Disaster Preparedness and Management

The December 26th, 2004 quake, and the tsunami that soon followed, killed 60,000 people at today's count.

In this journal I hope to record my thoughts on how to analyze disasters and disaster response. This log won't be very personal, and will be fairly dry and factual in tone. It's a serious subject. (Although I may review the occasional disaster movie.)

Most coverage of disasters focuses on body counts and blame, with occasional human interest stories to bring things into perspective. These aspects are very important, but not what I want to look at.

It's seemed to me that there are places for mitigation in any disaster scenario, starting long before the actual event occurs, and ending long afterward. Here are a few points:

1. Risk identification-- did the authorities (or other people in a position to be effective) realize the possibility of this event? Did they correctly estimate its likelihood of happening, and its potential magnitude?
   
2. Preparation-- did authorities have workable plans in place? Were people trained in executing them?
   
3. Event recognition-- how quickly after the beginning of the disaster did someone realize what was happening? How soon did that information get to people who could do something about it?
4. Immediate response-- how quickly did the authorities take action to reduce how much harm would take place? How coordinated was the response?
   
5. Secondary response-- did authorities take action against problems stemming from the initial damage? For example, in the tsunami, we expect to lose an additional 60,000 lives from disease, water contamination, and malnutrition.
   
6. Long-term rebuilding-- how well did authorities address psychological, environmental, and economic problems?
7. Improvement-- Did authorities learn from their mistakes?

I'll analyze how well the local governments and international community do as news comes in. In the meantime, someone's already started a blog specifically about the tsunami, which gives addresses and instructions on how to help.