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Veterans Day Thoughts: The Soldier’s Oath

Posted on November 11, 2016November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

On entering service, every soldier swears an oath that requires, in part, obedience to the President and the officers appointed over them. But that is only the last part of the oath. First we swear “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” That same oath to the Constitution is also sworn by all government officials and workers. The oath is a reminder that the Constitution is more important than the person who holds the office. Preservation of the system of government established by the Constitution and the rights and freedoms it guarantees is paramount.

Understanding this, it concerns me when I see the demonstrations taking place across the country in protest over the Presidential election results. The simple fact is that there is no hint that there was anything unconstitutional or illegal about the elections and, like it or not, Donald Trump is the legitimate President-elect. The election process and the peaceful transfer of power enshrined in the Constitution is what is important. Those who have sworn the oath have no choice but to support the President unless his actions put him in conflict with the Constitution.

While I understand and share the feelings of fear and disgust that have sparked these gatherings, there is a part of me that fears that they will be perceived as the acts of spoiled children who did not get their way, especially when they descend into violence. However, I am even more disgusted by the reports of hate crimes that have occurred across the nation in the past few days. This, too, is a violation of everything the Constitution stands for and now is not the time to stand silent. The right of assembly was so important that it is enshrined in the First Amendment. People have the right to gather and express their concern.

I do not believe these demonstrations should be focused on showing disgust with President-elect Trump as an individual or about the election. I believe that instead they should be used to send a strong message to our new government in waiting: campaign rhetoric is one thing but you’d best step carefully before seeking to erode the rights of our citizens. There are an awful lot of us out here who understand that the Constitution is much more important than you are.

Yes, you have a plan. But do you have a strategy?

Posted on October 30, 2016 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment

One of my pet peeves with emergency planning is the over-reliance we place on the one-size-fits none guidance we receive from the Federal government. Don’t misunderstand me; the guidance overall is good and well-intentioned. But there is subtle and not so subtle pressure put on local jurisdictions through grant requirements and reviews to develop plans that mirror the guidance.

The simple fact is that all jurisdictions are not alike and to expect each to use the same plan fails to take this fact into account. Resources are not the same, risk tolerance is not the same, even the threats each jurisdiction faces are not the same. The problem as I see it is that we focus on the tangible result, the plan, without considering the importance of the strategy behind the plan.

I was recently in a plan development meeting with a major utility department seeking to consolidate multiple division plans into a single unified department plan. The planning team supported the concept and saw the benefits of using an enterprise approach. Things started to get uncomfortable when I started asking questions about how they planned to manage their new operating structure. For example, each division had its own logistics operation and the team agreed that establishing a combined logistics team would save time and money but they had not thought about who would manage that team or how the team would operate. They had never thought to discuss the strategy behind the plan they were writing.

There is certainly a commonality among plans. Most rely on central coordination through an emergency operations center and decentralized tactical operations at the department level. But even this simple concept can cause problems if you haven’t worked out your strategy. Does the EOC serve as a command center, actively directing operations, or as a point of coordination? Do department heads report through the EOC or directly to the senior executive? These are not issues you want to decide during a crisis.

Develop your strategy before you begin revising your plan. Ask the hard questions. Once you understand strategy, the tactical component will be much easier to develop. In the words of Sun Tzu, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

A Crisis Demands Decisive Action

Posted on September 29, 2016November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

In his weekly column in the Chronicle this past Sunday, my old boss, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Jr, drew some interesting contrasts in how local governments responded to the officer-involved shootings in Tulsa OK and Charlotte NC. In Tulsa, police released video of the shooting and charged the officer involved with manslaughter. In Charlotte, police have still not released any footage of the shooting, leading to assumptions by members of the public that the police are lying about the victim having a gun. The result was that Charlotte has seen nights of often violent protest while Tulsa has remained quiet. Brown’s recommendation is blunt:

Lesson one for police agencies throughout the nation: Release the video immediately after every incident. Eliminate the speculation that you’re hiding something. It’ll come out one way or the other, so you might as well be the one to do it.

I believe that we are seeing in Charlotte is one of the “four traps of decision making” I’ve written about previously: using the need for gathering more information as an excuse for inaction. One of the things you have to accept up front in any crisis is that you will not have all the information you need to make a good decision. There is a good chance that your initial decisions might turn out to have not been the best course of action or may be completely wrong. However, failing to take the risk of making a decision that may seem wrong in hindsight frequently allows the crisis to escalate, often to the point where you lose control. Acting decisively on the best information you have available at the time can be justified and explained; failing to act and allowing things to get of hand cannot.

