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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Here's an example of the type of cascading effect that is hard to predict when you're doing a risk analysis. The eruption of a volcano in Iceland created an ash plume somewhere between 20,000 to 36,000 feet in height very close to the Atlantic air routes that link the United States and Europe. The drifting […]
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, […]
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 […]
I recently had the pleasure of attending the Colorado Governor's Emergency Management Conferenceas one of the presenters. As I was wandering around the breakout rooms, I noticed a small conference room filled with communications equipment and very intense looking people. When I asked, I was told that the Colorado Division of Emergency Management had brought in an ICS […]
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 […]
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 […]