David Rubens Associates

My sincere thanks to Vice President William Blake and all at ICPEM (Institute for Civil Protection and Emergency Management ) for inviting me to be the after-dinner speaker at the Dinner to mark their AGM on Wednesday 15th May.

Vice President Tony Moore gave an inspiring and moving speech about Eric Alley OBE, President Emeritus of the Institute, who was not only a veteran of the Arctic Convoys in World War 2, but has been involved in civil protection and emergency management since 1949. Eric was involved in the development of many of the organisations and industry frameworks that we now accept as a natural part of the emergency management landscape. It was especially poignant as the Institute announced Eric’s passing two days later on 17th May (More details here)

The dinner was excellent, the company was distinguished, and the conversation in the bar afterwards – well, actually, I can’t remember too many details about that, but I do remember that the insights were impressive and the wit was sparkling.

You can find more details on ICPEM at www.icpem.net

The picture that changes Risk Management for ever….

If there has been an overriding theme within Risk Management over the last thirty years, at least on the larger perspective, it has been the move away from the idea of RM as a protective and preventative role (which is still the objective of classical security management), and on to an understanding that the threats that we are dealing with are becoming less susceptible to interventionist control (think global warming, technological breakdown or mass pandemics), and are therefore becoming more an issue of post-incident response and consequence management. The truth is that the global matrix has become so complex that we can no longer claim to be managing or directing it.

This itself is a direct result of the growing interdependencies on which our global infrastructure is based, whether it is supply-chain management, the delivery of basic life-management requirements (water, power, fuel, information), or the tightly-bounded High Reliability systems that are at the heart of our critical national infrastructure. If the basis of security management is ‘define your territory, and then protect it’, how do we do that for risk management in a world where there are no boundaries, and many of the problems that we are dealing with exist only in cyberspace and have no physical presence (such as data within banking IT systems, which are crashing on an increasingly frequent basis).

The need for Risk Management methodologies to develop the capability to model and manage these non-traditional problems was originally identified by Rittel and Webber in their ground-breaking work ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’ (1973), and those ideas have been developed by Patrick Lagadec in works such as ‘Crisis Management in the 21st Century: ‘Unthinkable’ Events in ‘Inconceivable’ Contexts’ (2005) and ‘Unconventional Crises, Unconventional Responses: Reforming Leadership in the Age of Catastrophic Crises and “Hypercomplexity”’ (2008). And yet, the truth is, that as soon as our RM methodologies are tested by problems which are outside of our immediate experience (what might be called ‘Routine Emergencies’), they almost inevitably fail to respond to the new challenges that those problems pose.

The picture at the top of this post is very pretty, and you may well have identified it as the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights), that are caused by the suns solar flares interacting with the earth’s electromagnetic field, which is concentrated around the polar regions (typically at latitudes of 10-20 degrees from the magnetic poles). These lights have been observed with wonder throughout history, and have often been seen to hold messages from the gods. What is notable about this particular picture is that it wasn’t taken at some polar outpost, but in Yorkshire, at a latitude of 53 degrees. This is the result of a major solar storm, something over which we have absolutely no control, and which is likely to have a significant impact on our satellite communications systems. It is widely believed that the power-out in Toronto in 1989 was a direct result of solar flares, and given the increasing global dependence on satellite communications systems for every aspects of our lives, the question has to be asked – what are the plans to deal with the impact and consequences of a major solar storm, something that is at the extreme corner of the High Likelihood / High Impact matrix.

Risk Management, at its most fundamental level, is based on a rationalist view of the world, in that we believe that by using the right tools we can create a cause-and-effect pathway that allows us to influence and control the wider environment within which we live and operate. We have started to understand that the forces that we are dealing with on a planetary scale, whether climate change, rising sea levels or the changing weather patterns, are outside our control. But what can we do when the forces that will have the greatest impact on our lives are operating on a much, much larger scale, and are something for which our RM toolboxes have no solution?

We may not be in a position to do much about it on a global scale, but if you are responsible for the security or risk management of your operation, the impact of a solar storm that is taking place on a star 150 million kilometres away is something that should really be high on your agenda.