Remember that Botterell’s Fourth Law of Emergency Management is, “Perception is reality.” If you give the appearance of concealing the truth, this is what the public will believe. You need to be seen to act decisively and quickly if you are to retain the public turst. One of the sayings attributed to General George Patton is, “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” This applies as well in crisis management as it does in war.

Do you really see me?

Posted on August 25, 2016November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

In his song What Made America Famous? Harry Chapin tells the story of a small town feud between the local volunteer fire department and

The kind of kids that long since drove our parents to despair.
We were lazy long hairs dropping out, lost confused, and copping out.
Convinced our futures were in doubt and trying not to care

The "hippies" shared a rundown slum with black welfare cases and were shadowed by the police wherever they went. In retaliation, they paint a swastika on the fire house door.

Things change, however, when the building catches fire. The firefighters are initially reluctant to respond but one of them threatens to go alone and shames the others into responding. In the course of the fire he rescues the narrator of the song, his girlfriend and two children who are trapped on a ledge. But he goes further: he opens his home to the victims of the fire.

We spent the rest of that night in the home of a man I'd never known before.
It's funny when you get that close, it's kind of hard to hate.

The identification of outsiders through visual cues is bred into us from prehistoric times. It was a defensive mechanism used to identify potential threats, i.e. people who were not members of our tribe. But in our multi-cultural society, we may well have outgrown the need to classify people by their differences from us. It’s easy to hate “those people” but it’s hard to hate someone you have taken the time to know. There is a reason that Zulu warriors greeted each other with the phrase, “I see you.” Differences don't seem important when you're faced with disaster.

As someone who spent years in private security in the US and abroad and has dealt with national security issues, I’ve seen the dark side of human nature. But the one thing we see over and over in disasters is the willingness of ordinary people to extend a helping hand to total strangers. And it’s not just those who have a responsibility to help, like the firefighters in Chapin’s song. In the aftermath of the Loma Prieta earthquake, the biggest jerk on our block knocked on every door to ask if everyone was alright and if they needed any help. He even refueled the patrol car of the local cop who was constantly writing him parking tickets.

Chapin’s narrator undergoes a change because of his experience in the fire and the song ends with him dreaming of a world where everyone works together to build a better country. It's a dream many of should keep in mind in these troubled times.

I had the kind of a dream that maybe they're still trying to teach in school.
Of the America that made America famous… and
Of the people who just might understand
That how together, yes we can
Create a country better than
The one we have made of this land,

Is It Time for Emergency Managers to Think Globally?

Posted on July 26, 2016November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

Emergency managers tend to focus inwards on our communities, as opposed to homeland security which is fixed on external threats outside the country. Our area of interest is on specific threats that directly affect the populations we serve and larger issues of national security are left primarily to the Federal government. But ultimately we deal in risk and one of the key factors in determining risk is social vulnerability. If we accept this, we really cannot afford to ignore the increased global connectedness of the modern world.

A scenario I read recently highlights how seemingly disparate events can combine to create catastrophic results. In this scenario, BRITEXT leads to additional defections from the European Union, weakening the EU’s ability to impose economic sanctions. At the same time, the election of Donald Trump in the United States leads to a weakening of NATO as the US becomes increasingly isolationist. The weak economic sanctions coupled with reduced NATO military deterrence encourages Russia to seize additional territory in border states, leading to armed conflict.

Clearly, this scenario has little bearing on day to day emergency management. However, it does demonstrate how things are connected and these connections can have an impact on social vulnerability. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, has led to a net increase in jobs for the country as a whole but has led to a loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs, increasing unemployment and lowering wages in states whose economy are based on manufacturing. Increased poverty means increased vulnerability to disasters and reduced tax revenue to invest in preparedness. The conflict in the Middle East has produced the largest movement of displaced people since World War II. A large number of those refugees can be absorbed into the United States but since immigrants tend to cluster in communities, they will affect local demographics and present emergency managers with challenges related to cultural differences and languages. As both these examples show, the overall impact of an event on the country as a whole may not be the same as that on a local community.

I am not suggesting we spend our time playing useless “what-if” games or constructing doomsday scenarios. What I am suggesting is that we turn our focus outwards enough to be able to recognize events that could have the potential to affect social vulnerability within our communities and to begin developing strategies for dealing with them. This means thinking beyond day to day hazards to think both globally and long range, two things that, unfortunately, we have not done well at any level of government.

One of the leading causes of power outages may be hiding in your backyard!

