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Hello Lucien,
Welcome to the July edition of Emergency Management Solutions.
If we ever needed a reminder that disasters are rarely single events, this month certainly serves that purpose. The widespread impact of the CrowdStrike IT failure may have captured the headlines but it was far from an isolated event. At this writing, a wildfire in California is now the 7th largest in California history and is only 14% contained. And it is just one of many raging in the state. This month also saw the attempted assassination of a US presidential candidate and a contested election in Venezuela that could lead to political violence. In Europe, many countries are dealing with the effects of a heat wave that has already killed a number of people. It has truly been a dark month and a very busy one for emergency managers.
In this month's featured articles, Tim Riecker examines the Community Lifelines concept and suggests ways it can be implemented. Erik Bernstein shares some of the lessons his father, Johnathan Bernstein has learned during his 30+ years as a crisis management consultant. My own contribution on how we can handle the competing demands of planning for multiple risks.
Be well!
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Canton on Emergency Management
By Lucien G. Canton, CEM
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How Do You Plan for Everything?
Anyone who has spent time in emergency management understands that the public’s attention to risk is often either non-existent or fleeting. It takes disaster on a large scale to gain attention and that attention is usually accompanied by demands for swift corrective action in the immediate aftermath which is in turn followed by apathy as the disaster fades into history. This is particularly true of disasters that have a low frequency of occurrence but a high potential impact.
Consider, for example, the Y2K crisis of distance memory. Also referred to as the millennium bug, the problem was caused by computer coding that failed to account for changing the first two digits in a date from 19 to 20 at the turn of the century. The problem was known well in advance and there were numerous missed opportunities to correct it. However, it wasn’t until a year or so before the event that the problem became a widespread crisis, with predictions of catastrophic failures of computer systems leading to the apocalypse. A lot of effort went into last minute planning by emergency managers to help allay public concern. However, within a matter of months all the lessons learned about system interdependencies, critical points of failure, and the need for parallel systems were forgotten.
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© 2024 - Lucien G. Canton
Lucien Canton is a management consultant specializing in helping managers lead better in a crisis. He is the former Director of Emergency Services for San Francisco and the author of the best-selling Emergency Management: Concepts and Strategies for Effective Programs used as a textbook in many higher education courses.
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The Contrarian Emergency Manager
By Timothy "Tim" Riecker
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Preparing for Community Lifelines Implementation
In all great ideas, the devil, as they say, is in the details. Implementing new concepts often requires preparations to ensure that the implementation goes smoothly. We often rush to implementation, perhaps excited for the results, perhaps not thinking through the details. Without proper preparation, that implementation can fail miserably. Integrating and implementing the Community Lifelines is no exception.
Just like everything else we do in preparedness, we should turn to the capability elements of planning, organizing, equipping, training, and exercises (POETE) to guide our preparedness for Community Lifeline implementation.
Planning and Organizing
I’m coupling these two capability elements together as they so strongly go hand-in-hand. Determining how you want to use Community Lifelines is an important early step. I’d suggest developing a Community Lifeline Implementation Plan for your jurisdiction that not only identify how you will use them in response and recovery operations, but details of how their use fits within your response and recovery management structure, how information will flow, who is responsible for what, how information is reported, and to who it is reported. The Implementation Plan should also outline the preparedness steps needed and how and where information will be catalogued.
I’ve seen several Community Lifeline integrations across local, county, and state jurisdictions, these mostly being visual status displays, but there can be some complexity in how we even get to that display.
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© 2024 - Timothy Riecker, CEDP
Used with Permission
Tim Riecker is a founding member, partner and principal consultant with Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC, a private consulting firm serving government, businesses, and not for profit organizations in various aspects of emergency and disaster preparedness.
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Bernstein Crisis Management
by Erik Bernstein
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30 Lessons from 30 Years of Crisis Management
Jonathan Bernstein got his start in crisis management when he helped launch one of the earliest crisis communications practices in the U.S. as part of a national PR office. Branching off to form Bernstein Communications, which would later become Bernstein Crisis Management, in January 1994, he has been actively practicing in the field of crisis management and crisis communications for more than 30 years. For this article he shared 30 of the most important lessons he’s learned during this time.