The news that UK processed food being sold as ’100% beef’ was in fact adulterated with horse meat – and in some cases, was made up entirely of horse meat – is just one more blow for those of us who are trying to maintain some semblance of belief in the qualities of fair play – or even basic honest practice – in the world around us. My main feeling is not surprise that this has happened. If we insist on having the cheapest possible goods at our fingertips, whether it is school uniforms for £7 a piece, 20 beef burgers for a pound or mobile phones that are so cheap that they are basically being given away for free – then it is hardly going to be a shock when the people who are suffering for that are not those who make the final sale of the finished article, but those who are squeezed as part of the supply chain.
Not only is it the complexity of supply chains that gives a clue as to the underlying nature of the system – I have written may times that as soon as a management system seems to be over-complex, it is a pretty sure sign that someone somewhere is already planning to avoid responsibility – but it is the additional layers of profit taking that need to be factored in.

Supermarkets in the UK buy the products for a supplier in France (who uses the same material to make products for a range of different supermarkets and producers, all selling them under their own labels); the French supplier contracted that out to a subsidiary in Luxembourg, who ordered the meat from another French supplier, who in turn sourced it from a Cypriot trader, who contacted a Dutch trader, who placed an order for the meat with a Romanian abattoir. Given that every single one of those people would have made their profit on the transaction, one must ask why didn’t someone somewhere have the bright idea of shortening the supply chain, cutting out entirely unnecessary middlemen (who, it musty remembered, don’t actually do anything – they just pick up the phone and pass on the order!), and therefore both increase their profit and their control of the system.

However, as I said, it is not this aspect of the story that has surprised me. Large organisations are both rapacious by nature and, to a large extent, stupid (because it doesn’t actually matter to the people within those organisations as to how efficient they are). What gets me is the surprise at the Food Standards Agency that this could have possibly been going on, under their noses. So my question is, what the hell have the FSA been doing for the last ten years when prices have been forced well below what could be called in any sense of the words ‘market rates’, and it is clear that someone, somewhere down the line, is going to have to be cutting corners. It is exactly the same as high-street shopping giants who sell T-shirts for a couple of pounds, and then express surprise that the people who actually make the goods in some sub-contracted work unit in a backstreet sweatshop in an unregulated factory in China are not enjoying the same working conditions and social frameworks as would be required in western Europe or North America.

Once again, large corporations have done exactly what we would have expected of them – broken any concept of the ‘social contract’ between supplier and customer, and it is the regulators who have been equally, if not more guilty for not fulfilling their responsibility of using their powers to ensure that we, the product-buying and service-using public, are kept safe.
You can see my thoughts on why regulators fail here, (this was the most read article on the www.infologue.com site in 2012), and you can read my more prosaic take on the general breakdown in the informal trust networks that are supposed to underpin the social frameworks within we live, here.

Committee Room 15 in the House of Commons yesterday was the scene of what could possibly be the worst performance by a major corporate figure in front of a House of Commons Select Committee in recent years – and given that this follows on a tradition that has seen Bob Diamond, James Murdoch, Paul Tucker (Bank of England Deputy) and Tony Hayward (BP) give performances that have immediately resulted in the loss of hundreds of millions of pounds from their companies share prices, personal resignation or the loss of their own prospects of future advancement, that is saying something.

Having the luck to be in Committee Room 15 at the time (I make a brief appearance on Sky News! – sitting behind Ian Horseman-Sewell at 13 secs and 1:30), I can assure you that G4S Chairman Nick Buckles came across even worse in real life than he did on TV highlights. If it had been a fight, not only would the referee have stopped it in the first round, but he would have fined Buckles his fight money for being under-prepared.

So, where to start…

Buckles’ Performance
Firstly, given the clear and total fiasco that the G4S operation had undoubtedly become, you would have thought that Nick and his team of senior advisers would have arrived to the hearing with a well-thought out strategy to apologise profusely, explain what had happened, and then move onto the front foot by setting out exactly what steps they would be taking to fix the problem, as well as doing some reputational defensive work by explaining how they would be covering the costs of the police, military and other people involved in saving their bacon. What immediately became clear, however, was that Buckles was unprepared and badly briefed by his own people. He repeatedly responded to committee members’ questions with ‘I don’t know’, using a low and mournful voice as used by a schoolboy trying to explain why he hadn’t done his homework . He even answered ‘I don’t know’ when asked by Committee Chairman Keith Vaz (a well-known committee rottweiler, and not a man who is likely to shy away from the possibility of making a headline or two himself), ‘How much is your management fee?’. The Chairman of the largest security company in the world, called before a House of Commons Committee to explain the complete failure of his company to provide security cover for the biggest event to happen in this country in sixty years – and the answer is ‘I don’t know how much we are being paid’….. ?!

