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In this edition of PWH...
- SPECIAL ARTICLE
America Needs a Culture of Preparedness
-General Russel Honore
- Director's Article
DaVinci's Horse Part 4
-Ed Beakley
- From the Field...
The Self-Designing High-Reliability Organization: Aircraft Carrier Flight Operations at Sea
- Gene I. Rochlin, Todd R. La Porte, and Karlene H. Roberts
- Featured Articles
Is Crisis Management (Only) a Management of Exceptions?
- Christophe Roux-Dufor
Hard-Wired to Bounce Back
- Nan Henderson, M.S.W.
Defense For The College Campus - Evelyn Byrd, CPP
Creating A Coordinated Game Plan: Improving the Effectiveness of Military Civil Support to Law Enforcement
- Bob Brooks
Abundance of Planning Failures
- G.I. Wilson
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For additional recommended reading, please click here.
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Special Article |
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America Needs a Culture of Preparedness
By General Russel Honore
Retired Lieutenant General Russel Honoré serves as Emergency Preparedness contributor to CNN Worldwide. He focuses exclusively on disaster preparedness, response, and recovery activities, with multi-sector integration of emergency management.
Before retiring, LTG Honoré commanded Joint Task Force-Katrina. In that capacity, he led the Department of Defense response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and directed the operations of over 22,000 Service members, 200 aircraft, and 20 ships. In accordance with the leadership and priorities established by LTG Honoré, Joint Task Force-Katrina collaborated with Federal, State and local authorities to coordinate and conduct all response, recovery, and mitigation operations.
Lieutenant General Honoré is a native of Lakeland, Louisiana and retired on February 29, 2008, following 37 years of active service with the United States Army. He continues to speak and consult nationally on Building a Culture of Preparedness.
America needs a culture of preparedness. We are seeing that more state governments are struggling in response to recent disasters. Recent Red Cross data shows that for every dollar spent on preparedness, it saves 6 to 9 dollars during disaster response and recovery. As many have seen, disasters cause drama, drama for state governments especially when plans don’t execute or the storm trumps the states capability to deal with the disaster response. “Blame the Federal government and FEMA”, that is the get-out-of-jail- free card that the state governments have. We can do better, this America and one solution is to transform state government.
First and foremost, we have to optimize technology. We need to issue disaster assistance cards which can easily be activated and provide financial assistance to those who need it. Secondly, all state employees should be trained to register folks for relief following a disaster, which currently few states are trained to execute when needed. Officials also need to be mindful to pre-position food water and tarps in communities, as well as use local businesses to serve as a large part of the area’s disaster response. Each area affected should have assistance locations and they should be well marked. They shouldn’t block major roads and supplies should be given to anyone who shows up, no matter what county they are from.
Cities should utilize resources and use local businesses as an integral part of the disaster response. Businesses should be aware of response logistics and local governments should have pre-arranged contracts with local businesses to provide emergency goods and services. One idea would be to have local businesses provide hot meals at fixed prices – approximately 8 dollars each.
Officials should also think of the residents in disaster areas as resources as well. School systems in each state should integrate disaster preparedness and first aid into to its curriculum and every college graduate should be first aid certified. We need to involve the members of our communities, where we can create a civilian response corp in each community. I like to call them “men of consequence” – those who volunteer their time and talent to create resilient communities. These volunteers would be prepared and trained to clear debris from roads and help shore up levees. They would be taught how to operate distribution points and help evacuate communities.
A very important point that I must make is that local officials must assure that residents in our communities have power. It is imperative that that various laws are passed that will require gas stations and drug/grocery stores to have generators. When cities lose electrical power, our quality of life regresses back 80 years - people have no television, no running water or working sewer, no internet or cell phones. Facilities such as hospitals, courthouses and emergency response stations should have mandatory generators on the 2nd floor in order to protect the power source. As we saw during Hurricane Katrina, many City of New Orleans public buildings did have generators – but unfortunately they were in the basement or at ground level which did not serve them in the disaster.
