The meeting focused on a possible terrorist bombing in New York City, but everyone’s attention was on the unfolding triple disaster in Japan, which had occurred four days earlier. This one had the unusual characteristics of being both a natural and man-made disaster—and massive beyond imagination.
We had gathered for A Tale of Our Cities, a conference with the goal of improving planning for an interdisciplinary response to terrorist use of explosives, specifically in NYC. More than 900 people from dozens of different organizations in and around the city came to learn lessons from experts from London, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel. (The meeting was sponsored by the Injury Response Division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which hopes to bring it to other cities around the country.)
One of the clear messages from those with experience: Your first responders are going to be the laypeople in the vicinity of the event and can make a dramatic difference in who lives and who dies. Are your citizens ready, willing and able to respond? Will they take the need for readiness seriously? And just as important, do the professional rescuers acknowledge and integrate the bystander in their response planning?
The Japanese are thought of as one of the best-prepared populations in the world. They have elaborate drills involving hundreds of thousands of people every year on Sept. 1, commemorating the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, which left more than 100,000 people dead or unaccounted for in the Tokyo area. According to press accounts of the 2010 drills, more than 650,000 people were involved in preparing for a series of earthquakes, with an unprecedented force of 8.7, and the ensuing tsunamis. The head of the country’s nuclear safety agency also participated. As we now know, the planning was inadequate, with the 9.0 Tohoku quake (as it is now officially called), tsunami and a nuclear threat that is still unresolved as we go to press, more than a month later.
If the Japanese were still caught short, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Preparedness vs. readiness
Lois Clark McCoy, the founder of the highly regarded think tank National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue, once explained to me the difference between preparedness and readiness: “A runner can prepare for years for an Olympic event and yet miss the starting gun. He was prepared but not ready to act when it counted. Readiness implies you have not only the tools (training and equipment) to act but the willingness—the heart and presence of mind—to act when the time comes.”
But how do we instill a national will to promote (and fund) readiness for an event that may never happen (at least not in our community) in our lifetime? How do we get the attention of the public, who by necessity will be the first line of defense, whether the event is a bomb or an earthquake? According to a widely cited 2009 survey conducted by FEMA and Citizen Corps, only 14 percent of the public has participated in a home evacuation drill, and while 44 percent said they have a household emergency plan, follow-up questions showed that most of those really didn’t. Why? Almost two-thirds expect to be able to rely on police, fire and EMS for help in the first 72 hours. We all know that when the big one does hit, that won’t be the case.
One of the key concepts of the conference was “building resilient communities.” There are a number of ways to define that, but every variation includes readiness by the civilian population. What are you doing to make that happen?
Keith Griffiths can be reached at publisher@emergencybestpractices.com
