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Category: Resilience

Responding to Terrorism

Responding to Terrorism

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Earlier this week I posted a blog about Jacobean ‘terrorism’ (to coincide with the 408th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot). This was one of the issues that I mentioned today during my lecture on Responding to Terrorism delivered to students from the Department of War Studies at Kings College London.

I’ve provided my slides below, and ask you to forgive the formatting errors which have occurred in uploading to SlideShare! I’ve sat through lectures where the presenter reads text from a slide…that is not my style. However, without the description to accompany the slides some of the points may not make complete sense. In hindsight, I should have recorded my presentation…I’ll try and arrange that the next time I present on something.

Anyway, enough from me, take a look at the slides and let me know what you think.

If you want to know more on my thoughts on responding to terrorism, or would like to invite me to present, please get in touch!

You’ll also notice in the slides that I relate back to a number of historical London disasters – remember you can find out more about them on one of my Disaster Tours!

Gunpowder Plot: something more than terror?

Gunpowder Plot: something more than terror?

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Britain has a long history of religious conflict, mostly forgotten by largely secular modern society. However, every year on the 5 November one such event is commemorated across the country.

Later this week I’m lecturing at Kings College London on a module entitled Responding to Terrorism. In preparation, I’ve been looking at how on the surface the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 reads like modern-day terrorism and how Russell Brand might have something to learn from history.

rememberremember

First, let’s look at the Gunpowder Plot: a fringe group of religiously motivated fanatics planning to detonate explosives in an underground area beneath a well-known location in an attempt to change the government to one favouring their religion. It certainly brandishes all the hallmarks of terrorist incidents that we’re familiar with in 2013.

Even today, over 400 years after the plot was foiled, the Houses of Parliament in London are surrounded by metal and concrete barriers; it remains a target for terrorism.

However, going one step further than the ‘modern’ terrorist, the 13 conspirators (I’ll take off my broad-brimmed hat and cloak if anyone can name, without Googling, more than one of them?!) had developed a plan which went considerably further than striking ‘terror’ into the hearts and minds of the public.

Following their planned explosion designed to kill the King and the Government, they next planned to kidnap the daughter of the King, Princess Elizabeth, and create a Catholic government around the puppet crown. It is worth recognising that the plan was more sophisticated than just destroy the current system and see what happens. Interestingly, this latter approach seems to be the style of ‘revolution’ that comedian Russell Brand has recently called for. Additionally, it is interesting to see that protest groups are now using the imagery and metaphor associated with the Fifth of November to stage their own protests about perceived injustice.

The semantics of whether or not the 1605 plot was ‘terrorism’ isn’t really the issue for my lecture. What I’m interested in is how have responses changed. Our understanding of modern terrorism shapes our opinions of past events. But at the same time, are there things that we can learn from history to deal with modern risks?

Not wanting to give away my secrets before Thursday, check back later in the week for my thoughts!

Oh, and I should also mention that it’s not just because of the foiled plot that the Houses of Parliament feature on my Disaster Tour!

 

Image Credit: Anon Online/Twitter

Video: The Emergency Manager

Video: The Emergency Manager

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People often introduce me to others and say that I have a really interesting job. I’m not going to lie, I really do, and I’m passionate about it, but I’m not sure that people really know what a career in emergency management entails. Sometimes, I wonder myself!

Today I found this gem of a video via Eric at Emergency Management – in less than 5 minutes it does a really good job of summarising one part of my role – to respond to emergencies.

It’s great to see such a simple and engaging overview, although there are some differences, but I expect these are a product of different US concepts and terminology rather. Although, I’m not sure that the information on Improvised Nuclear Devices is absolutely correct.

But what the video doesn’t comment on, and indeed makes a less exciting cartoon, is the hours of work that go in to assessing and then managing the risk of emergencies, with activities that might include:

  • the procurement of specialist equipment
  • development of agreed response procedures between all organisations
  • design, organisation and facilitation of training and validation
  • providing communities and businesses with information or
  • ensuring that following any incident, we emerge from it better prepared for the next one.