Tips from decades of hands-on crisis management experience
1. Not planning for crises is the same thing as planning to have a crisis.
2. One hostile and/or ego-driven person with a computer and some Internet savvy can do a huge amount of damage to any organization.
3. Damaging information present on the Internet spreads virally, being reprinted by other websites and/or even news organizations regardless of accuracy. Ignoring it will only make matters worse.
4. All legal threats – e.g., threatened lawsuits, regulatory investigations – are potential threats to reputation and should be brought to the attention of whoever is responsible for reputation management/PR as soon as they’re identified. Typically, however, legal counsel and even senior company management delay notifying their PR advisor, internal or external, until the stuff hits the fan or will do so imminently. Rushed consideration of PR strategy and messaging is seldom as good as that which can be produced given more lead time.
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© 2024 - Erik Bernstein
Used with permission
Erik Bernstein is President of Bernstein Crisis Management, a specialized firm dedicated to providing holistic strategies for managing crisis situations.
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What the CrowdStrike IT failure says about cybersecurity
The CrowdStrike outage greatly impacted not only airlines but also various sectors in healthcare and hospitality. San Jose State Professor Ahmed Banafa explains that the outage affected many more people than a typical IT failure impacting just one company. He notes that fixing the issue requires manually deleting a malicious file from thousands of computers, a process that could take weeks.
With systems compromised, hackers can take advantage of this situation by creating phishing emails along with fake research and websites to gain access to affected parties. When asked how individuals could keep their computers safe, Banafa emphasized thinking before clicking and only using help directly from Microsoft and CrowdStrike.
In addition, Banafa notes that no one questions a software update, and as a result, 8.5 million devices suffered this outage. This incident may prompt Microsoft to reconsider its relationship with CrowdStrike due to the negative publicity.
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2023 FEMA Resilience Year in Review
FEMA is excited to share with you the 2023 FEMA Resilience Year in Review report, which highlights the significant strides FEMA Resilience has made in enhancing the nation’s preparedness and resilience. The year 2023 displayed the escalating effects of the climate crisis with an emergency or disaster declaration occurring on average every three days. This report emphasizes the critical importance of collaboration and continuous improvement as we face escalating climate challenges together.
Key initiatives in this report include:
- Promoting Equity: Ensuring that all communities, especially those historically underserved, have access to the resources and support needed to strengthen their resilience.
- Expanding Climate Resilience Programs: Implementing innovative strategies and programs to address the growing challenges posed by climate change.
- Improving Community Readiness: Offering targeted assistance and legislative reforms to better support communities in their resilience efforts.
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By showcasing these achievements and outlining our future goals, we aim to inform you of our ongoing commitment to building a resilient and prepared nation.
Through partnerships and collaborations, your support is helping to make significant strides toward a safer and more resilient future for the nation.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Leaving Nobody Behind: Emergency Management in an Inclusive Way
The Journal of Emergency Management (JEM) Editorial Review Board invites the submission of original research, papers, and case studies supporting a special issue titled: Leaving Nobody Behind: Emergency Management in an Inclusive Way.
Leaving no one behind is the ongoing aim of disaster risk reduction and emergency management approaches. Yet, increasingly, planning and operationalization challenges arise due to the difficulties of addressing inequities that exist in communities. We present this call
for papers to identify, document, and garner lessons learned from teams around the world for understanding and implementing strategies for inclusion into pre-disaster planning, mitigation, and post-disaster recovery. This special issue will not debate the need or importance of equitable outcomes in emergency management but will focus instead on the approaches which should be achieved, especially in a global context. The focus is on the future integration of disaster risk reduction and emergency management research to identify, advocate, and manage the effects of inequities through risk mitigation and loss prevention at the emergency management level.
