Recovery

I have been re-reading a couple of Chubbm's blog posts on R4 Resilience. What Mr. Chubb drives home in both of these articles rings very true with this Recovery professional. I have been writing for some time on the theme of Holistic Recovery and the need to be innovative and even daring when faced with the task of recovering from a catastrophic event.

Pehaps the first phase is to bring Recovery truly under the Emergency Management umbrella and spend as much effort on having excellent recovery programs as we do in preparedness, response and mitigation.

I highly recommend Failure is Fertilizer and Recovery: 8 Principles vs. 12 Steps as primers for more engagement on Natural Disaster Recovery.

Convergence

Not having the budget to trek down under to hear Ken Simpson’s presentation to the BCI Summit, I have settled for the next best thing…I reviewed his slide deck at Contemplating.

As with my previous post on a Profession in Transition, Ken subtly (at least without a script or speaker’s notes it appears subtle) suggests that EM and BCM are converging. I work at a rather complex level service delivery and I can tell you that when we examined our maturing BCM program it led to a similar convergence. So much so that Emergency Managers are cross training as Business Continuity Managers and taking ownership of the whole BCM program as a sub-component of the Disaster Management program.

This was done when it appeared to the EM world that BCM seemed to be satisfied once the plan was written. In fairness the task of developing a BCM program in our organization was enormous and as a result the focus was tended to be on compliance. This level of satisfaction was seen as complacency which frightened the Emergency Management crowd; you know the ones who see cascading effects around every corner and seem to want to push the dynamic nature of disasters (wicked problems) on the BCM planners.

It has yet to be tested, but it would appear that though this example of convergence, we paid attention to the techniques and processes of BCM while applying the more general concepts of EM to the finished BCM plans.

A Profession in Transition?

I have just finished reviewing the results of the 2009-2010 Preparedness, Security and Crisis Communications a survey co-sponsored by Honeywell. The results are interesting and show a continuing trend towards all hazards approach to Emergency Management.

As a relative new comer to the profession of Emergency Management I have been intrigued by the specialization and competition amongst the various fields that contribute to the preparedness field. I often wondered why the various specializations seemed to want to claim primacy where in fact all contribute to the field of Emergency Management.

Being a former soldier I pictured this as the various branches of Armor, Infantry, Artillery and Engineers all clambering to prove they are the most important component of the Army. But as any true soldier knows its only when the four arms are combined and supported by the necessary resources is the full power (resilience) of the whole Army truly on display.

Perhaps what the client group is trying to tell our profession is that they need a whole solution to their preparedness challenges and the focus should shift from specific BCM, IT or crisis communications to a broad all hazards approach to the task.

I wonder if this is true Emergency Management?

Tsunami and the Prairie Boy

I was recently visiting with a friend who happened to be in Hawaii during the tsunami warnings after the earthquake in Chile.

Being that we are both landlocked prairie boys the idea of a tsunami is exotic and frightening at the same time. So when my friend and his wife were woken by sirens in Waikiki that morning they were more than a little concerned. I don’t know about you but like most prairie boys, that was my friend’s first tsunami warning and he didn’t know what to expect. Being from the Red River Valley, our water emergencies are generally slow moving and predictable floods that we spend weeks and months predicting. The image of a tsunami for a flatlander was a vision of a fast moving wall of water due to arrive at any minute.

Turing on the TV, my friends was immediately comforted by the well prepared and informative public information being broadcast on the local channels. The hotel staff was well prepared and gave detailed instructions on the tsunami plan for the hotel guests. It appeared that every detail was taken care of including designated evacuation routes and locations identified on high ground . This was supported by regular updates on the preparations and status to the public through the media.

We know now that the tsunami had little impact in Hawaii, but in the moment I can tell you my friend was comforted by the scale of the preparations and the professional attitude of the islanders. So well done to the Emergency Managers of Hawaii and all those who worked so hard to be ready in case!