Lastly, officials need to improve evacuation contra flow. We need full use of interstate highways. The federal government owns the flow on the interstate but during hurricane Gustav, unfortunately, we saw city, state and county officials blocking traffic on interstate highways. This policy needs to be reviewed and having surrounding states reroute traffic to protect the flow of tourist traffic to local resorts is unacceptable. As I am sure you will agree, going 40 miles in 12 hours is another disaster in the making.
We need to create a culture of preparedness in America. Our forefathers knew how to take care of themselves, their families, and the communities in which they lived. As citizens, we need to be prepared to do that same - we can not wait on the federal government to do it for us. For more information, go to www. CNN.com.
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Director's Article |
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Da Vinci’s Horse: Perspectives on Decision Making in Crisis
Part 4 – Resilient Communities
By Ed Beakley
Part One of Da Vinci’s Horse closed with a statement and question: As Leonardo da Vinci’s sculpture of a giant horse stands as a symbol of the Renaissance and his unique perspective, creativity and gifts to the world, when historians look back on America and the problems unmasked by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, what will be noted as our symbol of creative response in the 21st Century? Indeed, will there be one?
For 2008, Project White Horse 084640 will explore thinking about that future in context of the idea of a resilient community, whether that “community” be a university, a city, a state, or a nation. The decision (and investigation since Fall ’07) to focus for some period on the idea of resilience derives directly from the PWH focus on time critical decision making in crisis – particularly worst case scenarios. By using analysis concepts more focused on process than event, when looking at a Katrina-like or Virginia Tech type events, it stands out clearly that no matter how well local first responders act or how quickly national assistance arrives, worst cases create situations that simply can’t be mitigated completely by “those officially responsible - leaders and troops alike.” Citizens must be prepared and heavily involved in their own survival and recovery. The more prepared the citizen, the less required by responders for individual support with more focus and effectiveness on dealing with the larger community needs. The more ready the citizen, the more likely the survival and recovery when a major disaster severely diminishes or isolates the ranks of the professional first responder.
Saper vedere, Sapio audacter …sapere aude
To see is to know – dare to know … dare to be wise-think boldly
>>Read Da Vinci’s Horse Part Four: Resilient Communities
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From the Field... |
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The Self-Designing High-Reliability Organization: Aircraft Carrier Flight Operations at Sea
By Gene I. Rochlin, Todd R. La Porte, and Karlene H. Roberts
Studies of large, formal organizations that perform complex, inherently hazardous, and highly technical tasks under conditions of tight coupling and severe time pressure have generally concluded that most will fail spectacularly at some point, with attendant human and social costs of great severity. The notion that accidents in these systems are "normal," that is, to be expected given the conditions and risks of operation, appears to be as well grounded in experience as in theory. Yet there is a small group of organizations in American society that appears to succeed under trying circumstances, performing daily a number of highly complex technical tasks in which they cannot afford to "fail."
Of all activities studied by our research group, flight operations at sea is the closest to the "edge of the envelope"--operating under the most extreme conditions in the least stable environment, and with the greatest tension between preserving safety and reliability and attaining maximum operational efficiency. Both electrical utilities and air traffic control emphasize the importance of long training, careful selection, task and team stability, and cumulative experience. Yet the Navy demonstrably performs very well with a young and largely inexperienced crew, with a "management" staff of officers that turns over half its complement each year, and in a working environment that must rebuild itself from scratch approximately every eighteen months. Such performance strongly challenges our theoretical understanding of the Navy as an organization, its training and operational processes, and the problem of high-reliability organizations generally.
>>Read the article
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Featured Articles |
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Is Crisis Management (Only) a Management of Exceptions?
