Security expert Bruce Schneier speaks at Penn State University on October 10, 2010. (credit: youtube.com),

Months ago, Matthew Hochstein, a project director with the Evanston-based emergency management consulting firm Hagerty Consulting, explained how the government prioritizes resources when it comes to preparing for, and then dealing with emergency events.

“Prioritizing resources is a tough job,” he said. “It’s very complicated because you’re dealing with not just multiple states, but multiple regions. For example, the water/ice/MREs in the first 72 hours is probably the first and most important thing next to search and rescue teams. Search and rescue teams and live-saving commodities are the most important resources you’re going to need in the first 72 hours. These are not infinite resources.”

There’s also an important federal versus local dynamic, “Largely the role of FEMA at the Federal level is trying to provide a 50,000-foot view of, ‘Here’s the true situation for each of the areas that are hardest hit. We need to prioritize all resources and equipment there first, get search and rescue teams there first. And then work you’re way out to areas that were not as heavily impacted.”

Politics factor in, according to Hochstein, “It does play into where some resources go. That’s the fact.”

Throughout the term I’ve looked closely at the scientific risk and the financial risk associated with emergency management and homeland security. I was curious to know more about the role that political risk plays.

Paul Rosenzweig, former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is a Carnegie National Security Fellow at Medill School of Journalism. “Political risk is part and parcel of all the risks that important actors consider,” he told me.

“It’s hard to explain risk to people. It’s hard to explain the science of hurricanes, or the science of highway traffic accidents,” he said. “There’s a sense in which risk, and all its cost-benefit analysis has a dissonance with some fundamental moral and social principles that people get from somewhere outside of risk analysis.”

Bruce Schneier is among the most insightful voices on security subjects, and Chief Security Technology Officer of European telecom company BT. Last October he gave a TED talk, Reconceptualizing Security, to an audience at Penn State University, that amplifies Rosenzweig’s point.

“Security is two different things. It’s a feeling. And it’s a reality,” he said. “You can feel secure even if you’re not. And you can be secure even if you don’t feel it. We have two separate concepts mapped on to the same word.”

The rest of the talk is Schneier unpacking the two dimensions of security. First, he summarizes the economics of security decision-making in terms of ever present risk/reward tradeoffs, “The question you need to ask about security anything isn’t ‘does this make us safer?. It’s ‘is this worth the tradeoff?'”

“There’s no right or wrong here. Some of us have a burglar alarm. Some of us don’t,” he said. “A lot of times these tradeoffs are about more than just security. People have a natural intuition about these tradeoffs. We make them everyday.”

Given the everyday-ness of the security tradeoffs people make, you would expect people to be good at making those decisions, yet they are not. “We are hopelessly bad at it,” Schneier observes. His short answer for why, “We respond to the feeling of security and not the reality.”

Feelings, it turns out, can be inadequate models of reality. Terrorism events, for example, are exceedingly rare but are a outsize presence in our current lives, according to Schneier.

Here, Rosenzweig disagrees, “People’s moral judgments are just as evidence-based” as the reality Schneier holds up. “I don’t necessarily accept the premise that because their feelings, they can’t point to a scientific grounding for them that they’re less worthy of consideration in any sort of risk analysis.”

Political risk is, it seems, the ultimate tradeoff. Tension between political safety, public safety, reality and feelings make emergency management and security decision-making difficult. Yet functional government and functional society are possible when these decisions are made, and not deferred.

The lessons for citizens when it comes to both emergencies and government emergency management are, I suppose, the same: Be aware and be prepared.

credit: Bank of America Chicago Marathon

After you and thousands of others have run hundreds of miles to prepare for the big race, public safety officials are using that same big race to prepare for potential disasters. Be glad. It’s making both your race day and your community safer.

Big races are a big opportunity for the city’s emergency management services (EMS). “They know this event happens. They know it’s every year on this day,” says George Chiampas, medical director for the annual October Bank of America Chicago Marathon and the spring Bank of America Shamrock Shuffle, an 8-kilometer race. Each race counts more than 40,000 runners.

