You Can Run But You Can’t Hide: Another Lesson From the Gulf Spill

Posted on June 15, 2010November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs4 Comments on You Can Run But You Can’t Hide: Another Lesson From the Gulf Spill

My good friend, Art Taber, sent me a link to BP'sRegional Oil Spill Response Plan – Gulf of Mexico dated June 30, 2009. Although Art is not an emergency manager, he took the time to read the 583 page document and offered the following observations:

1. In a section titled “Sensitive Biological & Human-Use Resources,” the plan lists “seals, sea otters and walruses” as animals that could be impacted by a Gulf of Mexico spill;
2. It lists a Japanese home shopping website as the link to one of its "primary equipment providers for BP in the Gulf of Mexico Region [for] rapid deployment of spill response resources on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis". While I can't read Japanese, it does seem to me that: http://www.msrc.com/Equipment.htm is not a purveyor of oil-spill related cleanup supplies or heavy equipment;
3. It directs BP media spokespeople to never make "promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal." {Like the statements that their CEO has been making?};
4. It contains no information about tracking sub-surface oil plumes from deep water blowouts such as those now billowing from the damaged oil well that the Deepwater Horizon was drilling before it exploded on April 20. {Like those plumes that BP denies are occurring?};
5. It includes no information about currents, tides, prevailing winds, possible hurricanes or other oceanographic or meteorological conditions, even though such data are essential for effective oil spill response;
6. It contains no information about preventing disease transmission (such as viruses or bacteria) to captured animals in rehabilitation facilities, which was identified as a serious risk after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989;
7. In the chapter on "Worst Case Discharge" offers assurances that within hours of any incident, regardless of size, "personnel, equipment, and materials in sufficient quantities and recovery capacity to respond effectively to oil spills from the facilities and leases covered by this plan, including the worst case discharge scenarios" will be deployed.

Whether Art's observations are accurate is not the point. What is important is that in this day and age, your plans are readily accessible to informed and involved citizens like my friend Art and you will be held accountable for their contents in the court of public opinion. And before you use this as an argument that your plans should notbe posted on the Internet, remember that these plans must be provided to a private citizen if you're a government agency under the Freedom of Information Act or during pre-trial discovery in a lawsuit if you're a private organization. Regardless, electronic media files are still easier to leak to the media than hard copies were in the days of the Pentagon Papers. Sooner or later, the public is going to get to read them.

So what's the solution? Do I really need to spell it out? Stop writing plans merely to meet requirements and start writing plans that really address the problems they were intended to solve. Want it simpler? Do the right thing.

Learning from Catastrophe?

Posted on June 2, 2010November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

A recent op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by Ian Mitroff dealt with lessons that we should be learning from the recent oil spill in the Gulf. Mitroff is a professor at Alliant University in San Francisco and a senior investigator in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UC Berkeley. He makes four very salient points:

1. preparedness before the event is essential in reducing the impact of the event,
2. your record of past performance is readily available making it futile to try to reduce liability by pleading ignorance or unforseeability,
3. mitigation is cost effective – it's cheaper than paying damages in most cases. and
4. it's pointless to try to blame others when you are responsible for your failures

Part of my frustration is that this is the same message we've been trying to communicate for years as emergency managers but our leaders are still not getting it. Part of the reason is that deep down in the hidden recesses of their hearts, most people really don't believe a disaster will happen; that if it occurs, it won't happen to them; or if it does happen to them, it won't be that bad. That's human nature.

However, when you're in a position of responsibility with the lives and livelihood of others depending on you, it might just be in your own best interests to listen to your advisors and do something about mitigation and preparedness before something bad happens. It's cheaper and better than trying to explain to the public and your shareholders after the event why you didn't do spend a few dollars to prevent a catastrophic loss.

Worst Case Scenarios

Posted on May 13, 2010November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

One of the recurring questions in emergency management involves how we use risk assessments in planning. On the one hand, we need to focus on objective risk – risk that is most likely to occur and is credible. On the other hand, we understand that we are frequently dealing with events that fall into the high impact, low frequency category and there is little evidence on which to base a true risk analysis.

I've argued elsewhere that the "gloom and doom" approach doesn't sell to senior executives. I've also argued against scenario-based planning except in specific cases. However, I've never been able to articulate just what I felt was wrong with worst case scenarios. Thankfully, Bruce Schneier has done so in a recent blog titled Worst Case Thinking, an article that should be required reading for emergency managers.