It was also clear that he didn’t know how many people G4S would actually be able to provide, how many people the military would need to provide, or when he would be able to tell the authorities how great the shortfall would be. You could see the members of the Committee, as well as the few observers (the room itself is quite small, and limited to 12 members of the public and a few spaces for journalists) growing increasingly unimpressed as Buckles seemed to be making up policy (and expensive decisions) as he went along. When asked whether G4S would cover the cost of the police operations, he answered with some confidence ‘Yes, absolutely’. This was obviously a question that he had prepared for. When he was then asked whether he would cover the cost of the military personnel, he hesitated, and then again came out with ‘Yes’. When he was asked whether that would include the cost of accommodation of the military and police, he was clearly nonplussed, but eventually came out with a further ‘Yes’. It was at this point that Vaz claimed that Buckles seemed to be making it up as he went along, and you could hear city shareholders drawing in their breath as Buckles made a public commitment to an open-ended cost that could clearly cost his company further tens of millions of pounds. After all, replacing barely-trained part-time security personnel at £8.50 an hour with experienced police officers (and their senior commanders) is obviously going to involve a completely different business model and pricing structure.

Implications for G4S
The figure that was being bandied around yesterday was £30-50m losses for G4S. There was even a disagreement as to how significant this was, with Vaz stating that the problem was that this was not a significant sum for a global company with revenues of over £7.5 billion, and Buckles claiming that it was a ‘massive’ sum, 10% of annual profit. However, given Buckles’ new commitments to reimbursing the military and police, it is likely that those numbers could grow, and that is before the matter of G4S’s management fee is discussed. It grew gasps of shock, and faces of incredulity from the committee members, when Buckles stated that he saw no reason to forego any of the management fee, as G4S had already put two years of management and planning into the operation and would be providing at least some of the personnel. Vaz said that, given the fiasco that the project had become, and the damage it had created to the reputation of UK as a whole, surely G4S would have to make the public gesture of giving up the fee, but Buckles was not prepared to accept that. For a man who stated in his opening sentence that his primary concern was to protect and restore the reputation of his company, he didn’t seem to realise how bad he was making both himself and his company look.

Up until yesterday, G4S had lost 14% of their share price (translating to a money loss of £700m), but that was followed by a further 9% fall following Buckles appearance in front of the committee. Although there have not been any serious calls for his resignation yet, if he becomes ‘the face of G4S’ then there will undoubtedly be questions about his future from major city investors – and Tony Hayward, James Murdoch and Bob Diamond would undoubtedly be able to give him some advice on how that situation can develop.

Buckles announced that G4S have withdrawn from the bidding process to supply security to the Brazilian World Cup (2014) and Rio Olympics (2016), though that will have little effect on their current commercial position. What is much more significant is their exposure to UK government contracts. Over 50% of the roughly £1bn that G4S turns over in UK comes directly from government contracts, and G4S has been at the forefront of pushing for an increased slice of the privatisation of many of the policing services that have traditionally been provided by the police and other Home Office agencies (such as prisons, prisoner transfers, escorting deported immigrants, etc). Their case will not have been helped by the fact that they have just been through a high-profile inquest into the death of an Angolan refugee who died after being restrained by three G4S guards on a plane waiting to take off from Heathrow. Although the official reports put out by both G4S and the Home Office initially stated that Jimmy Mubenga had ‘been taken ill’, it later came out that he had been restrained in a bent-over position in his seat, putting extreme pressure on his diaphragm and ability to breathe. The three guards responsible for escorting him were arrested on grounds of suspected manslaughter, though they have now been told that they will not be charged. G4S insiders then told the same Home Affairs Committee that staff had continuously warned management about the use of restraint methods that could lead to death, and that the director of public prosecutions had asked that Crown Prosecution Service to write to G4S, the UK Border Agency and the National Offenders Management Service (all of whom were involved in the deportation of refugees and failed asylum seekers), raising concerns about the restraint methods and potential use of lethal force.
This was then followed, also today, by news that G4S is facing a new investigation after a prisoner was found collapsed in a police cell after the required checks (by a G4S civilian contractor) were not made. It could be said that given the scale of G4S’s operations in the private contract sector, it is inevitable that there will be isolated incidents somewhere within the system, but much like a shark frenzy, once blood has been tasted, it is hard to see the seal pup surviving….