“It provides them an opportunity to test their technology and test their preparedness,” says Chiampas, pointing out that with so many runners and spectators flooding city neighborhoods the different EMS agencies – police, fire, hospitals, ambulance providers, public health, plus city parks, traffic management, Chicago Transit Authority, American Red Cross – have to communicate and work together effectively.

Marathons and other road races with lots of participants have developed a symbiotic relationship with the emergency management and public safety organizations in the cities where these events take place.

Fargo, North Dakota, had 10,000 runners participating in the city’s same-day marathon and half-marathon on May 21. It was a cool, but humid day. Runners inexperienced with how humidity taxes the body might add a layer. As a result they faced a real risk of overheating despite the comfortable temperature. “People don’t feel it right away,” said Fargo Marathon race director Mark Knudson.

A total 80 runners came through the medical tent at the finish line, including a rush of them when a mass of finishers from both races came in at the same time.

Fargo’s Sanford-Merit Care Hospital emergency room was full then too. The city EMS was also taxed. But it’s something they planned for.

The marathon has become an educational and practice event for the hospital, said Knudson. “Over the years it’s become something that they’ve learned a lot from.”

Comparing marathons, Fargo doesn’t go to anywhere near the logistical lengths that Chicago does, but it is still sizable.

With more than 20,000 runners participating in five different races, no other event on the Fargo calendar brings in as many out-of-town visitors. Fargo does take into account the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Incident Management System (NIMS) framework for inter-agency operations but doesn’t follow it as comprehensively as Chicago does, though that may change, according to Knudson.

NIMS is at the heart of what happens in Chicago on marathon race day. Chiampas said that the NIMS command structure is something that FEMA recommends strongly, “It basically means that there is a collaboration and communication between all organizations in managing any sort of a mass event – police, fire, FBI, traffic management, EMS.”

All the organizations fall in line under a single command hierarchy and use one messaging system. Chicago’s marathon system, Chiampas feels, is state of the art.

The main command center, the Joint Operations Center, runs out of the city of Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC) 911 facility downtown. The race also has a forward command center near the race start and finish in Grant Park. A third mobile command center, owned by OEMC, is on the race course.

All of it is necessary. The race will have 45,000 runners, 12,000 volunteers and 1.7 million spectators, and the city could potentially have many more things to deal with at the same time. “There may be a baseball playoff game. There may be a fire. There may be a gas leak. There may be a robbery,” Chiampas stopped himself.

Each non-marathon situation has to be dealt with, “How is that an incident? How can it affect the marathon course?” Chiampas’ priority is clear, “The number one thing anytime we have an event is safety – safety for our runners, safety for the citizens of Chicago. We need to make sure the city is functioning at the same time as this event.”

But what happens when the details coming in about an event are ambiguous, and there’s no clear-cut immediate response. That’s when the race leans most heavily on its city partners.

Every day the Chicago OEMC gets ambiguous information, and on race day, for them, it’s the same set of operating procedures. “They have ways to verify certain information, and without going into detail, we have that capability,” said Chiampas. “Because we’re working as a team in a unified command approach it allows us to respond appropriately with all of the knowledge that you need.”

Everyone involved knows that they will be called on to respond to something, and the unified command meets year-round, intensifying preparation in the two months before the race’s October calendar date. Over the past 3-5 years more and more resources go to safety management.

Chiampas feels what’s special about the system is how public and private organizations work together. “We have a tremendous amount of respect. We work well together,” he said, “that’s the basis for doing this well.”

It is, he thinks, a template for how a risk-filled world can take care of itself.

”You’re going to need private entities to provide water and resources. We can’t expect our EMS system to do this on its own. We also need the citizens to be involved,” Chiampas said.

If everybody does their share, and understands what their responsibility and their role is, the system works, he feels.

But practice and preparation are crucial. The Chicago Marathon provides the city an opportunity to test all of its EMS systems and at the same time provide critical safety services to hundreds of thousands of spectators, tens of thousands of runners, and thousands of volunteers. “There’s no small numbers. And everyone expects the best response, and best practices in terms of how they’re dealt with. That’s what we’re measured up to.”

