First is this blog post The Gorillas in the Room, which speaks to the big issues that claw at governments. I appreciated the author's take on big issues that are not going away. Byron Katsuyama is with the Municipal Research and Services Center (MRSC), which is a nonprofit organization that helps local governments across Washington state better serve their citizens by providing legal and policy guidance on any topic. I recently reconnected with Byron electronically and I have agreed to start contributing a once-a-month blog post targeted at elected officials and senior policy makers here in Washington state.
One of the gorillas he calls out is the Cascadia Subduction Earthquake Fault. It is not going away and will eventually rear its ugly head — at some point.
Then yesterday I had the opportunity to meet and have an in-depth conversation about disaster resilience with a senior government official who I know cares about disaster resilience. Of all the issues, challenges and outright conflicts that this leader is dealing with, none of them have to do with disaster resilience. During our conversation, I brought up the four quadrant priorities chart that everyone should have at least seen once.
He is spending his precious time in Quadrants I and III. That is where we all seem to gravitate to. Quadrant II is where the gorilla issues hang out with fitful and irregular efforts by us and our institutions to address. He could have written my most recent op-ed just published last Friday, Opinion: Twenty years after Y2K, preparing for the next major disaster takes a backseat (which I gave him a paper copy of). Having not read it yet, he made a number of the points I wrote about.
Understanding risks, weighing one's options and moving forward, both as an individual and organization, toward action are very different steps that are not always connected.
Our role as emergency managers with our internal organizations that we serve is to be seen as agitators for action. I certainly have that reputation, as Barb Graff named me "Our John the Baptist" here in this region. However, this is not a one-man/one-woman task. Don't sit mildly in the corner taking the crumbs from the table that are thrown your way. Do your best to move people to address and take action by planning — in Quadrant II which will hopefully move to Quadrant I eventually.
