Gone Fishin’

Quickly Noted: Crisis Manager Newsletter

A few weeks back I got a note in my inbox about a resource that might be of interest to you all.  The bulk of the site is about Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc, the company.  I’m interested in what he’s giving away, which is a bi-weekly email newsletter about issues of crisis management.  You can register and read the archives here.

While I don’t advocate for Mr. Bernstein’s services (with whom I’ve never worked, nor know anyone that has), I can attest that his newsletter is at the very least interesting to read.

Photo credit: Matt Callow

Quickly Noted: Salmonella Infects US

According to the US News and World Report, the ongoing salmonella saintpaul outbreak is the largest food-borne disease outbreak in the history of the US. Now, I’ll forgive them for not including outbreaks before the Wiley Act, but still, the largest? In this era of biosurveillance and agro-security our food is making thousands of people sick?

We’ve talked about agro-security before (wow, after re-reading that, I’m really happy with it), about how basic food chain security will save lives, plain and simple.

Yet, here we are, one year later, and at least one person dead from this latest outbreak, with epidemiologists no closer to the answer than they were in April.

Now, I’m going to do something that I’ve been warned never to do, so let me preface it heavily. To the best of my knowledge, and in all reality, this is NOT happening.

On to the conjecture: what if someone was poisoning our tomatoes, our cilantro? What if this was an agro-terrorist attack? Would we know? Could we tell the difference between a “naturally” ocurring outbreak and something intentional? Is there really any difference?

All that money spent on bioterrorism programs and homeland security, and we don’t even know what’s making us sick? The folks in public health who have complained about the singular focus of all that spending to the exclusion of traditional public health goals are being vindicated in this slow motion disaster.

That said, I still argue that that money and those bioterrorism programs should be applied to agriculture protection, and indeed all public health work. The goals are the same: prevent disease, protect people, save lives. Why not invest in a system that’s been proven to work, rather than a small, very new, very homeland security-ish subset of that system?

Photo credit: jacki-dee

On Resilience

Since early this spring, I’ve written probably a half dozen or so posts on resiliency. And tossed them all. Recently, though, I read an editorial in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice and Science that put my feelings into words, or at least helped to crystallize how I thought about resiliency.

I was first introduced to the idea of building a resilient society while researching HSPD 21: Public Health and Medical Preparedness. I posted specifically on this topic at the time, saying:

Truthfully, there is only so much the feds can do to promote community resilience outside of physically changing folks’ mindsets. Besides, I think the American people are pretty resilient - especially after the whole Hurricane Katrina debacle (ie. they know the feds aren’t going to help, and they need to just take care of themselves).

Then I didn’t hear anything about it until John Bowen posted a review of The Edge of Disaster, a book by Stephen Flynn, one of my favorite preparedness authors. On his recommendation, I picked it up and found that resiliency was quickly becoming a buzzword in preparedness, homeland security and emergency management. In fact, Congressman Thompson’s Homeland Security Committee even held a “Resiliency Month.” And now it’s everywhere.

Building resiliency into a community is not a bad thing. Striving for a resilient society is an admirable goal. In fact, it’s similar to free ice cream in that nobody can really be against free ice cream. We just worry about the why and the how behind it (the free ice cream and the push for resiliency).

In the case of resiliency, the why is easy. Because a resilient society will “bounce back” from a disasater more quickly and with fewer long term negative effects, it is something to aspire to. Like I said, nobody can argue against it.

The how, however, is a bit different.

How, exactly, does one build a resilient society? Or, better yet, how do we build a resilient America? You go to war with the America you’ve got apparently, and in this America, we spend next to nothing maintaining our physical or medical infrastructure (so says Flynn in his book), our entire business sector is built upon the idea of off-shoring and just-in-time delivery, and people are literally being kicked out of their houses. None of those things are big resiliency motivators.

As noted above, I guess I just don’t get this idea of resiliency as a stated goal of our preparedness efforts. It’s always seemed to me to be a way to shift the burden of preparation from the government to the private sector and lower levels of government (not that the feds should do all the work, it should be a shared responsibility). You know who’s got to come up with business continuity plans? Businesses, and there’s nothing that the federal government can do to make that happen. Putting on a tinfoil hat, can’t you imagine some sick media commentators blaming the Hurricane Katrina disaster on New Orleans just not being resilient enough–like it’s their fault. That’s my worry.
pre-requisites ,
In any case, enough with my negativity and onto the reason for this post.

Monica Schoch-Spana from Center for Biosecurity of UPMC had an editorial published in the June 2008 issue of Biosecurity. (It used to be free, but now seems not to be, so sorry for not having a link) She gives a description from Norris, et al., (200 of community resilience and all of the things that need to happen to attain that goal. The groups that have essential roles include formal institutions (governments), community members, resident networks, trusted media outlets–all working in concert. The prerequisites for all of these groups to begin working together include diverse employment opportunities, robust health and human services, a strong physical plant and an equitable distribution of income and assets. Do either of these things sound like our society today?

So, to contrast that, Schoch-Spana gives the opposite of good resilience, which sounds an awful lot like my worries about what resilience will look like in our non-perfect country:

This multifaceted picture of community resilience stands in stark contrast to the idea of the indomitable human spirit in disaster. … It can obscure the hard, collective work necessary to mitigate potential communitywide harms. It can relieve the federal and local government of major responsibilities to help, fostering an ethos of every man and woman for themselves. And, at worst its worst, it can hold disaster victims responsible for their own tragedy, for not having demonstrated some ideal “innate” ability to bounce back.

Seriously, I thought that way before I read this article, and Dr. Schoch-Spana just put it into words.

So, where does that leave us? Resiliency is a goal for public health and medical preparedness, the President said so. The question about how to do it remains. And what exactly do we do in the meantime?

Photo credit: DuncansTV

Quickly Noted: Iowa Floods Tracking

Okay, so I’m a little behind the news here, but I just came across this really great social media aggregation site.  Launched as the Mississippi devoured the upper Midwest, IowaFlood.com served as a one-stop shop for anything tagged on the web as “IowaFlood.”  Everything from Tweets, to YouTube videos, to Flickr images, to blog posts, to news stories–constantly updated with the flood of information and available to everyone.  I’m calling it now, sites like these will become de riguer in future disasters.  Agencies and companies interested in disaster response and preparedness issues should learn how to set something like this up.  Just a thought, wouldn’t this be a great role in a JIC?  I’ll leave that up to my PR and crisis communications friends.

Kudos to blogger Andy Brutdkuhl for setting IowaFlood.com up.

Here’s a couple of stories on how flood victims and relief agencies, including my friends at the Red Cross, used these social media tools during this catastrophe:  ReadWriteWeb.com post Mainstreet.com story

Photo credit: Christie F.