Risk Management - A Planning Process

This is an excellent article by Mainak Mazumder on how disaster risks can be addressed through process of environmental calamity planning.

Disaster Management is not a stand alone concept. It’s a combination of environmental, developmental, social factors coupled with administrative directives, organizations and operational skills and its capacities to implement those to lessen the adverse effects of an emergency and thus stop a disaster. The other important constituent of risk management is proper and precise information flow and that information flow in itself is a form of disaster response in its own right.

The full Blog is at http://bit.ly/9EDahb .

Global Situational Awareness

I picked this site up off a tweet. This will no doubt be of interest to those supporting global interests.

Havaria Information Service

More on the OODA Loop

Observe Orient Decide Act are the famous stages of combat decision making and they can be underpinnings of any crisis decision making program.

One of the primary reasons Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) penned this system was to provide discipline to the process of making decisions under stress. By applying discipline and making the steps repeatable you create an ingrained process that continues even under the stress of combat. Taking that ingrained, disciplined process into your own crisis management processes will serve you when challenged by pressures of a crisis.

One of the key benefits of this disciplined approach is to speed up the decision making process with the intent of "getting inside your enemies OODA loop". While the enemy for our purposes might be a BCM issue, a fire or flood; making fast and informed decisions helps with establishing control of the situation and gives the organization confidence that its leadership has a grip on the situation. In other words getting inside the OODA loop. This attitude of not surrendering the initiative to the event is what I believe is key to my concepts of crisis action management.

The kind of organizational agility that allows you to make and implement decisions in a crisis will put you out in front of the crisis, helping your organization return to normal as quickly as possible and possibly ahead of your competition.

Some Thoughts on Sense/React

In a comment to my post on "Crisis Management and Resilience" Ken Simpson introduced the concept of situational awareness and Sense/React. I want to provide a few thoughts on this along with a more expanded look at React.

Firstly I want to state that in my view sense/react is an oversimplification. It misses the key steps of taking what your sensors identify and turning it into usable information which informs the react function.

Looking at this in reverse order I will briefly discuss react. I don't like that term as it implies that the situation is the master and the organization is purely reacting to situation. In principle I belief this surrendering of the initiative can lead to complacency and resignation.

When looking at the sense function, we can see how this might challenge an organization during a crisis. It is the sense function that provides the raw data that makes up an organization's situational awareness. In normal times, we have research departments, corporate relationships and other sensors that provide input to situational awareness and help the decision-maker "react". When a crisis occurs many of our normal channels of situational awareness are non-effective or operate at reduced effectiveness and here is where I believe most organizations are vulnerable.

As I mentioned earlier, the concept of sense and react is a simplification of the process of decision making in a crisis. I would like to expand that to Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. This theory know widely as the OODA Loop was originally penned Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) for air to air combat and has become one of the seminal concepts of decision making theory.

Introduction to the OODA Loop



I will provide a further blog on how the OODA Loop can take a crisis management program from normal to extraordinary.

Recovery in Haiti

As a natural disaster recovery professional I am following the efforts in Haiti with interest. There is no doubt the the effort will take years and will from time to time be difficult. By difficult I mean it will call for decisions that will have impact on the entire society of Haiti or the at least those in the disaster zone.

The recent report in Time: Scientists: Why Haiti Should Move its Capital is one of those decisions. As scientists and outsiders providing assistance to the Haitians it is easy to make grand recommendations. However from my own personal experience, relocating disaster victims from their "normal" is a challenge. A challenge in which no amount of money, arm twisting or common sense will influence those that chose to resist the idea that somewhere else is better than rebuilding what was lost. There are a number of issues that must be taken into account as those leading the efforts attempt to influence the reconstruction effort:

There is a societal wide rush to return to normal with little thought on how to prevent future issues. Self recovery is already well underway and unless the national recovery effort catches up, the momentum of self recovery will surpass the inertia of government decision making and the potential for a rift in the efforts increases.

