transmission of diseases such as SARS, and many other bugs are on the horizon.

Emergency Managers (in the UK at least) use the Reasonable Worst Case to develop planning assumptions and conduct risk assessments. Whilst the Swine Flu Pandemic in 2009/10 didn’t reach these planned levels, there was potential, which still remains, for a novel virus to have a massive impact not just locally, but on global populations.

Whether we choose to prepare (or encourage people to prepare) for flooding, flu or flesh-eating zombies is irrelevant. What matters is that they’re preparing. How long we can ride the zombie wave isn’t known (judging by the numbers at the Science Museum last week there’s still a considerable interest), but there will be something else. Something which will captivate popular imagination despite being implausible.

 

Image Source: Science Museum Flickr ZombieLab Set

Rainy Day Funds

Rainy Day Funds

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Ceramic piggy bank

I read an article in The Independent last week about how there has been an increase in people unable to cope with unexpected expenditure.

Presumably this is as a result of the recession, and I’ve certainly noticed that everyday life seems to be that little bit more expensive than it used to be; most likely as a result of a combination of rising fuel prices, an increase in VAT and inflation rate changes. However, I’m no economist and therefore I’ll leave precise analysis of the reasons for this to people much better informed than me.

This does have impacts for resilience though. Flooding, arguably the UK’s most likely risk, rarely generates sensational media images associated with…say…helicopter crashes, but (I would suggest) is more damaging in terms of cost. In this context, Rainy Day Fund seems a particularly apt metaphor.

Right now, would you be able to afford, or does your insurance cover,

  • Replacing all of your downstairs carpets?
  • Hiring equipment to dry out plaster?
  • Repairing damage to your car caused by flood water and debris?

It’s something The Guardian picked up in 2011, but clearly many of us didn’t heed their warnings! How many of us have a piggy bank that we can raid in an emergency?

I have several contingency funds, but none of them particularly extensive, and I’m sure I’d have to call on other sources of assistance if I needed large sums of money quickly.

The organisations that I work with every day prepare detailed plans for many of the risks in the National Risk Register. Some of them have considered how to ‘deal’ with Vulnerable People, and often this involves information to “prepare a household or community emergency plan” but perhaps some more practical advice like “save a small amount of money each week” would be more advantageous?

Community resilience isn’t just about sandbags!

 

Image Source: Ocean/Corbis

Response – Vauxhall Helicopter Crash

Response – Vauxhall Helicopter Crash

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It’s been a busy 48 hours!

One of the earliest photos that I saw (Via @craiglet)

Shortly after 0800 on 16 January I was made aware of an aircraft which had crashed in central London. Fortunately I wasn’t on call, so didn’t have any immediate responsibilities, and therefore decided that I would remain at home to watch the unfolding news. This ensured that rather than getting on the tube, I remained contactable should I have been needed.

It quickly became apparent, in the age of social media and citizen journalists (which is a dated term, but I quite like it) that the aircraft in question was a helicopter, which had collided with a crane on a construction site.

Having established these very basic facts, and having received no calls at this point, I decided that I should probably go to work!

As I arrived, it became apparent that this tragic incident had really grasped the attention of the media, which, as ever was a sea of speculation with islands of truth. For me it’s not a problem, because I’ve been trained to treat media reports with a degree of caution until confirmed. It’s not surprising though, when many members of the public (with limited other information) believe everything they see in the news.

At the scene of the incident, and even away from the scene, response arrangements were initiated. However, the response to any emergency involves many more organisations than you typically might expect. Just as an example, each of the locations in the following sentence fall under the jurisdiction of a different organisation. The helicopter had hit a building site, debris had fallen into a variety of areas, which could have included a very busy stretch of railway, a considerable area of the road network in the area and various business premises and homes.

Providing support, consistent and accurate information and a communication route between the many and varied agencies is my primary role in a situation such as this. The initial phase of an incident, the first few hours generally, are (quite rightly) dominated by the emergency services. As time progresses through, colleagues from Local Authorities, Transport providers, Government and Utility companies all have a role to play in the response, recovery and communication to the public.

Whilst the investigation into this incident is ongoing it wouldn’t be right for me to comment any further than these basic details.

But before the snow arrives, and as the media reports move on to other issues, I felt it appropriate to acknowledge the very wide range of organisations who work together in these situations.

That, and it’s a perfect example of (what I call) the Emergency Planner’s Paradox. It is obviously a tragic incident and my sincere condolences are with the families of those who were sadly killed, but it is a real test of the planned arrangements, and I think they worked incredibly well in this instance.

Photo Source: @craiglet (I chose this one as it was the first that I saw yesterday)

Resilience at the movies

Resilience at the movies

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I didn’t realise it until I started this blog, but it appears that I have an affinity for the Disaster Movie.

I’ve developed this list of Disaster Movies and will be bringing you my thoughts on disaster films from a professional perspective (it’s based on a list I found here, and as you’ll see, it’s very much a work in progress!). I’m not setting myself any objectives here – I’ll just do this as and when, and based on which movies I can get my hands on. Check the ‘At the movies’ category for all relevant blog posts.

disaster movie picture

What am I hoping this will reveal? Well, there are already numerous studies of Disaster Movies from other perspectives (cinematography, feminism etc) – but as far as I’m aware, there hasn’t been a professional Emergency Management approach previously. So, my intention will be to compare what I know and have experience of, with what is portrayed on the big (or little) screen.

Obviously Hollywood likes to embellish fact with a good story; I understand that we’re not, unless explicitly stated, watching documentaries here. Nevertheless, for most of us (in the UK at least) our exposure to disasters is infrequent, so perhaps the disaster movie can serve as a learning experience – perhaps for the public, but perhaps also for the response community. Maybe once I’ve worked my way through the list I’ll have uncovered a lot more!

It’s going to take some time, and I expect I won’t be able to get through all of the films listed. I’ve already provided my analysis of 2012s The Impossible and I watched Source Code this weekend so will bring you that one soon too.

So there we have it, my intention for the first ‘running theme’ of this blog. If you have any suggestions on films you’d like reviewed – what was the professional message from Snakes on a Plane perhaps – then drop me a comment below or on twitter.

Oh, and the image is my rudimentary analysis of the categories of disaster film by year – I’m going to do a bit more work on this and come back with some more meaningful and insightful analysis, so for now, it’s just a nice picture!