Researchers at the University of Oklahoma and at Texas Tech are developing technologies to improve disaster prediction and response, but emergency managers are not as quick to move these advances out of the lab and into the field.

Oklahoma mathematician Theodore Trefalis works on artificial intelligence methods that have been shown to improve the short-term prediction of tornadoes. His methods use machine learning, a set of computational-intensive techniques for extracting insights from enormous amounts of data.

Machine learning methods “are made to extract patterns within the data,” says Trefalis’ graduate student Robin Gilbert. When working with large data sets, like weather, machine learning means that “you don’t need to store and analyze terabytes of data, you just find the pattern and use it.”

Trefalis and Gilbert focus on finding tornado patterns, and have earned plaudits from artificial intelligence peers for it. The pair won multiple awards for papers published at last year’s Artificial Neural Networks in Engineering research conference, “an unprecedented accomplishment” according to OU meteorology colleague, Michael Richman.

Keith Jones’ work on urban search and rescue (USAR) robots at Texas Tech is less technically complex than Trefalis’, but it also stands to impact the emergency management community. He is finding that if the tele-operators of remote-controlled USAR robots were better drivers, the robots would be less likely to become wedged in the openings they are trying to move the machines through.

These robots are a far cry from Star Wars, and generally consist of just a small tracked base, like on a tank, and a UHF camera capable of transmitting video to a base station, according to Jones.

Tele-operators use a radio-controller to guide the machine from a distance, and robots vary individually in terms of the precision with which an operator can guide it.

Operators are actually pretty good at gauging the size of the opening they move robots through, Jones has found, but “operators’ driving performance is not so good” and is more often the reason for a USAR robot getting stuck.

The good news is that operator-driving skills improve with dedicated practice, Jones’ research shows.

Both Trefalis’ and Jones’ work improves on current practices for tornado prediction and USAR, but neither has been widely adopted by emergency management community.

According to Jones, emergency managers challenge him, saying”Convince me that when we get out in the field it’s going it’s going to make a difference.” There’s an inherent skepticism that his controlled experiment translates to what they face at the site of a catastrophe.

Trefalis faces similar hurdles, made more difficult by the complex computational mathematics of machine learning. “Usually emergency practitioners want to see pictures or images,” said Gilbert, and providing them with what he and Trefalis see, their algorithms’ standard output, “is not very practical.”

“We are mathematicians and in order to talk to these people, we have to simplify and sometimes distort what we are doing (to be understood),” says Trefalis.

Visualizing the results of their computational analysis takes the Oklahoma researchers out of their normal role. “We are not graphic designers,” says Gilbert. “It is very hard to tell people what we are doing if we don’t have eye candy to show them.”

Jones, however, feels he has gained traction communicating to emergency managers. “I use the analogy of parallel parking a car,” he says. To successfully navigate an automobile into a tight space, one takes into account both the size of the space and the skill of the driver. “It gets the point across.”

Soldiers in the Missouri National Guard, 117th Engineer Team clean up after the catastrophic tornado in Joplin, Mo. (credit: Ann Keyes/Missouri National Guard)

Corrected on August 3, 2011. The original version misidentified the company Mariah Re as O’Ryan Re.

The Central U.S. is a tornado sweet spot. During spring and early summer, the west-to-east flow of cooler air in the upper atmosphere can slap tropical air masses traveling north from the Gulf of Mexico so violently it creates a swirling vortex that concentrates the warm air’s considerable energy, a tornado.

They are inevitable. They are destructive. And they are unpredictable. Yet they are insurable. The hows and whys of insuring property against a natural disaster such as a large tornado bear explaining. The short answer is “cat bonds,” but first some background.

“The cat bond business isn’t really taken into account by (government) emergency managers,” according to Matthew Hochstein, a FEMA consultant based in Evanston, IL. “Cat bonds are mitigation of financial risk” and do not address “the ability to respond to, or immediately recover from an event,” like a tornado.

It would be wrong to say that government doesn’t care about cat bonds however. State governments in California, Oklahoma, Alabama and Florida either regulate or provide catastrophe insurance products for citizens because of the potential for disasters within their borders.