It’s certainly not just about sitting around and waiting until emergencies happen!

Any budding animators fancy building on this cartoon to show the true life in the day of an emergency manager/yours truly? Get in touch!

 

Avid readers may recognise this as a repost…technical problems meant that the original was unavoidably deleted!

 

International Day for Disaster Reduction (Cross Post)

International Day for Disaster Reduction (Cross Post)

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Some areas of the world are more at risk of disasters, but there is nowhere that escapes them completely. Similarly, whilst everyone can be affected by disasters, they can have a more pronounced impact on people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups.

disability_naturaldisaster

This year the UNISDR International Day for Disaster Reduction draws attention to the specific challenges of Living with Disability and Disasters.

To mark IDDR2013, I wrote a blog post for LondonPrepared which you can read over here…

 

Image Credit: homelandsecuritynewswire.com (and before anyone says, I know being in a wheelchair isn’t the only disability!)

Pop Up Emergency Planning

Pop Up Emergency Planning

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From one off exhibitions and sample sales to short term high-concept bars and restaurants, the trend for temporary, ephemeral retail and leisure has gripped London, and many other places, in recent years.

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The cynic in me knows not to be drawn in by the marketing and hype, but then I get a serious case of FOMO and hop aboard the ‘for a limited time only’ train. From eating deep fried crab in petrol stations, to sipping rum from watermelons in a faux 1950’s holiday resort; it’d be fair to say I’ve participated in the trend.

However, it wasn’t until this week that I thought about transitioning this from a retail context to resilience.

Emergent behaviour in response to disasters is nothing new. There are countless stories of unplanned, improvised and spontaneous responses which should give us all a warm feeling: despite not knowing our neighbours, community spirit really is alive and kicking.

Perhaps though, there is room to develop, enable and facilitate these pop-up responses in the event of an incident? Are there any lessons to be learned from retail for our own pop-up planning, both within the responder community but also at the individual and community level?

In a study conducted in 1983, Quarantelli identified a typology of emergence, shown below.

Structures

Tasks

Old

New
Old

Quasi-Emergence

Task Emergence
New

Structural Emergence

Group Emergence

Remember the London Riots Broom Army? The task was new, the clean-up of the mess and debris left by several days of consecutive looting and vandalism. The structures used were also new and so this would be classified as Group Emergence.

With the Volcanic Ash Cloud of 2010, people near airports offered spare rooms to stranded passengers – a new task (the provision of shelter), but using existing structures (people’s homes rather than camp beds in a village hall), giving rise in this case to Task Emergence.

Whilst this is a useful model for understanding different motivating factors behind emergent behaviour, as with most things, I expect there is a degree of overlap between the different groups, and it’s hard to classify all examples of emergence as just one of these types.

However, in thinking about this typology, where can we help enable emergence in the future? It’s easy to identify the ‘old’ structures and tasks, this is  what we do every day and in the way that we currently do it. Even identifying ‘new’ tasks isn’t that complex, as whilst they may not be everyday tasks, they’re likely to be foreseeable. I think it’s the identification of ‘new structures’ which presents the challenge. (I have a feeling that VOST could be one of these new structures, and I’ll get round to blogging more about the use of volunteers to support operations soon!) It’s easy to say ‘communities’ but who? What are the factors which make someone a community leader, how do they get people onboard with their vision? How do they coordinate spontaneous activity?

There is a tendency for emergency planners to seek to ‘control’, when actually that’s both extremely complicated and largely not desired by affected communities. We need to dispel two myths, that the public is incapable and that we can solve everything alone. There is going to be emergence in disasters, so we should include emergence in preparedness activities.

 

 

Image Source: kimchiandchips.com

Right Royal Resilience

Right Royal Resilience

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I’ve been thinking lately, motivated by on-going projects at work, about what influences our resilience. My ponderings tend to wind up at etymology, what did the word or term originally mean and what does that tell us, if anything, about how we should or could understand it.