To offset the rush to self recovery, there will be a segment with victim paralysis. These folks will be unable to make decisions and even when pressed to contribute to their own recovery, will find even the simplest decision beyond their grasp.

Finally, I have found that without including the local population in the major recovery issues you will only create resentment. It is very easy to foresee the Haitian people getting fed up with outsiders telling them what is best for the country and society. The best solutions are those that come from the grass roots and are adopted by the local leadership.

While it might be wise to move the capital, without a locally lead buy in for the concept it will be beyond reasonable for most. Would we be happy if someone told us to move Washington DC or Ottawa or London because our ancestors screwed up?

Crisis Management and Resilience

I have been back reading a number of blogs by Ken Simpson and I came across his review of some work on economic resilience by Adam Rose a Research Professor at USC. (linked)

Ken Simpson makes some insightful observations of Rose's work but what interests me is that Ken identifies that (according to Rose) there are two types of resilience: inherent and adaptive resilience.

While Ken Simpson's blog identifies a number of interesting lines of thinking from Rose's work I am most intrigued by the concept of adaptive resilience. My initial view is that adaptive resilience that is a true measure of the deep resilience of an organization and that it will separate winners from losers in a major catastrophe.

This concept looks like an endorsement for crisis management as a key system to improve organizational agility and adaptive resilience. I will continue to research the idea of adaptive resilience as a key to survival in a catastrophe.


What are the parts that make up adaptive resilience?


What are the characteristics of organizations that demonstrated adaptive resilience during a disaster?

Are decision making processes different during a disaster? Are they different in organizations with adaptive resilience?

Grand Strategy?

As I continue to explore Palin's ideas and concepts for Resilience as a Grand Strategy for a nation, I can't help but let the cynic in me have a post.


Is it really possible to have "grand strategy" in a modern, information age democracy? My experience indicates that governments at every level have very little appetite for conflict with its constituents and seek the middle ground even when idealistic visions are at stake. It appears that government policy and "strategy" are aimed solely at winning the next election. Instead of seeking power to impart ideological direction on a nation, it seems that in this age, seeking power has become the self-licking ice cream cone. (this phrase came to me at some time in my army career but like FUBAR I can't remember where I heard it first) Satisfying in and by itself with little need for much else!


In an era of polling, polls and special interest lobbying, is there a realistic chance that a government will set a nation on a course of doing what's right regardless of the political costs? I look south from my frozen backyard and watch with interest the recent attempts at ideological change of our neighbors and wonder what will be the ultimate outcome.

I warned you, the cynic has spoken. Now I can get back to considering resilience and its applicability to my work and studies.

Resilience: The Grand Strategy

OK I guess this is a bit of a book review, but I think this particular paper is worth talking about.

I recently read the short paper by Philip J. Palin which proposes a national security strategy based on the concept of resilience. The paper was a fleshed out version of what he playfully entitled “Long Blog” which he re-drafted at the request of the Homeland Security Affairs.

I found this to be a very interesting treatment of resilience. The concepts and approach laid out in this paper are a very valuable and I would suggest revolutionary contribution to the post 9-11 national security debate. Mr. Palin has torn a page from George Kennan’s seminal work Long Telegram of 1946 which first proposed the strategy of containment when dealing with the Soviet Union. Those initial thoughts by Kennan eventually became the underpinning of nearly 50 years of grand strategy, not only for the United States but also for the Western World.

As a matter of credibility and I suppose flattery, Palin has chosen to mirror Kennan’s structure or schema with a view to proving his theory of resilience as a viable grand strategy for the United States. He tackles the obvious difference between 1946 and 2009 with care and provides some very insightful observations of the national psyche. Meanwhile his comments on the national neurosis are at the same time both useful and frightening (at least to this non-American). I will leave it to you to determine whether that argument holds true to your own values or national identity.