Florida uses its financial clout to offer residents reduced-cost insurance against hurricanes. For the most part however, families and business owners are on their own to safeguard their financial security.

Cat bonds speak directly to the economic losses incurred because of a natural disaster, much of it property-related, not the loss of life. “Ultimately we’re providing capital to help rebuild” after a catastrophe, says John DeCaro, a principal at Chicago alternative investment manager, Elementum Advisors, which trades catastrophe bonds.

American Family Insurance, based in Madison, WI., protects property-owners throughout the Midwest, many of them in the tornado sweet spot.

When there’s a disaster, American Family has to make sure it can meet obligations to its policy-holders. To accomplish this, the company turns to “a marketplace where insurance companies buy insurance to cover these things,” according to Greg Gisi, director of risk management there.

That marketplace, called reinsurance, is where one insurance company (the reinsurer) provides insurance to another insurance company (the insured). The reinsurer helps the insured deal with expensive risks where the value of property at risk is greater than its resources on hand.

Reinsurance was originally conceived after fire devastated Hamburg, Germany, in 1842. Insurance reserves were inadequate, and four years later Cologne Re, the first reinsurer, gave property insurers a second party to transfer risks to. The destruction in pre-reinsurance Hamburg ultimately required 40 years to rebuild from.

More recently, Hurricane Andrew wrecked Florida coast during August 1992, causing damage then estimated at over $26 billion. According to The New York Times, eleven insurance companies went bankrupt.

Soon after Andrew new financial instruments called catastrophe bonds were invented to transfer large, rare, catastrophic risks to publicly traded markets, instead of just reinsurance companies. “They’re a way to expand the number of reinsurers that provide protection to American Family,” explains Gisi.

Last year American Family sponsored a company that issued two cat bond series linked to tornadoes and hail in the Midwest. Standard practice is to have an offshore shell company created for the sole purpose of creating the bond and providing reinsurance. “Those cat bonds were actually issued by a company in the Cayman Islands named Mariah Re,” says Gisi.

“The reinsurance premiums that we pay to Mariah Re are used to provide the investors their investment income,” says Gisi.

Recent severe tornadoes have made those bonds particularly volatile investments. “There’s been an increase in trading activity on those notes because of real concerns arising from Alabama-Mississippi tornadoes that happened on April 27,” says John DeCaro, the Chicago investor.

The price fluctuations have no bearing on American Family. Once bonds are issued, the initial bond holders put up cash that goes in to an account that collateralizes the reinsurance obligation to American Family, says Gisi, and from that point forward, regardless of investor volatility, “our cost of financing that risk doesn’t matter.”

It does matter to DeCaro, whose firm has invested in the bonds. He’s monitoring NOAA’s weather reports out of Norman, OK., to determine where tornadoes are going to occur, and how intense they are.

“We find a way to track and determine what the potential impact will be on our bond positions when a tornado happens,” says DeCaro, whose firm’s positions are based on an interpretation of facts as it sees them.

Compared with another trader’s perspective “that leads to a difference of opinion in terms of the valuation of an investment that we can take advantage of”, says DeCaro.

The differences of opinion trace back to the catastrophic risk models, and to real-time specialty data services that the firms use.

Mariah Re priced the bonds using a severe thunderstorm risk model from AIR, the Boston-based firm formerly know Applied Insurance Research that pioneered catastrophic risk management beginning in 1987.

The other major provider of catastrophic risk management models is RMS, based in Newark, CA. RMS recently changed its risk model for Atlantic Ocean hurricanes, something that prompted the downgrading of a number of already-issued catastrophe bonds.

Elementum relies on those risk management models, plus data provided by weather information boutiques like Planalytics, based outside Philadelphia, and ImpactWeather, located in Houston.

The Mariah Re bonds “have dropped probably 3 points on average in the past month,” says DeCaro. “Fortunately, for us as an investor, they were not materially exposed to any of the events that have occurred in the Southern states.”

That price change doesn’t affect the security of American Family policy holders, though it could make Gisi’s job harder, “Adding volatility means that if I want to put one out this year, it might change the price that I may issue a new one at,” something that could increase the cost of disaster insurance to property owners.