ToL

Whilst many people believe ‘resilience’ has roots in 1970s environmentalism, in his paper (Resilience and disaster risk reduction: an etymological journey) David Alexander suggests resilience traces back considerably further to classical cultures, I therefore got to thinking about the broader history of resilience.

Fittingly, I visited Rome earlier this year and recognised the symbolic nature of the Colosseum – both as a reminder of the destructive power of the 1349 earthquake, but also that such destruction doesn’t always equate with decline. Similarly London has also exhibited significant ‘ability to endure’ and to prosper in the face of catastrophic events. Flooding, Fire and Plagues have befallen the city, but it remains standing as a leading world power.

My first post on this blog nearly a year ago concerned Doomsday Preppers, who have taken preparing to the next level compared to the general public. Staring across the River Thames at the Tower of London today, I realised that the notion of a ‘Prepper’ isn’t new.

The Tower of London is typical of medieval castles, and employs some similar strategies those of modern doomsday preppers.

  • Multiple layers of defences (see image above), including ditches and moats, fences, stone walls and towers – even the ancient wall of Roman London also served a defensive purpose – and the origins of The Barbican are in a fortified outpost or gateway to the city
  • Self sufficiency – in order to withstand a prolong siege, the area inside the castle was used for farming, water, and small industries.

As important as the Kentish ragstone walls, pots of boiling tar or portcullises no doubt served to be, they alone do not define resilience. As I reflected on the link between royalty I realised that the parallels weren’t just in the hard measures either.

The British Monarchy has demonstrated resilience as an institution (having had it’s fair share of low points from which it has ‘bounced back’) but I wonder whether monarchical rule itself exerts any influence on wider resilience? Does it represent continuity between the past and the present, or provide hope of stability and order during times of uncertainty and change.

 

Image Source: Wikipeadia

What If…Blackout?

What If…Blackout?

Reading Time: 6 minutes

In February I was approached by a researcher from RawTV about a programme they were making…on Monday the programme they were making, Blackout, aired on Channel 4.

Blackout

The premise: A cyber attack brings down the National Grid, plunging the country into darkness. How would we cope in a nation-wide power cut lasting 5 days?

There are parallels between this and my Anytown project, so I was interested to see how this scenario would be presented, and what messages it might provide about resilience. The few reviews that I have read have criticised the ‘lack of realism’ (mostly the apparent infinite battery life of smartphones and cameras). But I’m willing to forgive a dose of editorial license required to get this into in a prime-time slot.

The first thing which interested me is that Blackout was not presented as fiction. Although this is not the first time that’s been done – the 1938 CBS broadcast of War of the Worlds inspired by the 1926 BBC broadcast of Broadcasting from the Barricades – it adds to the sense of realism. Some clever editing to interweave footage from real events with the drama highlighted that there are typical consequences from all emergencies, and therefore the value of flexible consequence based planning.

Whilst the shaky-cam and histrionics (frankly, terrible acting by Girl in Hospital) did detract slightly I think there were a few take home messages.

Establishing the scale of the disruption

Is this a problem with your fuse box? Is it confined to a couple of houses or your street? Or is it wider than that? The programme showed people reaching for their phones; “My friend on Facebook in London say’s there’s problems there too”, #smem for the masses.

Initial reactions

Viewers were presented with the televisual equivilent of a bullet-point list of immediate consequences and the subsequent public response.

