Hospitals across the New York region spent the morning of September 11, 2001 preparing for a casualty load that mostly did not arrive. Emergency departments near the World Trade Center took a rush of ambulatory patients in the first two or three hours and then saw the flow stop, because [...]
Most exercises I have sat through were built to be survived rather than to teach anybody anything, and the tell is always the same: the scenario was written after somebody picked the date, the objectives were written after the scenario, and the after action report listed communications as a... [...]
On the evening of October 8, 1871, fire swept through Peshtigo, Wisconsin and the farm settlements around it, killing more people than any other fire in American history. The same night, and driven by the same weather, Chicago burned. Chicago got the correspondents, the relief money, the... [...]
On March 18, 1925, a tornado track crossed Missouri, Illinois and Indiana and killed roughly 695 people, which remains the highest toll from a single tornado in United States history. No warning reached anyone ahead of it, in part because the Weather Bureau was not permitted to use the word... [...]
Hospital surge planning gets reduced to a bed count more often than any other part of emergency management, and the bed count is the least useful number in the building. This piece covers the staff, stuff and space framework and why staff binds first, how the conventional, contingency and crisis... [...]
A tsunami warning system is a chain that starts with a seismometer and ends with a person on a beach deciding whether to walk uphill, and the weakest link is almost never the detection end. This piece covers how the warning centers work out that a wave exists and how [...]
An evacuation order is a sentence, and everything that has to happen after it is said is a transportation operation with a fixed road network, a finite fleet, a fuel supply sized for ordinary Tuesdays, and a population that does not all own cars. This piece covers where clearance time [...]
When a storm takes the lights out across a county, the emergency operations center becomes the place people call after the utility's line goes busy, and almost everything those callers want is a date. This piece covers how an electric utility actually sequences restoration, why a hospital... [...]
Almost every fire department, EMS agency and police department in the United States has something on a wall about mental health, and a large share of them have very little behind it. This piece deals with the parts that decide whether a behavioral health program works at all: exposure that... [...]
A disaster declaration is a chain of documents moving upward through local government, the state, a federal regional office and finally the President, and every link in that chain has a different signer acting under a different legal authority, which is where most of the confusion starts. This... [...]
