Two things in retrospect strike me especially, and the most empathic of my impressions. . .The first of these was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos.
William James, psychologist and philosopher, on witnessing first-hand the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and immediate aftermath
–A magnitude 9 (M9) earthquake off the shoreline of the Pacific Northwest is not an impossible-to-predict event. To the contrary, it’s being predicted all the time. What’s impossible to predict are the specific consequences on shore, apart from phrases like “unimaginably awful.”
–Having to improvise in these circumsgances will be like breathing: “breathing is not a doing or an action as much as it is a not-being-able-to-not-do-so.”
–In a way, M9 scenarios are so catastrophic that certainty increases with respect to responding to questions like, “What percentage of electricity is likely to be restored in 3 days?” Answer, well, about zero.
–Infrastructures being vulnerable create specific dependencies and responsibilities (e.g., with respect to evacuation), not just a network of cross-cutting interdependencies, summed up as “relatedness.”
–Interviewee comments—”we’ll be under pressure to get the plant up and running asap,” “our people won’t be able to get to the control room because they trying to save their families,” and “we’ll need to evacuate as many people as possible”—serve a key indicator that not only has techno-side of infrastructures been destroyed, but the socio-side of these large sociotechnical systems has also taken a very severe hit.
–Mitigation is a kind of preparedness and prevention that you more readily expect of the responder culture and not of a longer-term repurposing culture for replacing infrastructure.
–Alfred North Whitehead coined “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” i.e., when we confuse or conflate an abstract concept for something concrete and empirical.
Emergency management has its own fallacy of misplaced concreteness: as if bridges and assets are more real than the processes for emergency management and preparedness.
For example, when the aim is to shorten post-disaster restoration and recovery time, mitigation of physical structures beforehand is frequently taken as the priority. Even more a priority, some say, than having in place decision-making processes about avoiding vulnerabilities and errors associated with inter-infrastructural connectivities up to and through the disaster.
–We were told that the most beneficial mitigation, in utilitarian terms (greatest benefit across the greatest number), would be two-week readiness across the population in advance of disaster. We can’t even do that, how then do all the other pre-disaster mitigation?
–What a on-point confirmation of the centrality of high reliability management in infrastructures than the principal immediate emergency response of restoring the backbone infrastructure of electricity, water, telecoms and roads. Keeping reliable and safe is a central tendency, a reversion to the mean, an example of the institutional niche with which society holds critical infrastructures.
–Isn’t “We’ve never experienced anything like an M9 and can’t predict. . .” misleading if left at that? Isn’t it better first to ask, What’s your emergency management track record when it comes to “the biggest fire, or flood, or ice storm. . . the state has ever seen so far”?
–A positive track record with respect to emergency management is of course no guarantee of effectiveness when it comes to the unfolding M9 events, but neither is the retrospective record of no major failures a guarantee of high reliability management ahead even in normal operations.
–It is one thing to insist on unimaginable impacts arising from an M9 earthquake, but quite another to leave out infrastructures in imagining the impacts (e.g., treating wastewater as a low priority in inter infrastructural impact assessments).
–The other side of “everything’s connected” is “nothing can be completely reduced to something else.” As in: “It would be crazy for the regulator to do the work of the utilities, when the latter are the experts.” (For example, “we can’t tell them where to de-energize lines,” a regulator told us.)
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 