Schneier makes four excellent points about worst-case scenarios:

1. They focus on extreme but improbable risks and do not do a good job of assessing outcomes.
2. They are based on flawed logic, assuming that is necessary to prove the scenario impossible.
3. They can be used to support any position or its opposite.
4. They validate ignorance by focusing on the unknown rather than on what is known.

Worst-case scenarios play on our fears and force us to make bad decisions. One can also argue that relying on a worst-case scenario is easier than making hard decisions that carry a certain amount of risk. We have a tendency to act as if the worst-case scenario is the most likely scenario and therefore we hesitate to act or, as has become the case over the last few years, to over-react.

It's worth remembering that use of risk management is one of the Principles of Emergency Management. 

 

Power Point – Too much of a good thing?

Posted on April 29, 2010November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs1 Comment on Power Point – Too much of a good thing?

At the invitation of a colleague, I spent this morning at an emergency management "summit". Unfortunately, as someone with aspirations of being a professional speaker, I have the tendency to not only listen to what is being said but how it is being said as well. The messages presented by the speakers were good and they seemed to be competent in their subject areas. However, in every case, they sadly diffused their message by misusing PowerPoint.

It was the classic "death by PowerPoint" syndrome. There were too many slides for the time alloted, too much information on slides, minuscule point sizes on the text – just about every mistake that you can make in a PowerPoint presentation, including reading the slides to the audience.

I might have shrugged it off, but this evening I received an email from my friend Hal Weston about a New York Times article called We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint. In the article, reporter Elisabeth Bumiller discusses how senior military leaders are becoming disenchanted with PowerPoint, finding that it, "stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making."

This is not a new idea. Many years ago I was fortunate to attend one of Edward Tufte's seminarson presenting data and information and he made the same observation about Power Point as well as presenting some very compelling evidence of how PowerPoint has led to some pretty spectacular failures. His essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within should be required reading for anyone thinking of using PowerPoint.

So what's my point? As a speaker, I use PowerPoint and there are certainly situations where it is both expected by the audience and useful in conveying themes. But PowerPoint does not convey data well nor does it help communicate complex situations or ideas. Used incorrectly, it can diffuse the impact of your presentation, something I found out the hard way recently when my slides were converted from PowerPoint 2007 to an early version and I failed to double check them before the presentation. So use PowerPoint sparingly, use it wisely, and remember that the audience came for you, not your slides!

Oil Explosion in the Gulf Offers Case Study for Emergency Managers

Posted on April 23, 2010November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

One of the things that we have trouble dealing with as emergency managers is the slow-onset incident. This is an event that starts out so slow that no one takes it seriously until it's too late. In fairness, they're not always easy to spot and we have a built-in tendency to normalize events, so it's easy to identify the problems after the fact but hard to anticipate them during the incident.

There's a good case study playing out in the Gulf of Mexico. It hasn't got a whole lot of media play, but on Tuesday a deep-water drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon, exploded and caught fire, killing 11 workers and injuring many others. Yesterday, it collapsed and sank. The rig is (or was) located 50 miles from New Orleans and produced over 300K gallons of crude oil a day from the seabed located 5000 feet below.

So imagine for a moment a leak that could not be capped, sending over 300K gallons of crude oil a day towards the US coastline. Did anyone consider this scenario when they heard the rig had exploded? How many days has it taken to realize and react to the potential threat?

Fortunately, the Coast Guard is reporting that oil does not appear to be leaking from the well head and the weather forecast is keeping the spill from the coast, at least for the time being. There's a lot of clean up underway for the fuel oil on the platform and the crude spilled during the explosion and fire.

Two thoughts to take away from this:

1. It's not really over yet. That's the bad thing about slow-onset events. It's easy to ignore them, particularly if you're afraid of crying. "Wolf!"

2. This is a great opportunity to activate emergency operations centers in potentially affected communities and states to develop contingency plans. Even if they are never needed, this is an opportunity to train on a real potential crisis, not just a fictional scenario. And speaking of scenarios, this is one that could be translated to other locations. 

A Solution to Terrorism Theater?

Posted on April 7, 2010November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs3 Comments on A Solution to Terrorism Theater?

In a field filled with so-called "security-experts", I have always found Bruce Schneier to be one of the few voices of reason on security issues. In a recent article in the New York Times, he makes the case for what we emergency managers would call an "all-hazards" approach to security.

As we have learned over the years, scenario-based planning has its uses but can be too specific and therefore limiting. Instead, we have tried to develop a flexible response capability using a functional approach that addresses response-generated needs rather than focusing solely on specific agent-generated needs. In other words, we really don't care whether the incident was caused by a natural hazard or by a human agent – tasks such as rescue, evacuation, and sheltering will still be accomplished in essentially the same way.