Looking inside the budget, there is a miniscule amount available for state and local government to take preventive disaster mitigation measures for their critical infrastructure. Those mitigation steps are intended to make sure buildings are structurally sound in advance of a disaster event.

Surprisingly, money does become available for mitigation once a disaster event occurs, according to Brock Long, an emergency management consultant with Hagerty Consulting, based in Evanston, Ill.

Sections of the budget targeting infrastructure protection include an $840 million joint program for Infrastructure Protection and Information Security, cut back from $859 million last year.

A $50 million Predisaster Mitigation Fund, just $1 million per state, is down from $100 million in 2010.

The funds are offset by a significant increase in the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund. Disaster relief gets $2.65 billion for 2011, a $1.05 billion increase from 2010.

The Federal funding pattern reflects a shift in how emergency managers do mitigation projects, from predisaster mitigation to postdisaster mitigation.

According to Long, local government gets greater access to mitigation funding through FEMA after a disaster in a Presidential declaration than they possibly can before a disaster.

“The predisaster mitigation program is a drop in the bucket compared to the postdisaster mitigation funding,” says Long who until last year was the Director of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.

Irrational policy leads to irrational emergency management, according to Seth Stein, a Northwestern University earthquake geologist. Stein’s 2010 book “Disaster Deferred” focuses on government policy related to disaster preparedness for an earthquake on the New Madrid Seismic Zone that spans eight Midwestern states – Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois.

“If you’re an emergency management agency how do you keep yourself funded when most years you don’t have a disaster? You could spend your time preparing rationally for disasters,” said Stein, “but that’s nowhere near as exciting” as focusing preparedness on disaster response.

“Exciting” is a function of the media spotlight that comes with a disaster event.

The media judge an emergency manager’s success or failure. 90 percent of an emergency manager’s assessment is rendered in the first 72 hours after a disaster, according to Long, “based on how well they were able to get water, ice and MREs out to the public and in front of cameras.”

Even if more money was available from Federal sources for mitigation projects, as long as it requires a local match then mitigation projects won’t be undertaken “even though there are plenty of them to do,” according to Long.

Again it’s the media playing a role. Its spotlight doesn’t account for mitigation. “How many times have you seen CNN or Fox News go in after a disaster and show buildings that were mitigated pre-event versus post-event?,” Long wonders rhetorically. “They never do. It’s not an exciting story.”

It’s true. “We are going to be assigned to go where the buildings fall down,” says Cheryl Jackson, a freelance CNN reporter and an adjunct instructor at Medill School of Journalism. “I can’t see any reporter doing a live shot in front of a building that survived a disaster.”

The Midwestern U.S. is, like California, prone to earthquakes, specifically around the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ). What are the earthquake risks to public school buildings in the eight-state region?

The zone, whose epicenter is New Madrid, Mo., includes Memphis, Tenn., St. Louis, and parts of the states of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi.

A recent study appraised the condition of public buildings, including schools in the NMSZ.

The October 2009 report by the Mid-America Earthquake Center at the University of Illinois is of a simulated magnitude 7.7 NMSZ earthquake, technically a rupture along the full lengths of all three of the New Madrid faults.

The report estimated that out of 20,291 schools in the region, 1322 would have major structural damage and 277 would be destroyed.

While the report offers numbers there are questions about the real degree of risk.

In California the Field Act has been in place since 1933. It was passed after a magnitude 6.3 Long Beach earthquake severely damaged an estimated 75% of southern Los Angeles school buildings.

The Field Act requires “that schools be built to a higher standard than regular buildings,” according to Mary Lou Zoback, an earthquake risk analyst with the Newark, Calif., firm Risk Management Solutions.

The schools that fared poorly in the 1933 earthquake were brick schoolhouses like the first U.S. schoolhouses built in quake-less New England.

Child deaths were averted in the Long Beach quake only because the March 10 temblor took place at 2 o’clock in the morning.

“Many schools in the Midwest are brick,” Zoback believes. Brick is unreinforced masonry that gives easily when the ground shakes. Unreinforced masonry is banned for public works projects in California cities.

