Disaster Preparedness - Management at Personal Level
I believe that with the effort of the government and other international institutions, people have already reached a level of needed knowledge regarding disaster preparedness. I would say that we have reached only this level and not to the level of maturity for the reason that we have learned to prepare for a disaster, but not for the worse. Yes, maybe for some people they have reached a level of maturity or even more than enough, but with the ever changing dynamics of nature, we are sure that there are still more unexpected things to happen that we are not aware of. Being informed or learned means knowing 'the need to' or 'how to' prepare for a disaster, but being mature means expecting the unexpected impact of a disaster...
"...Being informed or learned means knowing 'the need to' or 'how to' prepare for a disaster, but being mature means expecting the unexpected impact of a disaster..." - Soren Franco Regis Daily struggles are composed of multiple incidents; most of them are just the usual, from water or power outages, busted fuse or battery of the car to traffic, unexpected sickness or worst, earthquake, typhoons and others. These may be non-impacting to high impacting events. Most of the non impacting, low impacting and some of the medium impacting events are usually negligible, but for most of the medium, to all the high impacting are considered disasters. Most of us relate disaster to loss of life, directly or non-directly, maybe it is now time to really understand what this word really means.
Every time we encounter an event that disrupts our usual dynamics, during our daily routines, we just normally have the "ow shit!" or "Oh my God!" reactions, maybe because the disruptions have become regular events, such as once to twice a week traffic, or once a week elevator operation disruption, or whatever it is that regularly disrupts our daily lives. Maybe at some point it is tolerable, say if you earnxsalary per hour at that time, but what if you are already earning3xsalary per hour? Maybe we are getting used to days of flooding during the monsoon seasons, but what if this flooding continuous to occur until several weeks to months? What if we got used to having natural disasters that we have become complacent in other forms of disaster, then one day terrorist attack your city, or maybe one day you just wake up and most of you found out that most of the people living in your neighborhood has now have ebola. What if we got used to having typhoons, including super typhoons, that we looked at all typhoons as the same, that when a super typhoon like Haiyan came, we thought that the impact would just be the same, but we were wrong...
Disaster management, which has a major goal of resiliency, is not an absolute science, it is very dynamic, very fluid, and ever changing based on needs. It uses different fields of studies, engineering, management, psychology, physics and others, and learning method, in order to be effective, should be 80% experience, 20% theory. There is no absolute academic book that would teach us this, not even an instructional manual to assist us what to do, nor an absolute scholar to teach us, since this deals with different forms of disaster, which has a major characteristic of being unpredictable - earthquake, typhoon path and impact, forest fire, drought and other natural disasters, and including man made ones.
One aspect of this field is balancing cost and requirement. It is good if we arrived at a design that is more than the requirement in which the cost was well within the capability of the sponsors, but what if the design is not enough for the requirement, in which the cost was already at the edge of the budget. Maybe we might have forgotten to consider alternate strategy or design, and because of this we have much more than what we are expecting.What if we have poured all our budget to create a wall that would block tsunamis, using a scale based on historical experience, but when the tsunami arrived it was higher than our design; and thinking that the walls would block the tsunami, most of our people did not leave the area...
A fire that started in the middle of a city in Metro Manila resulted to damages to
more than 30 houses.
The discussions here would evolve in personal experiences, actual instructions from different refutable institutions, and discussions from news media and documentaries. All will be digested by the author as to have a much better way of presenting the concepts in a layman’s format. Case studies will also be included for practice.
Due to the limitation of the experiences of the author, the discussion will not cover natural disasters that are not in the tropical settings, but will include man made disasters such as terrorism and negligence of policies. No specific incident will be discussed, only generic scenario based on experiences.
All safety and disaster management discussions included are not official. This blog is not an authority in disaster management or safety management, nor is it an authorized discussion channel of any international or local agency dealing with the subject. All inclusions are only for personal reference, and for the sake of case discussions.
But...
All content of this blog is originally written by the author. Please note that details are not available here, should you need a more granular guide, or wish to seek advice on establishing an incident management plan and/or the detailed plans, understanding the plans or creating guidelines for it, you may get in touch with the author.