  • No lights – saw people grab for their torches and candles. What I’d have liked to have seen is more explicit reference to wind up torches and some statement on the dangers associated with candle use
  • No airport activity resulting in stranded passengers – the programme didn’t go back to Heathrow after the initial loss of power, it would have been interesting to see the point at which a ‘normal disruption’ to flights starts to have significant consequences
  • No street lights or traffic signals leading to a rise in road traffic collisions, with no ability to control traffic flows, gridlock would build very quickly
  • Problems at crowded places and planned events with resultant public order and safety considerations
  • Inability to heat food and requirement to empty food from freezers – I thought the freezer issue was considered a little bit too early, but the challenges associated with not being able to cook are significant
  • People trapped in lifts (and on the London Eye) – again, not altogether uncommon, for mechanical or localised electrical issues, but becoming a more complex problem to solve in a widespread blackout
  • Mobile phone congestion (and later, disruption) – I didn’t think the factors behind this were particularly well explained in the programme. However, reduced fixed-line telecoms and an inability to dynamically manage mobile networks, this is a definite possibility in a relatively short period of time. Increasingly important as we’ve become much more dependant on mobile phones.
  • No heating – whilst this wouldn’t be a problem in the summer months, during winter it would be unpleasant and would likely result in excess deaths in vulnerable group
  • Commercial and economic impact – as well as the macro-economic impact of this type of event, the impacts at an individual level would also be significant. An inability to pay for goods (not ATMs), combined with an inability to process payments could lead to ‘looting’ (with no fear of recompense as CCTV cameras offline)
  • Drying up fuel stocks – as people jump in their cars and head to Sheffield, they forget that refuelling without power will be problematic, and likley to result in people resorting to questionable methods. I once (legitimately) syphoned petrol from a fuel tank, it didn’t go quite to plan and I got a mouthful of unleaded. The best advice would have been to follow the government advice to “stay in”…or perhaps to travel by bicycle.

The Emergency Planners Paradox

It’s not something that I’ve seen articulated on TV before, but is something that I experience from time to time. Having planned in detail for these events, to have the opportunity to implement those arrangements does bring a degree of satisfaction. Having drained his radiators, assembled his grab-bag and purchased a generator, the middle-class prepper found himself in this situation for some time. By the fourth day however his reserves begin to wane “I thought if a situation like this came about I’d be alright, but I’m finding it quite hard”, from there quickly descending to the lowest common denominator – survival at all costs.

Confidence, Optimism, Teamwork and Fear

Whilst there was little confidence expressed in the government plan, there was an undercurrent of confidence from most characters, trusty old Dunkirk Spirit (which may or may not have exitsted). A clear sense that ‘it’ll be back on tomorrow’ would probably be highly motivating in those circumstances, even if it didn’t turn out to be the case.

There were both positive and negative examples of people working together and emergent behaviour. Naturally the positive examples (such as the family who took in their vulnerable elderly neighbour) are great, but I’m glad the producers didn’t gloss over those who exploit a situation for their own good.

Whilst innovation and improvisation was seen as a key success factor, this was tempered with some characters being highly suspicious of others.  The Telegraph identified the tagged man as a paedophile; I didn’t reach that conclusion, but it was clear that the single mother was suspicious and uncomfortable travelling with him.

In fairness, the programme only hinted at pockets of panic-behaviours, which was reassuring as evidence and expeience shows this is a relatively uncommon response.

Emergency Powers

Whilst the use of temporary emergency legislation is included as an option in the Civil Contingencies Act (2004) there has been no situation since them requiring enactment. It’s quite possible that in a national emergency these powers would be utilised to provide continuity to essential services (where possible), but it’s also likley that their use would face much opposition.

Aftermath

As with the documentaries and movies that go before it, Blackout ended when the lights came back on. Whilst I understand the dramtic need for this, consequences will be more pervasive and long lasting, and from my persepctive, it would have been interesting to compare the rate at which Britan descended into anarchy to the recovery and restoration of normality.

So, that was what I gleaned from Blackout, but how did social media feel? I took to twitter to find out, here’s a snapshot illustrating the range of opinion from cynical to downright confused, but first…a graph, showing that around 26,000 tweets were sent with the hashtag #blackout peaking at 700 tweets per minute around 21:30.

blackouttweets

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!

20130905-201923.jpg

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.