Of the NMSZ states, only Arkansas has special seismic construction codes for its public buildings.

In January 2008, Arkansas considered adding additional earthquake safety provision to public building codes, upping the codes to California-levels, something FEMA recommends.

The Arkansas codes were not changed when the business community objected to the expense it would require, according to Seth Stein, a Northwestern professor of seismology,

Stein wrote the 2010 book, Disaster Deferred: How New Science is Changing our View of Earthquake Hazards in the Midwest, and he feels the NMSZ risks are overstated. Quakes occur frequently in the Midwest, mostly in the NMSZ, but there is little reason for concern, Stein believes.

The magnitude 2.5 earthquake that occurred 60 miles south of St. Louis in northern Arkansas in January 2011, was, according to Stein, a distant aftershock of the magnitude 7.0 New Madrid earthquake that occurred in 1811.

His research shows that very little energy is currently stored in the fault system and there is practically no imminent danger to the region.

Floods and tornadoes are far more dangerous to population centers in the region, Stein said, and FEMA wants states to build to 100-year flood levels and to 2500-year earthquake levels, at exorbitant cost.

The return on public investment for earthquake retrofits are minimal, Stein feels, asking rhetorically, “Would you rather put steel in your building or would you rather hire teachers?”

Matthew Hochstein, emergency management expert at Hagerty Consulting

An estimated 3 million people participated in The Great Central U.S. ShakeOut last Thursday, an exercise encouraging citizens to “drop, cover and hold on” in a simulated major earthquake drill.

Drop, cover and hold on is the recommended action to take when you feel the ground shake significantly beneath you. Drop means to go to the ground yourself, before the shaking has a chance to knock you down. Cover means to seek shelter and get underneath something sturdy, like a table. Hold on means you should grab ahold of your shelter until the shaking stops.

2.8 million Americans in eleven states considered in the New Madrid Seismic Zone– Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois – registered to participate at shakeout.org. Indiana participants did their drill on April 19.

In 1811 and 1812 the New Madrid region experienced a series of magnitude-7 quakes. The most recent major quake in the region was a 4.7-magnitude earthquake in Greenbrier, Ark., a small town north of Little Rock.

The central U.S. ShakeOut is organized and coordinated by the Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Geological Survey and dozens of other partners.

Hagerty Consulting, an Evanston Il., consulting firm, specializes in emergency management and preparedness. It assisted FEMA on operational plans for a New Madrid earthquake similar to what will be drilled for in the Great ShakeOut, and is an active partner to many federal, state and local emergency management agencies.

In anticipation of the exercise, SecurityZone spoke with Hagerty consultants, Brock Long, former emergency management director for the State of Alabama, and Matthew Hochstein, currently Hagerty’s Project Manager on the firm’s FEMA disaster readiness engagement.

The two discussed the benefits of having exercises like the Great ShakeOut, and how emergency management works in the context of today’s government.

SecurityZone: The Great Central U.S. Shakeout is coming up. What’s been Hagerty Consulting’s role?

Hochstein: We recently completed for FEMA the planning for the New Madrid Seismic Zone earthquake scenario, a similar scenario to the national exercise that will occur in May (May 16-20). The Great ShakeOut sits in between the drafting of NMSZ plans and the national exercise. It’s a way to continue to build up public knowledge of the threat, and increase overall public preparedness.

[The National Level Exercise (NLE2011) is a White House-directed, Congressionally-mandated exercise in preparation for a national catastrophic event in the NMSZ. It includes the participation of all appropriate federal department and agency senior officials, and goes far beyond the earthquake drills taking place during the ShakeOut.]

To properly exercise anything you need to have a plan in place first. … That includes logistics. That includes sheltering. All the major operational activities that would take place — search and rescue, communications — what is actually going to occur at the county level, the state level, the FEMA regional level, and then ultimately FEMA headquarters and other Federal and private sector partners.

Long: [Earthquake exercises] made us look at our own capabilities and where shortfalls are for an event of that magnitude. It helped states to have more interaction with the federal government emergency-support function (ESF) partners to really understand their capability.

The concern is that when you’re servicing eight states [in the Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium] that could be impacted, from the federal government standpoint, what’s the priority? How do you prioritize where resources go?

