Maybe it’s not surprising that many of the big issues at the end of 2011 have the same drivers as those of a year ago. It does make for an easier column, but there’s still ample room for commentary on both “old"and new.
The economy (still)
The extended and yet-worsening impact of the down economy still bears on every aspect of preparedness. Every level of government and many critical private-sector entities continue to reduce staff and services, including entire departments.
Programs viewed as “optional,” such as training and emergency management, tend to go early in the process, and continued cutting undermines the basis of resilience. Cuts in health and human services programs further squeeze those at the margins, making vulnerable populations even more vulnerable before, during and after disasters and less-publicized events.
At the federal level, two years of continuing budget resolutions is symptomatic of the executive and legislative branches’ collective inability to see past the present. The related uncertainty has also made it uncommonly difficult for federal agencies and those that rely on grants to do useful long-range planning, or even complete short-term projects.
Major cuts have already taken hold in most preparedness grant programs managed by the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Health and Human Services (DHHS): the Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) cut 33 of the 64 recipient cities from FY11 funding and may well cut another 20 or so in FY12.
As detailed in Trust for America’s Health’s annual Ready or Not report, the Cities Readiness Initiative and other public health preparedness grants administered by DHHS will likely continue to see cuts, potentially affecting dozens of metropolitan areas and every state. For some agencies and even states, federal preparedness grants are the only funds set aside for preparedness, meaning that entire capabilities will degrade.
Looking ahead: What can/will state, local, tribal and non-profit entities do in the absence of funding? At what point do they start to see the point of no return, that is, elimination of personnel and programs leading to loss of basic capabilities that will take years to restore?
More shakeouts
The end of 2010 offered retrospectives on major earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. 2011 continued that unfortunate trend in New Zealand and Japan.
The February 22 earthquake in Christchurch, unlike its September 2010 predecessor, killed almost 200 and left portions of the city uninhabitable.
That was wiped from much of the non-Kiwi consciousness by the catastrophic March 11 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, followed by nine months of fear, uncertainty and radiation from the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor. While much of the Western world, particularly the Western United States, obsessed about vanishingly small amounts of radiation crossing the Pacific, approximately 20,000 Japanese were dead or missing (with almost all of the latter ultimately belonging to the former), and the survivors were embarking on a path of misery that most of us can’t imagine.
Just as Chile offered us the first glimpse of how modern building codes withstand the powerful and extended shaking associated with subduction-zone earthquakes, the Tohoku quake expanded that view with shaking more than twice as long and, as in Christchurch, unexpectedly extensive liquefaction. In Japan, long-implemented seismic building codes seemed mostly effective, but the most important lesson from the two stricken areas may relate to how we process, retain and act on information from signal events: the role of assumptions in plans and even daily decisions, even (especially?) if we’re not conscious of them.
A lot of very intelligent people assessed what they considered the “maximum"possible earthquake (and thus the largest tsunami) that the subduction zone off the east coast of Japan could produce. This was not a random or casual process.
Those assessments then became grounding assumptions in determining height of tsunami walls, location/hardening of auxiliary power for the Fukushima plant, public expectations and behavior, and urban planning, just as they would elsewhere.
Seismology and earthquake forecasting (not prediction) have large inherent uncertainties that are difficult to effectively communicate. The result was that what’s considered to be the most seismically prepared country (itself a highly relative term) was caught by surprise.
Another surprise was the degree of liquefaction in Japan and New Zealand, which carries enormous impact for risk assessment in the United States, particularly the Pacific Northwest and the mid-continent New Madrid Seismic Zone.
Looking ahead: Will the lessons offered by these disasters actually become lessons learned? If so, how can they be implemented? See “The economy"re constraints.
Technology
The emergence of social media as a situational-awareness tool is likely to continue, as entities like Ushahidi and Crisis Commons move crowd-sourcing from a free-for-all into a valuable capability. The power of personal devices to provide real-time, two-way information exchange is still largely untapped, but applications range from the personal to the national.
Looking ahead: Will national initiatives like Unified Incident Command and Decision Support and Virtual USA be overtaken by more nimble processes, or will users recognize that the information-sharing protocols that both rely on are necessary in themselves? Will public safety, emergency management and public health providers embrace tools that leapfrog (but are still compatible with) long-developed “conventional"systems? Will more of them move toward monitoring and interacting with citizen reports during disasters and even daily operations?
Will FEMA and other key players apply the disappointing (but predictable) results of the November 2011 Integrated Public Agency Warning System (IPAWS) test make the system work? Will the April 2012 rollout of the Commercial Mobile Alert System, tested in New York in December 2011, augment those efforts and help provide the long-awaited capability of geographically targeted alerts?
This doesn’t even consider the 2012 elections, the next act in Iraq, initiatives against domestic violent extremists, and whatever else we’ll be looking at next December….
Jeff Rubin is the emergency manager for Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue, Tigard, Ore., which hosts a comprehensive hospital preparedness website. His views do not necessarily represent those of his employer.