Posted on June 22, 2016November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

I’m just back from a family vacation and getting caught up. Part of my routine is to skim the newspapers that I missed while I was gone. I’m not so much looking for news as I am for some of the more interesting articles, such as the one that caught my eye today. It seems that Kenya suffered a nationwide blackout recently that lasted more than three hours (some sections of the country were still without power the following day). The blackout disrupted businesses and Internet service for most of the country. The cause? A Vervet monkey came into contact with a transformer, which tripped off and began a cascading outage. The monkey survived.

As you can imagine, I got a good laugh out of it and thought, “What a unique problem.” That is, until I did a quick bit of research and found that one of the leading causes of power outages in the United States is animal contact, primarily squirrels. In a 2013 article in the New York Times Sunday Review, author Jon Mooallem catalogued some 50 outages in 24 states over a period of just three months. And, remember, these were just the outages that were big enough to make the news.

The effects of these animal contacts were not confined to simple outages. Mooallem notes two instances in 1987 and 1994 when squirrel contacts shut down the Nasdaq. In 2013, a squirrel chewing into high voltage lines near a water treatment plant in Tampa caused authorities to issue a boil water order lasting 37 hours. A flaming squirrel carcass falling from a utility pole started a 2-acre grass fire near Tulsa, OK the same year. The cost is not cheap either: some utilities estimate that as much as 20% of all outages may be caused by animal contact and a 2005 California study estimated that animal contacts cost the state between $30 to $317 million each year.

Utilities are not being idle. They have been experimenting with physical barriers, fake owls, and spraying utility poles with fox urine. But if you’ve ever owned a bird feeder, you know how hard it is to keep a determined squirrel out. Success has been limited so far. In one ironic incident, a hawk attacked one of the fake owls and caused a substation outage.

So the next time you’re feeling smug, remember that the infrastructure we rely on so heavily is also extremely brittle. It doesn’t take much to cause problems. A one-pound bundle of fur and teeth may be all it takes to ruin your day. Preparedness for power outages is always a good thing.

When disaster strikes, who is accountable?

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Lucien Canton | Posted in WeblogsLeave a Comment

Last February Japanese prosecutors charged three former executives responsible for the Fukishima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station with criminal negligence related to the reactor meltdown following the earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The men are accused of failing to take measures that would have protected the plant from damage. This action raises an interesting question about who bears responsibility for failing to protect the public.

Contrast the Japanese action with the criminal charges stemming from last year’s Santa Barbara oil spill. In March prosecutors indicted Plains All American Pipeline and a single employee on multiple charges related to the oil spill. Four of the charges leveled at the company are felonies for spilling oil into state waters. The remainder, including those against the employee, are misdemeanors related to failure to report the spill in a timely manner. The company could face fines up to $2.8 million if convicted of all counts. The employee is looking at up to three years in prison.

Our tendency in the United States is to treat disaster events as civil rather than criminal actions. Companies are sued in civil court and must pay damages. It is rare that companies are charged criminally and even more unusual to see charges brought against individuals. This is changing somewhat as evidenced by the charges brought against one city and two state employees in the Flint, Michigan water crisis and the current Federal criminal investigation related to the Gold King Mine disaster in Colorado.

But cases like Flint and the Gold King Mine involve public agencies not corporations. In the US corporations are treated as individuals in terms of liability. The responsibility is fixed on the corporation as a whole rather than on the officers who made the decisions that may have precipitated a crisis. In the case of the Deep Water Horizon spill, only four individuals were criminally charged. Two of those cases were misdemeanors related to obstructing the investigation. Only two low level employees faced manslaughter charges directly related to the blow out. They eventually pled guilty to reduced misdemeanor charges. BP plead guilty to manslaughter charges and paid $4 billion in fines and penalties.

The corporate system exists precisely to shield individuals from personal liability in order to protect their personal assets in a civil suit. But should these protections be extended to absolve them from criminal responsibility? Is a fine that is ultimately paid by the customers and shareholders sufficient to redress criminal negligence? Maybe it’s time we started to rethink this issue.

Focus Versus Balance: A Tail From The Dog Park

Posted on April 20, 2016November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Tails From The Dog Park, WeblogsLeave a Comment

Toby arrives towards the end of our morning at the dog park as part of a dog walker’s pack. What makes him special is his love affair with a big red ball. Toby heads directly to it and proceeds to run it around the park with a skill that would rival a soccer pro. If the ball is outside the park and one of us tosses it in, the sound of the ball hitting the dirt is enough to grab Toby’s attention from anywhere in the park.

