Recommended reading: lessons (yet to be) learned

admin » 11 June 2007 » In Gear, Recommended reading, procurement »

This essay, “Prepare for Disaster,” by Tom LaTourrette and Ed Chan of the RAND Corporation, was written in 2005 following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But it could have been written yesterday or ten years ago. Weighing in at 812 words, it’s a concise statement of a reasonable framework for discussing disaster planning and response. With Stuart Brand’s account of the San Francisco earthquake, this essay would be an ideal starting point.

Reducing risk entails long-term investment in planning, prevention, and protection. Emergency response is the last resort and should never be relied on as a primary strategy for preventing disasters.

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As with local response, there is a point beyond which the cost of maintaining standby resources exceeds their benefit. Although it is not clear where this point is, if we accept that this point exists we need to look to alternative approaches. The better prepared a community is to deal with a disaster, the lower the emergency response needs.

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… advances in prediction and diligent response planning can help facilitate evacuations, get people into shelters and protect valuable infrastructure.

Here’s a link to LaTourrette’s short bio, and a list of some of his publications. (The bio doesn’t say whether he’s a descendant of the French physician Gilles de la Tourette, for whom “Tourette’s Syndrome” is named). Tourrette is the lead author in the study Protecting emergency responders : community views of safety and health risks and personal protection needs, available as pdf file here.

We’d be very happy if RAND extended this research to gear for the persistently underfunded community-based first responder and recovery groups; we suspect there’s not a lot of appetite among government research funders to ask those questions, let alone answer them.

Chan’s similarly short bio doesn’t appear on the RAND site. Perhaps there’s an internal protocal here about who rates a bio; publications here. We’re current reading a piece on which he’s co-author discussing the CDC Strategic National Stockpile.

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