We were able to sit down with these ESF partners to understand their capabilities, learn what they think will be available. It also provided us exposure of resources we may not have been aware of.

SecurityZone: Is that Hagerty’s role in preparing for large-scale disasters, to be a middleman between the states and the Federal government?

Hochstein: In March 2010 FEMA released a regional planning guide [for catastrophes, including earthquakes]. It provides a 5-step process on how to do operational planning and how to get it from the startup phase, essentially a kickoff meeting, all the way to a completed exercise.

The role of someone like Hagerty, or any other consulting firm is to help facilitate that process. One of the main parts is to form courses of action, or, how you’re going to address a shortfall operationally, like what’s the strategy going to be to help address the fact that you don’t have enough urban search and rescue teams?

Long: As a former director, a lot of these states do not have the staffing resources to be able to coordinate, write the plans, do something of this magnitude.

The economy really started impacting state emergency management agencies three years ago. It doesn’t allow you to hire when you lose positions due to attrition. So many of the states are operating on reduced staff, and staff have to multi-task.

For example, we have an earthquake program manager in Alabama who also runs the hurricane program. We just didn’t have the dedicated staff members to be able to pull together separate programs.

The consulting arena provides experienced professionals that have been there who can help pull this together. The state level of government doesn’t have the ability to do it to that large an extent.

SecurityZone: Competition for government funding is intense, how do you convince decision-makers that disaster preparedness and mitigation is a priority?

Long: Prioritizing resources is a tough job. For an event of this magnitude it’s very complicated because you’re dealing with not just multiple states, but multiple regions. For example, the water, ice and MREs (meals ready-to-eat) in the first 72 hours is probably the first and most important thing next to search and rescue teams.

Search and rescue teams and live-saving commodities are the most important resources you’re going to need in the first 72 hours. These are not infinite resources. There are only certain contractors that can actually bring in the bottled water.

The role of FEMA at the Federal level is trying to provide a 50,000-foot view of, “Here’s the true situation for each of the areas that are hardest hit. We need to prioritize all resources and equipment there first, get search and rescue teams there. And work you’re way out to areas that were not as heavily impacted.”

Hochstein: [With New Madrid earthquake planning] Hagerty was helping FEMA and the states manage, this is not an exaggeration, a stakeholder group that is probably in excess of 2000 people that are directly impacted by the earthquake.

States requested a real insight as to how FEMA was going to pre-designate the national Federal-level assets in an event, so that [states] could figure out, “I know I have X coming from the Federal-level then I can figure out the delta between X and known requirement through some type of strategy.”

Hagerty helped the states voice that concern with the help of the Planning Division program office at FEMA headquarters. Eventually we were successful in getting FEMA to pre-designate what those Federal assets were going to be.

Once that occurred, the state leaders and FEMA and all of the national agency leaders came together for a two-day workshop to discuss how their resource allocation would work in the event. They would never have gotten to that point if the concern from the states wasn’t bubbled up to FEMA headquarters.

Brock: Ultimately though, this country’s got to do more to build a preparedness culture. Basically the first 72-hours after a disaster are really on citizens. Help is going to come. The Federal government is going to come. The states are going to do what they can but it’s not going to be immediate, you know, in an event that large.

I feel sometimes, in the emergency management community, we fail to be that blunt with citizens and say, “Guys, you have to do your part.” We need to stop looking at citizens as victims and start empowering them to be somewhat self-sufficient. Be your own hero.

Protect your house. Be adequately insured. Make sure you’ve got supplies to handle your family for the first 72 hours.

That’s just something we have to take a hard look at. Are our national “be ready” campaigns really working? And how do we get funding and preparedness messages down to the local level into their hands so that they can tailor messages and deal with the communities they live and work in every day.

Stovepipe messages from the Federal government on down, they are not effective, in my opinion.

SecurityZone: Are there mitigation benefits that come out of a public event like the upcoming Great Shakeout?

Brock: The bottom-line about the mitigation program, there are different pots of money that are provided to do mitigation. There’s structural mitigation and non-structural mitigation.