Setting aside the one or two troubling excuses for past conduct, I find the overall concept and argument quite satisfying. Whether you subscribe to Palin’s view of the world, I think most could find the idea of resilience as a grand strategy for national security a concept easily adapted to most national value systems.

I have included the link to the article and recommend it to anyone interested in resilience and national security.

http://www.hsaj.org/pages/volume6/issue1/pdfs/6.1.2.pdf

Insurance as a Component of Resiliency

In the recovery phase of several recent disasters I have seen an increasing number of incidents where insurance was unable to satisfy the needs of the disaster victims. The failure is not that the needed insurance products did not exist; it’s appears to be an increasing number of citizens are not carrying basic insurance. Insurance is a difficult expense to justify when a normal person can go their entire life and never claim on the policy. But when faced with a catastrophic loss or major expenses due to an insurable peril, the decision to have insurance is immediately justified. This is an emerging and possible urgent issue impacting the basic resilience premise of disaster assistance programs. What makes this more tangible is that the majority of the cases where we see this gap are with the most vulnerable segments of society.

Government disaster assistance programs generally exclude assistance for perils that can be insured at a reasonable cost. There is an assumption by governments that the population will take reasonable steps to protect themselves and their property. This concept of self-protection includes an expectation that citizens will purchase reasonable insurance, and this I would argue is a key assumption in the government’s view of its social resilience. What appears to be the trend however is that large segments of society are unable or unwilling to protect themselves by investing in basic insurance products. It therefore maybe time to modify our assumptions about social resilience and recognize the potential risk that a majority of society is unable to meet the basic insurance expectations.

This issue of insurance is not particular to one segment of the population or society. At a recent conference U.S. emergency managers cited statistics that showed only 20% of eligible flood plain properties had the required FEMA Flood Insurance even though to qualify for assistance property must be insured. In Canada we also see a similar issue with water back up insurance, experience has shown that a majority of homeowners have opted not to add a back up extension to the basic homeowners policy. The damage from a recent tornado also revealed that 1 in 6 homeowners who experienced a total loss did not carry even a basic homeowners policy. Despite this lack of insurance most homeowners find a way to recover without disaster financial assistance. More concerning from a recovery perspective is that this level of personal resilience is rarer at the lower income levels of society and with those most vulnerable.

Basic insurance needs are rarely met with those of limited economic means. The economically disadvantaged make choices every day on how to spend their meager funds. As one drops down the hierarchy of needs, funds are depleted long before insurance needs are addressed. What results is a segment of society that lives without the ability to replace their basic possessions such as clothing, basic furniture, and other household items. These same people live in public housing or low rental properties in conditions that probably have greater exposure to risks such as fire or water damage. In some cases this type of housing exists in areas where the threat of natural disaster impacts is greater as the land is less desirable.

Secondly we are seeing a lack of insurance on First Nations. Setting aside cultural differences (which are too complex to address in this blog) it has been noted that with very few exceptions First Nations housing stock is uninsured. This alone is a risk that needs some mitigation as a large number of First Nations are routinely exposed to hazards such as wild fires and flooding. Until now our response programs seem to have prevented the worst case scenario, but it will only take a single wildfire to sweep through a First Nation to create a crisis. In addition to the risk to the housing stock it appears that the majority of First Nations citizens live in these hazard heavy areas without tenant’s insurance.

It would appear that there is an increasing gap between society's expected level of financial protection and the coverage afforded by government disaster assistance. A more thorough study is required but my experience indicates that a vulnerability exists.

Reconstruction and Opportunity

As a Natural Disaster Recovery professional, I will be following with interest the reconstruction efforts in Haiti. My sincere hope is that those leading the effort will take a holistic view to this mammoth task. By this I mean to really succeed at the fourth tier of Emergency Management you must not only reconstruct what was lost, but you most take advantage of the opportunities presented by disaster.


The list of holistic activities is vast and limited only by the courage and leadership present in the effort. But is must include concepts such as established and enforceable building codes, depopulating hazard prone regions, relocating or redirecting transportation routes and nodes from hazards for example. In the end all investment in recovery should have as an underlying objective the goal to increase society wide resiliency.


