I
These days, it’s the most natural thing in meetings about this or that disaster scenario to ask up-front what are the risks with respect to each scenario. Starting this way, we think the real methodological problems are in better calculating the risks rather than in determining when the question itself is systematically misleading, both conceptually and practically.
Say you work in an urbanized marine domain of ships and container transport, ports, navigation ways, major bridges, anchorage areas, intermodal transportation hubs, underwater hazardous liquid pipelines, dredging vessels, environmental regulations, and more. Your starting point in contrast is the unavoidable fact that the marine domain consists of interconnected critical infrastructures, some more tightly coupled than others, physically or temporally, .
Which means you already understand that instead of starting with all manner of possible disaster scenarios related to say, a tsunami and then ask How to respond? How to prepare?, you start from the fact that these across-infrastructure connectivities generate many different disaster scenarios that more than one infrastructure has to worry about, should a tsunami of that order come their way. You end up with disaster scenarios, not start with them.
II
Modelers, like most of the informed public, are asking you which disaster scenarios should matter more by way of action–be it better emergency preparedness or immediate emergency response. But they don’t understand the interconnected marine domain the way you and your domain colleagues do. They want you to prevent disaster scenarios before they unfold, while your starting point–the interconnected marine domain–clearly implies having to improve the across-infrastructure (across domain) resilience to respond to the inevitable surprises thrown at the domain, even during pre-disaster times, let alone during the tsunami or afterwards.
What do you say to them?
III
I’m no expert on public speaking, but I’m pretty sure something like the below needs to be better translated:
“It’s so natural to think we need to start with risk scenarios, like what is the risk to the marine domain of a mid-bad tsunami. But let’s start with what we know about immediate emergency response, be it to this or that disaster. Efforts to restore critical infrastructure services during immediate emergency response (e.g., through placement of mobile telecommunication towers) almost always entail real-time improvisation and workarounds, within or across the infrastructures involved. Indeed, they may become the only key real-time interconnection between the systems during those times. This in turns puts a high priority on pre-disaster efforts to improve the joint restoration and recovery resilience across those interconnected critical infrastructures.
What does this mean practically? It means capitalizing on existing opportunities beyond the official emergency management structures and plans at the local, regional, state and federal levels there. The aim is to leverage existing initiatives that have already “seen the light, ” for example, vessel traffic services, marine exchanges, and harbor safety committees. The priority in focusing on those who actively acknowledge the centrality of interconnectivities is made all the more visible because these are still early days in thinking through emergency management in terms of infrastructural connectivities.
The core competency called for in more effective modeling, table-tops, real-time control room desks and the like is in the area of inter-infrastructural connectivities. These professionals are targeted because they already work outside their infrastructural or sectoral siloes. . .”
See four brief links for related material:
The single most important place to start adding value in emergency preparedness is. . .
The public good of “stabilization” in immediate emergency response and initial service restoration
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 