Emergency Planning: The impact is relative
We spend a lot of time trying to define the differences between emergencies, disasters and catastrophes and with good reason. We know that there are qualitative differences between events that influence how we respond. But that's the big picture – the strategic level. It's easy to forget that at the victim level, disasters are relative. It's all about how it affects me, the victim.
I was reminded of this yesterday. We had a couple of minor earthquakes in the Bay Area along the very active Hayward fault. The temblors occurred early in the morning and only minor damage was reported. I slept through most of it.
Later that evening, we had a minor power interruption in San Francisco that affected 6000+ customers for an hour. Which do you think had the most impact on those people in the outage zone? Everyone was talking about the earthquake but this minor outage probably affected more people directly.
So the point to remember is that there are no "minor" emergencies from the victim's perspective. We need to watch how we refer to events and make sure that our response is driven by need and not just magnitude.