I just received an interesting note from my friend and colleague, Rocky Lopes. It seems that the recent 3.6 earthquake in Maryland rattled a bit more than windows. Here in California, we use 5.0 earthquakes to stir our coffee, so a 3.6 would probably not be noticed in most places. However, Maryland rarely gets earthquakes, […]
Here's another for the "you can't make this stuff up" category. One of the basics of liability is the concept that if an event is foreseeable, you need to have at least considered it in your planning. This usually comes down to proving whether or not an event was foreseeable, a question usually decided by a jury. To […]
Download Newsletter June 2010
There's been an interesting development in the ongoing oil spill saga. BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg has replaced CEO Tony Hayward as the person in charge of the oil spill cleanup with Managing Director Robert Dudley. Ostensibly, the change is being brought about by Hayward's rather abysmal handling of public relations and demonstrates decisive leadership by Svanberg. However, […]
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: In a section titled “Sensitive Biological & Human-Use Resources,” the […]
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 […]