Disasters That Worry Emergency Planners Most | Hacker News Reader

Disasters That Worry Emergency Planners Most

theatlantic.com

Another factor is that successful preparedness for past events produces a false sense of complacency for future events. The more disaster planners succeed, the less people think their work is necessary.

See also: Y2K. What a waste of money all that was, amiright?

My area of work centers around quality and testing these days. This comment really hits home.

I can't find the exact quote, but a former Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset Police said something like "On my patch I have to worry about an international airport, a nuclear power station, and Glastonbury Festival". I once volunteered to be a pseudo-casualty needing a decontamination shower from the Fire & Rescue Service on site there. By the time they had rigged up fire appliance vehicles for showers and dug a waste water pit the sun was going down and it wasn't great weather for an outdoor cold shower.

Sounds obvious, but was that billion-dollar disaster graph adjusted for inflation?

Yes. If you click the NOAA link on that graph, it'll take you to a Summary Stats page where you can switch between CPI adjusted and unadjusted. The link is:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/summary-stats

Surprised to not see "civil war" mentioned.

It's remarkably hard to plan for one without any idea of the "shape" it would take. Region vs. region? Faction vs. faction, which would geographically mix it up a lot more? What would which governments be responsible for, and not?

The normal preparations would go some ways, everyone should have bugout plans, storage of food, water, essential medicines, etc., and while of course not recommended by most governments, basic arms, e.g. a rifle and pistol. Beyond that, it's really hard to say at this point, especially since we seem to be so far from one (for how long did our only Civil War brew?).

Civil war would be somewhat out of the scope of what the article is talking about, namely discrete, punctuated events like nuclear blasts and earthquakes. Even hurricanes last only a few days in one area. War could drag on for years.

One can typically see a civil war coming from much further away than a hurricane or earthquake.

Civil war in the west is just not going to happen. There is localised political violence, but a proper civil war requires the defection of some or all of the military. The most likely country for this that counts as "western" is Turkey.

Uhmmm ... Spain ?

That was only 75 years ago ...

And a close call in 1981 and 1982.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23-F

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Spanish_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

"“To me it’s about numbers,” Fugate said. “How big can the numbers get? [Those] will produce the biggest numbers.”"

This comes out of the guy who is supposed to be in charge of coordinating our disaster relief.

To me, it's about potatoes. How tasty can our potatoes get? Those will be the tastiest potatoes.

> This comes out of the guy who is supposed to be in charge of coordinating our disaster relief.

When I read this, I remembered that the FEMA administrator at the time of Hurricane Katrina was a political appointee with zero relevant experience, so I went looking to see if Fugate is any different. Boy, is he!

Fugate has spent his entire career in this space, starting as a volunteer firefighter in high school, then working as a paramedic before spending ten years as emergency manager at the county level, then deputy director and director at the state level (in Florida). He turned down the FEMA administrator job in 2005 (when the aforementioned political appointee resigned in the aftermath of Katrina).

His reaction to being nominated by Obama for the role was to tweet "Pigs do fly" - https://twitter.com/disastersrus/status/1279506490

He supports the use of technology, including social media as a communications tool in the aftermath of disasters - http://www.dhs.gov/news/2011/05/04/written-statement-craig-f... - and crowdsourcing of disaster reporting via smartphone apps - http://www.fema.gov/disaster-reporter

He is a licensed ham radio operator and he used to run a website (domain registered in 2000; now inactive) with links, information and advice on how to prepare for disasters - http://www.disastersrus.org/bio.htm

This guy is awesome. If he says it's about numbers, I believe him.

There was a great essay a few days ago by that FEMA director, who apparently was not at all unqualified for his role.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/ex-fema-director-michael-brow...

To be fair, I'm sure he did the best he could. The responsibility lies with the guy who appointed him into that role.

He also coined the Waffle House Index [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index

I didn't realize they actually planned for it [1]. That's actually pretty awesome.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House#Disaster_recovery

Yeah, as mentioned in the various Wikipedia articles 4 companies that do a lot of business in and around Tornado Alley are prepared for it. The others are Home Depot, Lowes, and Wal-Mart.

The latter is the one I know the most about, it's based in the north-west most county in Arkansas, 3 counties due south of Joplin, MO, where we enjoyed an EF-5 tornado in 2011, and they have serious plans which they get to put into operation all too often. Not as quickly and directly as Waffle House, but with all their logistics resources its easy to surge food, water, etc. as soon as the roads are open.

Ah, the Joplin Home Depot was in the zone of total destruction, but our Lowes was untouched, and the company surged many, many employees to it, it was really busy in the days and months afterwards.

I find it amusing that Walmart is probably in a better position than most governments when it comes to the ability to deal with the humanitarian crisis following a natural disaster...

Good point. In NYC companies like IKEA in Red Hook had local impact following Sandy.

I was told in the late 90s, anecdotally, that in South Korea which has a festering humanitarian disaster 50 miles from its capital, the large conglomerates each have a role in the emergency planning.

For example: LG provides potable water; Samsung, Quonset huts; Hyundai..., etc

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