Given that G4S has high-profile contracts / high-value across the UK policing sector, including managing 12,000 offenders under the tagging monitoring programme, running pre-deployment training for the British troops before they are shipped out to Afghanistan (a contract that they won, ironically, in order to prevent these training programmes becoming ‘a major drain on military resources’) and supplying specialist civilians to police agencies on a contract basis, it is likely that the issue of outsourcing in general, and the use of G4S in particular, will be high on the agenda of many local police authorities.

Next Steps…
Despite the fact that Buckles claimed that he had no interest at this stage in his own personal future, it is clear that he is likely to become a highly public sacrificial lamb, though whether that is enough to save G4S, or at least allow them to cut their losses to a manageable degree, is something that we will need to wait and see.

As a global operation, G4S will undoubtedly be able to take the blows that will be coming, carry on with the bulk of the rest of their operations overseas, and write this off as a fiasco that will be half forgotten in six months, or when the next big scandal comes along. (And they will undoubtedly have felt a lot better after reading the headlines over their morning coffee about HSBC being the money-launderer of choice for drug cartels, international terrorist organisations and dictators everywhere. That is undoubtedly a much bigger issue from a strategic global perspective).

If Nick Buckles was Japanese, he could well be sitting right now on the thirtieth floor of a five star hotel, bottle of whisky half drunk, and the window to the balcony already open, waiting for him to do the honourable thing. However, as a UK businessman responsible for damaging the reputation of a global company, wiping billions of pounds off his shareholders value, and bringing shame on to UK plc in general, he will undoubtedly be looking at Tony Hayward, the man who took BP close to destruction over the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill, and who is now CEO of Genel energy company on a reported annual package of £2.8m, and Stephen Hester, who managed to keep his position at RBS despite receiving massive levels of criticism over his £1.2m bonus at a time when he had laid off 21,000 people, and was for all intents and purposes a civil servant, running a government owned-bank.

There was something about Buckles’ performance yesterday that was deeply unsettling. As Chairman Vaz summarised, it was ‘Unacceptable. Incompetent. Amateurish.’. To see the head of one of the few UK institutions that can claim to be a global player looking as weak, unprepared and clearly out of his depth as Buckles was made you question pretty well everything you ever thought about UK plc. Buckles’ future is probably going to be decided on the basis of two or three things, all outside his control. Firstly, will the Olympics manage to go off OK, even if based on high levels of police and military involvement. Secondly, will there be something else taking over the headlines (such as HSBC), which will mean that by the end of the Paralympics, this hearing could be seen as ancient history. And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, will his institutional shareholders decide that he is a liability, and throw him to the wolves in the hope that that will give them time to rebuild the commercial and government bridges that bring them so much revenue. For those amongst you who trust the bookies to get this right more than the politicians, William Hill are offering 6/4 that Mr Buckles is no longer G4S chief-executive by the time of the Olympics closing ceremony.

Sometimes, it is just hard to know where to begin.

With less than three weeks to go until the start of the Olympics, it is becoming clear that the security management programme that we have been told is of critical importance in the delivery of an Olympic Games safe from terrorist threat, is intrinsically dysfunctional at every level of its operation.

Last Tuesday (05/07), the day after the Olympic Stadium went into the final Lock-Down stage, G4S were supposed to supply 750 security personnel to support that operation. This would not have been too onerous, you would have thought, given that G4S are responsible for supplying the 10,400 licensed guards as agreed in their £284million contract, as well as managing the 3,300 students, 7,500 military personnel and 2,500 volunteers involved in the security operation. Yet they could only muster less than half that number, and even on the following day had to make up the rest of the numbers with unvetted personnel (‘Games short of trained security staff’, Sunday Times 08/07/12).