Schneier makes the case that we have let our response to terrorism be influenced by very specific scenarios, creating a situation where our security is actually less effective than we would like. In Schneier's words:

"A far better strategy is to spend our limited counterterrorism resources on investigation and intelligence – and on emergency response. These measures don't hinge on any specific threat; they don't require us to guess the tactic or target correctly. They're effective in a variety of circumstances, even nonterrorist ones."

Schneier is proposing a strategy of mitigation (prevention to you Homeland Security types) and preparedness. Sure sounds familiar…

Terrorism Theater at Its Finest

Posted on April 1, 2010November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs2 Comments on Terrorism Theater at Its Finest

In keeping with the foolishness of April 1st, the hot story circulating on the Internet these days is about the supposed attempt by terrorists to insert explosives in breast and buttock implants. The story apparently originated with a Sun article published in March. Considering the Sun's penchant for sensational stories, I was a bit skeptical.

However, what is instructive is how fast and far even a silly story can spread. Maybe it spreads because it is silly. Fortunately, the Sun has given us a marker for tracking the spread of this particular story. In the story, the chemical name for the  explosive PETN is given as pentaerythritol tetrabitrate. Since the name is actually pentaerythritol tetranitrate, it's easy to spot how many bloggers picked up on the story without doing even limited fact checking. A quick Internet search shows over 3500 stories with this misspelling.

In addition, the story has found its way not only into the National Enquirer and Fox News, as one would expect, but into major newspapers and wire services around the world.

It took about a minute to track down the Sun's "terrorism expert", Joseph Farrar. Mr. Farrar is actually a journalist and editor of the WorldNet Daily, the website that "broke" the story in February, supposedly based on reports from MI5. Mr. Farrar has never claimed to be an expert on terrorism and has said he was misquoted.

The trouble with stories like these is that they contain just enough truth to make people nervous and start the folks at Homeland Security looking for new toys and techniques to counter this latest "threat". So when they surface, let's do our homework and try to stop them before they grow – we've got enough real problems without adding someone's fantasies into the mix!

But I do wonder how they planned to detonate such a device….

Berlin, Haiti and A Lesson From History

Posted on January 22, 2010November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

I've frequently said that there's really nothing new under the sun and that we can learn valuable emergency management lessons by studying history, particularly the history of crisis. We emergency managers often think almost exclusively in terms of natural disasters, a tendency that is probably as frustrating to our Homeland Security colleagues as is the perception that they think solely in terms of terrorism is to us. So we sometimes need to stretch ourselves when it comes to our research and not just look at historical natural disasters.

During the past week I've been following the operations in Haiti, as many of my friends and colleagues have been doing. Over the years, I've learned that most emergency management issues are logistical in nature – you have to identify what is needed, find it, and get it to the right people. We are certainly seeing this in Haiti, where logistics is hampered by the use of a single airport and limited infrastructure.

It occurred to me that we have faced this situation before, albeit in a very different environment, in Berlin in 1948-49. Following World War II, Germany was divided into four occupation zones and Berlin, which was about 100 miles within the Soviet Zone was divided into four sectors. After a series of escalating crisises, the Soviets halted all surface transport to Berlin in June 1948. Only two air corridors guaranteed by treaty remained. Some two million people were cut off with limited supplies.

The Allies responded by mounting the most ambitious airlift ever attempted. Berlin need some 1,534 tons of food daily, plus another 3,475 of coal and gasoline. This would increase by another 3,000 tons as winter approached. To meet this need, the Allies improvised a system that was delivering some 8,893 tons per day by April 1949, more than had previously been brought in by rail before the blockade. The system relied on a single point of control, maximized use of limited numbers of aircraft, and quick ground turnaround times.

Now clearly there are tremendous differences between Haiti in 2010 and Berlin in 1948. While Berlin still had significant damage from the war, it had been on the road to recovery for three years. Templehof airport was in much better shape than the one at Port au Prince. More importantly, for all their squabbles, the Allies were more cohesive and more hierarchical than the vast array of international aid groups trying to get into Haiti.

Still, much of what was done to streamline operations during the Berlin airlift might have helped the situation in Haiti. The airlift was run like a railroad, with a single point of control for determining flight schedules. Each aircraft got only one chance to land and were turned around if they missed it. Aircraft were limited to a specific type that could be loaded and unloaded quickly. Crew remained with the aircraft and took off as soon as it was unloaded. Supplies were consolidated and prioritized at staging areas. Heavy equipment was disassembled and flown into improve and build new airfields.

We have done this before. There is a lesson in the Berlin airlift that could help inform our planning for future catastrophes. We would be foolish not to add it to the lessons we're currently learning (or relearning?) in Haiti.