But Toby’s game, while admirable and amusing to those who watch him, had a distinct downside. By being so focused on the ball, Toby failed to socialize with the other members of his pack. In the absence of the ball, he didn’t really know how to interact with the other dogs and got into trouble from time to time. There was only one solution: Toby had to go cold turkey. At the request of his walker, we stopped tossing Toby the ball and no longer encouraged his play. It took a few weeks but Toby is now well-adjusted and enjoys playing with other dogs. He still gets to play with his ball but not every time he comes to the park.

Being focused is an admirable quality and can be important to success. But anything taken to extreme is not healthy. Many of us focus heavily on our jobs or other aspects of our life without realizing that doing so closes us off from personal interactions. And in the long run, those interactions are what gives meaning to our lives. This is why achieving balance in life is so important. If you’re too busy chasing that big red ball, you may be missing out on the social interactions that make life worth living.

United Flight Attendants Fired Over Security Concerns Reinstated

Posted on March 9, 2016November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

About a year ago I wrote about an incident on a United flight that led to the termination of thirteen flight attendants (See Disagreement Over Security Grounds for Termination? A Case Study). The problem began when crew members found graffiti near an engine compartment that was potentially threatening. Passengers were held from boarding while ground crew checked the engine compartment. When nothing was found, the captain of the flight assumed it had been a bit of harmless ground crew graffiti and ordered the flight boarded. The flight attendants objected and demanded that the entire aircraft be searched to be sure it was safe or that a new aircraft be provided. The inflight supervisor ordered the flight attendants to begin boarding. The flight attendants refused and the flight was canceled. Following a disciplinary hearing, all thirteen flight attendants were fired based on United’s rule that disobeying a direct order is grounds for dismissal.

The flight attendants filed a federal whistleblower complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Yesterday, the flight attendants and United issued a joint statement saying that they had reached a confidential resolution and that all thirteen flight attendants would be rehired. No other terms of the agreement were disclosed. United’s senior vice president for inflight services commented, “We respect the right of our employees to raise concerns in good faith about the safety and security of our operations and encourage them to do so.”

As I said at the time, this incident is an interesting case study in decision making. On the one hand you have a potential risk to safety while on the other you have corporate pressure to make sure that flight departs. “Safety first” is good in theory but difficult to apply in reality when you need to balance competing interests. In this case, everything hinged on the assessment of the credibility of the threat. The supervisory team felt it was not credible and the flight attendants felt it was.

However, I find myself a bit irritated by the comments of United’s vice president. If United truly encouraged the reporting of security concerns, it would seem to follow that they would not have ignored the potential threat and ordered the attendants back to work. And they certainly wouldn’t have fired the thirteen employees. Instead, one would have expected some attempt to mediate between the competing interests of employee concern and schedule demands.

Here’s the interesting thing: what difference would it have made? Conducting a safety check might have led to a lengthy delay and possible cancellation of the flight. But having the entire cabin crew walk off the job led to a cancellation of the flight anyway. In the end, the flight attendants’ actions in raising concerns have been validated and United has suffered a certain amount of embarrassment.

So if you were in the position of the United management team, how would you have resolved this situation? If you were a passenger scheduled on that flight, would you feel the same way?

Earthquake early warning? There’s an app for that…

Posted on February 18, 2016November 27, 2025 by Lucien Canton | Posted in Weblogs

For those of us who live in earthquake country, the ability to provide early warning has always been a priority. The California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) was established in 2000 with this goal in mind and is working to cover the entire state with a system of interlinked seismic and geodetic stations. The US Geological Survey envisions eventually including low cost sensors in homes, businesses, and schools, all with the goal of gathering timely data and issuing emergency warnings.

But what if this goal could be furthered in way that provided millions of sensors at little cost? As they say, “There’s an app for that.”

Scientists at UC Berkeley have just released an application for Android phones called MyShake that uses crowd sourcing to gather information about earthquakes. The application runs in the background, using very little power, in a way similar to popular exercise applications. It uses a profile-recognition system that allows it to distinguish between normal activity and an earthquake, so data is only shared if the event matches the profile. When an earthquake occurs, the application detects it using the accelerometer in the smart phone and transmits the data and location anonymously to a cloud server. Within the cloud server, the data is aggregated with data from other devices and used to determine the magnitude of the seismic event.

While the application is currently only a data-capturing tool, the Berkeley team believes that application can be refined to send out alerts seconds or minutes ahead of dangerous shaking. The application is intended to supplement, not replace, the work being done by CISN but offers the advantage of much faster processing and notification. It would prove particularly beneficial in locations that do not have the sophisticated seismic network that California has.
The application has been tested with a small number of users and has performed well and researchers are now seeking to expand the number of users. You can get more information and download the app at http://myshake.berkeley.edu/.