It was also revealed that the training programme is not delivering on targets, with a reported 9,000 people still to be trained, vetted and licensed. It has become clear from anecdotal evidence, as well as reports that are now being leaked to the press on a daily basis, that rather than a security programme that can deliver a level of world-class professionalism and public service, it is (as is so often the case) being delivered on a last-minute, cheap and ‘get anybody you can in a T-shirt’ manner. It is clear that even if those nine thousand personnel do manage to go through the training programme before the Olympics, there will not be enough time to allow them to develop the real skills that can only come through a slow, clear and well-structured familiarisation and orientation process. The likelihood is that vast numbers of people will be dumped in the Olympic park with little idea of their role or function, and certainly no idea of what they are supposed to do in the event that there is a serious incident.

Given the scale of the recruitment programme, the truth is that the vast majority of people who have been taken on short-term contracts are not people who have any background in the security industry, but are basically unemployed people who have seen this as a way of making a few pounds over the course of the summer. The Times quotes a drop-out rate of 20%, and ‘there have been reports of a shortfall of thousands of guards’. The same report states that G4S security managers are phoning around ex-police officers to see if they are prepared to work at the Olympics (“‘Desperate’ Games guards call former policemen to plug security shortfall”, The Times, 10/07/12).

I don’t want to say ‘I told you so…’, but to quote from my own report released three weeks ago,
‘G4S, the company that has won the contract to supply all non-governmental security services to the
Games, is suffering because the nature of the operation and the scale of the number of personnel involved means that its existing organisational experience and corporate wisdom are neither robust nor sophisticated enough to deliver the capabilities and protocols appropriate to the London Olympics’.

The question has to be asked, if this is the state of play less than three weeks before the start of the largest event in the UK in recent history, and with G4S unable to supply 750 personnel at a time when they have absolute control of the situation, have no unknown factors to worry about and do not have to even consider the extra pressure that the pressures of the actual Olympics will undoubtedly bring, then what chance do they have of delivering not only a basic level of service, with the right number of people in the right place at the right time, but one that can give a level of effective security cover appropriate to an international terrorist threat that requires the deployment of anti-aircraft batteries on suburban houses, fighter jets ready to shoot down civilian planes, and the Royal Navy’s largest ship, together with attack helicopters and marine snipers, berthed in the Thames.

It is a basic truism of security that ‘the most effective security technology in the world in the human eyeball attached to a trained human brain’. The key factor in the delivery of a safe and well-run Games is the capability, motivation and general professionalism of the on-the-ground, front-line security staff who are being paid minimum wages, working in what will undoubtedly be less than ideal conditions, and who will in all likelihood be asked to deliver over-and-above what they are contracted to do. Given the right conditions, training and leadership, there is no reason why that could not have been achieved. But, if the system is clearly breaking-down before the operation even starts, then it is unrealistic to expect those self-same people to deliver a world-class level of professionalism and motivation in the face of the incompetence of their own managers and leaders.

I have just posted a report looking at some of the issues around the London Olympics security management programme, giving an analysis from a classical risk management perspective.

I look forward to any comments and feedback.

Access Report here

Those people who know me know that CP training is one of my favourite activities. There is something about taking a group of people and turning them into a truly efficient CP team, not only able to stand around outside a restaurant whilst the Principal enjoys a good meal, but who are able to take the responsibility for all aspects of ensuring someone else’s safety, and the safety of their family, in a genuinely professional way, that gives an immediate pleasure that very few activities can give (at least, whilst keeping all of your clothes on!).

I run regular SIA CP courses in London, but have run similar courses in Sweden, Malta and recently in France, and have run CP operations in over thirty countries over the years, and it is always interesting to see how different people bring a different cultural understanding to how they operate as CP officers.

Feel free to make your own comments, and if anyone reading this has been on one of our courses (and besides the non-accredited courses, we have had over 400 people successfully pass the SIA programme with us since 2006), please let me know that you dropped in!