And A Child Shall Lead Them: What A Toy Can Teach Us About Security

Posted on January 13, 2010November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

In my last blog, I talked about the diminished respect that the Transportation Security Agency was experiencing as a result of their reactive and ludicrous policies. I based my comments on a sampling of media reports and comments to various professional email lists and blogs. However, I overlooked a very interesting source for gauging public opinion on TSA – the customer reviews at Amazon.

It seems Playmobil issued a toy set in early 2008 called the Playmobil Security Check Pointthat comes complete with a passenger with roll aboard luggage and two security screeners. Leaving aside the strange choice of theme for a children's toy, what is really instructive are the Customer Reviews. Every one of the comments I reviewed used humor to send the same message (and not always in a nice way!): we don't take TSA or their procedures seriously. Here are some samples:

• It's too bad that they never came out with the "Pat-Down" edition, where fat guards are groping women for weapons, and turning customers away who refuse the degrading method of search.
• This toy would be a lot more realistic with about 350 people standing in line for an average of an hour.
• I especially appreciated the enclosed signed photo of Michael Chertoff and his letter explaining how necessary it is to start educating today's youth early with toys like these, especially as their elders just don't seem to be taking the whole thing seriously, what with posting snarky reviews on Amazon and all…
• I'd like to see some diversity in one of the guards and perhaps the other guard could have some drool dripping from it's lip to reflect the extremely low IQ needed to obtain this type of position.

Note that these comments were posted in early 2008, before TSA's latest fiasco. One wonders what these folks would say if this toy were being issued now. It might be tempting to dismiss these comments as attempts at humor by marginal elements of society but when you hear the same message from professionals in security and emergency management and read reports by reputable journalists and publications, you have to believe that something is wrong with TSA's approach to security.

Enough Terrorist Theater?

Posted on January 6, 2010November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs1 Comment on Enough Terrorist Theater?

Like many of you, I have been following the Christmas Day terrorist event and the resulting political theater that has resulted from it.What has been interesting to me is not the the event itself but rather the public outrage that is being directed at the Transportation Security Administration.

As someone who has worked in local government, I know that there are times when it is politically important to be seen to be doing something, anything, to react to a crisis, even if that action is really meaningless. This sends a message that you are 1) taking the event seriously and 2) doing everything possible to deal with the crisis. However, this time TSA has just gone too far.

When the terrorists of September 11th seized planes using box cutters, TSA missed that they were successful because of the element of surprise, not their weapons, and took away our pocket knives, knitting needles, and other sharp, pointy objects. This despite the fact that not even Chuck Norris could hold off a hundred angry passengers with a one-inch Swiss Army Knife while he whittled his way through the reinforced cockpit door.

When another terrorist tried to light his shoes on fire, TSA required us to remove our shoes for inspection, forgetting that the limited amount of explosives that can be contained in a shoe has to be carefully placed to be effective and that there are generally two other passengers in proximity to the terrorist.

Next came the scare that terrorists would use binary explosives and TSA took away our water bottles, perfumes, and 4.5 ounce toothpaste tubes, despite arguments by experts that binary explosives are complicated and unstable and unlikely to be used successfully by terrorists.

We went along with all of this because it seemed to make sense at the time. After all, the people charged with our protection were being cautious and reacting to actual events. But this latest knee jerk reaction goes too far. Does anyone feel safer because you can't go to the toilet, work on your projects, read or watch a program for an hour before landing? How do you feel about a pat search?

In putting such ludicrous procedures in place, TSA is sending the wrong message and calling into question all of their procedures. It suggests that TSA cannot think creatively or pro-actively and can only react to past events.  The result is a considerable loss of reputation and respect. We are now seeing airports refusing to implement the new searches and articles in the media comparing the number of terrorists caught to the number of TSA employees arrested for various crimes. People are viewing TSA, rather than terrorists, as the problem.

What ever happened to the concept of risk analysis? TSA continues to view passengers as problems rather than allies and insists on perpetrating the myth that we can be protected from everything at all times. The simple fact is that terrorism, like crashes, are a risk that we take every time we travel by air. We need to accept it and move on. TSA does a decent job of keeping us safe but it is unrealistic to expect that they will be successful every single time. TSA needs to make us partners in their efforts to keep us safe, not treat us likethe enemy – passengers have demonstrated on several occasions, starting with September 11th, that they are willing to be part of the solution. Knee-jerk reactions create more disruption in an industry already on the ropes and, far from keeping us safe, actually furthers the terrorist goal of destroying us economically.