Structural mitigation, money to keep buildings from collapsing in the pre-disaster arena is not great. If you divided the PDM funding, pre-disaster mitigation money that was made available to emergency management at the state level, and divided it up among the 50 states you’re maybe looking at $2 million per state.

SecurityZone: It’s been cut even more in the current appropriation.

Brock: Are you going to take $2 million and make a realistic dent in mitigating an area? I’d argue that you can’t, because mitigation has to be a culture. You’ve got to get everyone mitigating their facility, their communities.

In a state like Alabama that gets hit a lot – we have a lot of Federal disaster declarations – a large portion of PDM funding becomes available to us. The problem is that mitigation becomes more of a recovery, reactionary program.

Once everything’s been blown out and wiped off the map, now we go in and rebuild and mitigate.

We’re still living in a very reactive society even though mitigation’s intent is to build resilient communities. We have to take a hard look at how that money is structured, and putting more money out there to doing structure retrofits, getting legislation passed so that when you build a new school it has to have a tornado-safe room that can handle the building occupants. Making sure that we’re building smartly in these earthquake fault zones that we know exist.

The converse is that, you know, it increases the cost of building and the cost of doing business. Right now we’re in an economy where everybody is pinching pennies to an extreme. It’s a difficult situation.

John Norquist, President of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a Chicago group that promotes walkable, mixed-use, sustainable communities.

A siren wails and the question looms, will the ambulance, fire engine or police car get where it needs to in time?

The answer depends on the design of the town or city.

“You could either have this suburban kind of street network or you could have the street grid,” said Jacky Grimshaw, an urban transportation analyst at the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) in Chicago, standing in front of two maps side by side for effective comparison.

“And the same amount of distance takes you longer if you have to go around here,” she said, pointing to the giant artery road whose handful of offshoots fed the winding branches of suburban cul de sac development. “If you’re having a heart attack and you want the ambulance there in a hurry, if it has to go through all of these streets to get to you, you’re dead.”

“Who should be responsible for this,” asks John Norquist, President of the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU), referring to the infrastructure cost of building suburban sprawl, and the cost of providing fire service to it.

Norquist was the mayor of Milwaukee from 1988-2004, a period when the city experienced an urban renaissance.

“If you have a street grid you can service lots of people, lots of houses with a certain amount of fire service,” Norquist said, “but if everyone lives in a cul de sac then you need three or four times as many fire personnel to be able to service them at the same level.”

According to CNU, a study in Charlotte, North Carolina, indicating the per capita costs for fire service increased from $159 in the portion of the city with the best-connected street grid network to $740 in the least connected zone.

Grimshaw and Norquist both participated in a discussion on “Rethinking our Cities” as part of the Northwestern University Summit on Sustainability that took place in early April. The two made the point that infrastructure, specifically roads, are not something that necessarily needs protection, as much as they need to function effectively to protect citizens.

In 2010, both the CNT and CNU collaborated with the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the main standards body for road designers, to create a design manual for urban thoroughfares.

“It’s available for free download at ite.org,” said Norquist. “It gives communities the option of building smaller-scale streets, of building grids of streets instead of giant roads.” (Details at http://www.ite.org/css/ )

When asked how things might improve Norquist pointed out that roughly half of the built-environment will be transformed in the next 30 years and “about half of the housing will be new in some form.” Building it on a more urban pattern than it is now will lead all sorts of gains in efficiency, like improved public safety and, also important, reduced energy consumption.

CNU is also leading an effort to narrow suburban streets. A study in Longmont, Colorado by Swift-Painter-Goldstein, a transportation planning consultancy, indicated a 485 percent increase in accident rates per mile when streets are widened from 24 to 36 feet.

Narrow streets encourage walking and slower traffic speeds, making the overall environment safer for walkers, bikers and drivers alike. And with a well-designed grid street network, alternative routes for emergency response vehicle are available and accessible.

Congestion, the bane of traffic engineers for decades, is okay it turns out. “If you’re a business-person on Main Street you really like congestion,” says Grimshaw. People are looking into store windows. “They are shopping even though they may be moving through the neighborhood.”