Then there are human-caused accidents that often involve hazardous materials. These materials are “safe” when contained in properly sealed containers, but there can be leaks at fixed facilities and even more so during transit via rail or road.
Unfortunately there are also deliberate human-caused injuries and deaths. With active shooters, be they teenagers or terrorists, the results are mostly the same. Along with terrorism, foreign or domestic, weapons go beyond guns to include all types of bombs, dirty bombs, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and so on. You can top off this category with thermonuclear war if you like.
All of the above used to be put in a document called the Hazard Identification and Vulnerability Analysis. The last administration decided that just listing the hazards and vulnerabilities was too easy. Now if you are “up to snuff” in FEMA terms, you document all your hazards in a Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA). “The THIRA process helps communities map their risks to the core capabilities, enabling them to determine whole-community informed desired outcomes, capability targets, and resources required to achieve their capability targets,” according to FEMA. Now, are you feeling better informed and prepared?
All of the above have kept many an emergency manager and consultant employed documenting in writing all of this very important stuff.
But let the standards and documentation be; let’s talk about where the rubber meets the road. Once you have a very thorough understanding of your risks, what is it exactly that you choose to tell the public? Are the hazards left to rot on your Web page? Do you select a few that you use in public presentations? To what degree do you use “worst-case scenarios” to describe the calamity that might befall individuals, families and businesses? Do you talk about EF1 or EF5 tornadoes; Cat 1 or Cat 5 hurricanes; or, for earthquake country, magnitude 5 or 9.5 earthquakes?
Do you even bring up an asteroid strike on land or in the sea? Are corneal mass ejections or electromagnetic pulse events that might fry every electronic circuit and bring about a cataclysmic power outage that could last weeks or months included in your talks? Are these on your list of hazards that you talk about with the average Sally and Joe?
If you are not directly familiar with the story of Chicken Little, according to Wikipedia, “It is a folk tale with a moral in the form of a cumulative tale about a chicken who believes the world is coming to an end. The phrase ‘The sky is falling!’ features prominently in the story, and has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.”
We are not to be using fear to motivate people to become prepared for disasters. And, we are not supposed to be leaving disasters off our list of hazards because we personally don’t think they will happen. Our mission is to provide information in a thoughtful and meaningful manner so that people can make their own choices.
You never know, maybe Chicken Little wasn’t hit by an acorn, but in actuality it was a very tiny asteroid.