Leaving Nobody Behind: Emergency Management in an Inclusive Way | Journal of Emergency Management (wmpllc.org)
Call for Quick Response Research – SUBMIT NOW
With the support of the National Science Foundation, the Natural Hazards Center Quick Response Research Award Program provides funds and training for eligible researchers to collect data in the aftermath of extreme events to document disaster before memories fade and physical evidence is erased. The Natural Hazards Center is currently accepting proposals for a Special Call for Health Outcomes and Climate-Related Disaster Research. Funds will support awards in the amount of $10,000 to $50,00 each. Proposals for this special call will be accepted on a rolling basis until funds are exhausted. Apply now! More information can be found at https://hazards.colorado.edu/research/quick-response
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Professional Development Opportunities
DRJ Fall 2024
September 8-11, 2024
Dallas, TX
DRJ’s annual spring and fall conferences are the longest-running and best-attended business continuity events in the world. DRJ can help you protect your organization from today’s disruptions and tomorrow’s threats by exposing you to insights from industry leaders and giving you an early look at new BC technologies.
IAEM Annual Conference and EMEX
November 15-21, 2024
Colorado Springs, CO
The goal of the IAEM Annual Conference is to improve your knowledge, competency level and collaborative skills. IAEM accomplishes this by attracting relevant high-profile speakers to address current topics and practical solutions. Convening in tandem to this annual event, EMEX, IAEM’s Emergency Management & Homeland Security Expo, draws a myriad of exhibitors who are the top suppliers to the fields of disaster preparedness and homeland security.
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Cyber Breach: What if your defenses fail? Designing an exercise to map a ready strategy
by Regina Phelps
Businesses and organizations of all stripes defend against unending attempts to steal their computer data or damage their systems. They pour billions of dollars into those digital defenses. Few, however, have serious plans for how they will respond to the impact of an actual breach. And few stress-test those plans. Such “exercises” force real-time decision-making and actions the same way a fire drill in a large complex might not go well the first time. The problem is that cyber incidents are infinitely more complicated. This book shows Business Continuity Planners, Crisis Managers and their IT counterparts how to stage a cyber incident exercise that will test preparedness, surface unconsidered circumstances, and sharpen the responsiveness of everyone from top executives to line technologists. It focuses on Advanced Tabletop, Functional, and Full-scale exercises. And it covers everything from broad strategies to minute-to-minute decision-making in a “safe” process that brings experience and insight to everyone. It provides very specific step-by-step instructions – starting from the earliest planning to after-action reports. Such “exercises” force real-time decision-making and actions the same way a fire drill in a large complex might not go well the first time. The problem is that cyber incidents are infinitely more complicated. This book shows Business Continuity Planners, Crisis Managers and their IT counterparts how to stage a cyber incident exercise that will test preparedness, surface unconsidered circumstances, and sharpen the responsiveness of everyone from top executives to line technologists. It focuses on Advanced Tabletop, Functional, and Full-scale exercises. And it covers everything from broad strategies to minute-to-minute decision-making in a “safe” process that brings experience and insight to everyone. It provides very specific step-by-step instructions – starting from the earliest planning to after-action reports.
About the Author
Regina Phelps is an internationally-known crisis management and continuity planning expert. She is the founder of Emergency Management & Safety Solutions. For more than 30 years, on four continents, she has advised large corporations, government entities, and other organizations on how to prepare for circumstances that put their enterprises at risk. She designs and conducts more than 100 exercises a year. In 1991, she was elected the first female president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. She previously wrote Emergency Management Exercises - From Response to Recovery
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Emergency Management: Concepts and Strategies for Effective Programs
Second Edition
by Lucien G. Canton
This book looks at the larger context within which emergency management response occurs, and stresses the development of a program to address a wide range of issues. Not limited to traditional emergency response to natural disasters, it addresses a conceptual model capable of integrating multiple disciplines and dealing with unexpected emergencies.
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Looking for a speaker for your conference? I offer keynotes, seminars, workshops, and webinars, either in person or virtually. You can find more details and sample videos on my website. | | | |
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©Lucien G. Canton 2024. All rights reserved.
You may reprint and excerpt this newsletter provided that you include my copyright, the source,
the author, and "reprinted with permission."
ISSN: 2334-590X
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