Are You Disaster Ready? (hurricane, tornado, earthquake, flood, fire, etc.)

What do you expect in case of an insured loss? Who cares? Who has disaster preparedness/recovery money for that?
I don’t have all the answers, but on the matter of protecting insurance consumers I look here for one:

the white house
“the people’s house”
http://www.disasterprepared.net/whitehouse.html

The second project is a new class at the Emergency Management Institute (EMI) in Maryland, which brings together representatives from Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs) and members of Incident Management Teams for a week long class. The results of this effort are yet to be seen, but I feel it will be better to learn about each others roles and responsibilities before a disaster happens. This may achieve placing team oriented leaders around the U.S. one person per jurisdiction at a time. I guess you do not build a team in a day unless you have just had a disaster.

Many things are needed to overcome these “gap issues.”.

First, we need “meta-leadership,” the ability and skill for leaders to see beyond the immediate and their “rice bowl.” To achieve this we need education and awareness, but more importantly a change in culture. In part this will requir an understanding of the “operational” (as in operational level of manuever and operational art) and inter-dependency.

Next it will require training and exercising for individuals, command teams, and agency heads (and more importantly their middle-managers). I think the “teams of leaders (ToL) approach can meet this facet.

ToL needs wide application. This must be reinforced with an understanding of “meta-leadership” as an imperative. Beyound this we need to develop, support, and sustain an understanding of decision-support and intelligence as a. Supporting operational element. I attempted to drive this through the TEW (terrorism early warning) approach to fusion, but the silo and stovepipe bias chilled that initiative. Fusion centers supplanted TEWs, but the the need for interdisciplinary “meta-analysis” persists. We need to synthesize meta-leadership and meta-analysis—ToL can be a vehicle to start.

I believe these needs have been bridged in the past (i. e., in the TEW movement, and specifically this often occurs during major catastrophic responses—at least towards the end of the event when the needed EMON (emergent/emerging multi-organiztional network) kicks into gear.

We need to capture that experience and forge (or grow) networked response capabilities that work pre-, trans-, and post-in cident, and that can survive beyond a single incident, event, or threat envelope…

It may be true that the more “transboundary’ the event the larger the need for “transboundary” thinking, but the challenge is that you don’t know how an event will unfold until it is largely too late. Ranger’s point (see previous post #2)that the best response comes from the best prepared locals makes great sense. It is imperative that locals are included in the ToL approach, so they can continue developing the expertise and contacts needed to increase the efficacy of their disaster response.

While Feds may (or may not) know “systems” better than locals, locals will know the particulars of the local area and population, making both imperative in complex disaster response.