By Christophe Roux-Dufor
Crises are basically viewed as exceptional events. Current crisis management and analysis is then largely an event-centered approach that considers the crisis as the result of an event defined in time and space - the so-called triggering event. The triggering event makes the crisis visible. It crystallizes multiple dimensions and initiates a dynamic process that is often out of control. This story line tends to lead to an attitude of fatalism or victimization. But that freeze frame point in time offers an information rich opportunity to examine much more than the event and its consequences and specific dynamics. Here, the idea that crises are opportunities should be revisited. A theory of crisis should be able to integrate a wider time perspective and should lead individuals to ask themselves questions about the meaning and origins of crisis, not just filling in the unknowns of the specific event. If in addition to event based analysis, crisis could also be viewed (and analyzed) as a process of organizational weakening that degenerates until the point of disruption – the triggering or precipitating event – research could focus on the identification and characterization of crisis-fostering environments and on the processes of weakening of organizations. If crisis analysis as process can reveal crisis fostering environments, should it not also allow developing crisis mitigation environments – resilient communities?
>>Read the article
Hard-Wired to Bounce Back
By Nan Henderson, M.S.W.
Can individuals learn to be more resilient, or are some just born with the ability to bounce back from adversity? Both, according to researchers, whose work suggests that human beings are born with an innate self-righting ability, which can be helped or hindered. Their findings are fueling a major shift in thinking about human development: from obsessing about problems and weaknesses to recognizing “the power of the positive”--identifying and building individual and environmental strengths that help people to overcome difficulties, achieve happiness, and attain life success. Identifying, celebrating, reinforcing, and nurturing the growth of these positive human traits is the most important skill we can collectively develop to help ourselves and others be more resilient. But, can skills applied to individuals make a difference in the face of worst case disasters? Do we need to pull doves out of hats?
>>Read the article
Defense For The College Campus
By Evelyn Byrd, CPP
A college campus is similar to a military installation in many ways. The US Department of Defense (DoD) has been protecting installations, and the people on them, for generations. The threat of terrorism, particularly since the bombing of Khobar Towers (Saudi Arabia) in 1997 gave birth to the Antiterrorism (AT) Standards that are used today in the US military. This article proposes that those very same AT Standards used to protect military bases can be used as a basis for a comprehensive security program on college campuses.
>>Read the article
Creating A Coordinated Game Plan: Improving the Effectiveness of Military Civil Support to Law Enforcement
By Bob Brooks
Lieutenant General Russel Honore was the Joint Task Force Commander who provided the most visible and effective leadership in the days immediately following the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. In response to an inquiry about what he thought law enforcement should know about National Guard support, he stated that based on his experience, “The first responders and any other response organization should have exercised and collaborated before the storm. The scene of a disaster is not the place to exchange business cards.” He also recommended that coordination between law enforcement and the National Guard could be improved by threat specific planning accompanied by training in which potential participants are stressed to the point of failure.
Law enforcement and military responders cannot afford to ignore the lessons learned from prior events. Jurisdictions will have to rely on National Guard support for law enforcement in future catastrophic events, just as we have in the past. Citizens have a right to expect an effective, coordinated and rapid response to a life threatening disaster. Only by beginning to plan, train and exercise together can law enforcement and the National Guard fulfill their obligation to be at their best when the need is the greatest.
>>Read the article
Abundance of Planning Failures
By G.I. Wilson
The news is replete with stories about the abundance of planning failures. This paper explores why we fail to plan adequately. According to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) public opinion polls show people believe the government is responsible for protecting them. Despite the public’s belief that the onus for protecting them rests solely with local, state, and federal agencies, planning failures persist. The public and private sectors’ planning failures stem from a wide range of reasons. These encompass, lack of resources, funding, imagination, and simply not planning ahead. The challenges of planning failures are nonetheless foreseeable. This paper contends that a combination of bureaucratic processes, flawed mental models (e.g. lack of imagination, faulty assumptions, analysis paralysis), lack of risk awareness, and preference for the status quo, couple with factors such as groupthink, fallibility of human reason, and “turf” battles all contribute to planning failure.
>>Read the article
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