This practical, reconstruction focused concept of holistic recovery could and should be coupled with a view that reinvesting the vast sums of money into replacing only what is lost is throwing good money away.


I and I am sure thousands of others hope that despite this tragedy, Haiti will be more resilient as a result of this reinvestment.

Generating Canada's Response to Haiti

As I sit in my office today I sense the growing frustration among emergency managers emanating from my boss's office.

Several agencies have trained and deployable Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) organizations that exist to help in situations of building collapse etc. This organizations are generally kept on a high state of readiness to respond both inside and outside its jurisdictions. Since yesterday afternoon, many of the larger organizations of been seeking permission and assistance to deploy to Haiti.

Based on some protocols in place no deployment can take place unless OK'd by the Govt of Canada. The Govt of Canada relies on the DART as the nucleus of its response, but by any measure of timely response it is way behind the needed decision cycle.

It appears that part of the problems is diplomacy and the idea that Canada cannot send its Armed Forces into another sovereign nation without invitation. As we can imagine getting a decision from the Haitian Govt took some time. Meanwhile the vast USAR resources of Canada sit by watching their opportunity to rescue live victims diminish with each passing hour.There is no wonder why many aid agencies choose to "go now and seek forgiveness later".

Perhaps its time for the Govt of Canada to ask itself if the Armed Forces is the best agency to lead Canada's disaster assistance capability or whether a civilian agency should lead. Would that speed up deployment and save lives?

Economic Impacts of Disasters

I spent the day visiting a small urban centre that experienced a major disaster last year. While the community infra-structure was protected and any damages repaired with the assistance of well established government programs, little has been done to assess or address the damage done to the businesses of the area. There appears to be an absence of assistance for business revenue issues that result from natural disasters.

This particular area is subject to isolation due to flooding on a regular basis. In the past there have been attempts at economic recovery assistance (interest free loans).

While it is tempting to look at this as a recovery issue and design a solution to address the financial losses, it really goes to community resilience and even long term sustainability of the community. I was warmed to hear the various business owners talk about their challenges but focus on the long term solutions and not just ask for compensation. These community leaders want improved mitigation and not money.

The challenge of course will be to prove that mitigation will (in the long term) be the least cost solution.

There are more meetings scheduled and I will post follow ups later.

Some Thoughts on Recovery

The term recovery as it relates to emergency/disaster management (EM) has been used in a variety of contexts including reconstruction, restoration, rehabilitation and even post disaster redevelopment. Regardless of which term is used, the focus has been on recovery as it relates to the physical environment and for the most part recovery efforts have strived to re-establish what was lost with a view to restoring to an exact replica of pre-disaster make-up or state.

While the repair and restoration of the physical environment is a tangible and expensive undertaking, it represents only one component of recovery and generally ignores the opportunities to increase resiliency in the aftermath of a disaster. It is time to move beyond the focus on the physical environment and look at recovery as a social process that focuses on issues beyond restoration of what was lost and instead focuses on enhancing resiliency and sustainability of communities.

There are many components of recovery – residential, commercial, industrial, economic, social, organizational, information, data and social support to name a few. Equally there are various degrees of recovery. Successful recovery efforts typically rely on strong leadership, vision and integration of a recovery plan into other supporting social, societal or business networks.

Cooperation

I just returned from my monthly meeting with an ad hoc organization of NGOs that provide services and support to victims of disaster.

This group has been working together for more than 10 years and represents a wide cross-section of NGOs both faith based and secular. I am always amazed by the level of respect and cooperation that exists within this group. They have set aside the differences, overlaps and competition to focus on being ready to help when help is needed.

Not only is there a great deal of cooperation among the NGOs, they have also included various Governement Departments or government agencies to participate in their good works.

Its this level of cooperation and familiarity that will serve us well when a real crisis strikes.