I had an opportunity to be a Key-Note Speaker at the TINYg security conference hosted by John Jay College of Criminology in New York in April. It is always interesting to see the different perspective that talking in front of a new audience gives, and it was especially rewarding to have an opportunity to meet some serious players in the NY security and risk management community.
My own presentation was a development of the presentation that I had given at the same event a few months previously, in September 2011, and discussed some of the issues involved in creating a genuine response capability on a multi-agency level to what are usually described as either ‘Loosely Structured Situations’ or, if they become more extremely chaotic and uncontrollable, ‘Wicked Problems’.
It is a scary thought that, more than ten years after 9/11, it is still the issue of inter-agency coordination and integration that is at the centre of operational failures on even a basic level. The fact that lack of communications, lack of cross-agency information sharing and the on-going suspicion as to the value of, or even possibility of, inter-agency integration is still affecting the ability of national, regional and local agencies to provide effective security and response capability to the communities that they are tasked with protecting, is something that should be keeping a lot of people awake at night.
It has always been the case, and continues to be so, that when crisis response operations fail, it is not because of something that was completely unthinkable or out of the response managers’ control, but time after time it is the basic failure to create simple, effective organisational frameworks that would allow the people on the ground to move forward and do the job that they have been trained to do.
I know from talking with people across the world who are involved in all aspects of security management, and who understand and respect the responsibility that they have been given, that there is a real desire on the individual level to create a more effective response capability, just as there is the understanding that that capability can only be created by developing cross-agency relationships on every level – strategic, tactical and operational. The only question then, is why so little continues to be done on a practical level, and what will be the consequences the next time that a major incident happens.
I have attached an edited version of my presentation, if you would like the full version, feel free to drop me a line.

It is Spring in London – actually Summer – which means (yes, you guessed it) that it is cold, wet, grey and miserable. I have usually found that working harder gets me out of the wet weather blues, so I am going to resurrect the blog, start uploading stuff that I have been working on over the last few months, and see if we can get a community going that has shared interest in all manner of things security and risk management related.
Feel free to drop by and make your contribution, and I look forward to seeing where this particular path leads to.
All the best to all,
David

by David Rubens

May 2011

Main Points

• The events in Japan in March 2011, involving an earthquake and subsequent tsunami, fell exactly within the risk profile of Japan’s disaster management programme, and there were no contributing factors to the disaster that could not or should not have been predicted and accounted for.

• The failures in disaster response management came about through systemic weaknesses that were entirely predictable, and had been identified in previous similar events, including the 1995 Kobe-Hanshin earthquake

• The systemic failures of the Japanese government and disaster management system were not unique to Japan. They reflect almost completely the same weaknesses that were identified in America following Hurricane Katrina and 9/11.

• Japan’s planning and construction laws have clearly made a difference to the ability of large buildings to survive even major earthquakes, and this can be seen as a major success in their long-term earthquake management policy.

• Despite the fact that individual agencies have developed a high-level of expertise and capability (and often have world-class equipment and technology unavailable to other countries, including US), Japan still lacks a unified Disaster Management framework that allows the swift mobilisation of separate agencies under a unified operational command.

• There needs to be a clear distinction made between ‘Major Incidents’ and ‘National Disasters’. They require a different class of response, and as one US FEMA commentator noted, it is no use responding to a Class 5 Disaster with Class 1 frameworks.

• Failures at the tactical and operational level were reflected in, and in many ways caused by, a lack of leadership at the political level. Disaster management on a national level is a political issue, and responsibility for that needs to be accepted by national political leaders, whether in terms of long-term capability preparation or in the immediate post-incident response.

• Despite these failures, there is a clearly-defined development road-map that would allow Japan to use its existing technical, personnel and organisational resources to create an appropriate, effective and integrated unified Disaster Management framework.

• None of the points above are new or unknown. They reflect almost completely the conclusions reached following the 1995 Kobe-Hanshin earthquake and the Hurricane Katrina Congressional Reports. They were fixable then. They are fixable now. If they are not fixed, the same points will undoubtedly be made following the next disaster….

Introduction

The recent incidents in Japan in March 2011, involving a major earthquake followed by a  devastating tsunami, have once again  offered a dramatic reminder of how quickly the world can throw up situations that challenge the fundamental rules and principles that crisis response managers  depend on in developing their most basic response management programmes and procedures. Despite the fact that ‘The Big One’ was an inevitable consequence of Japan’s geographical positioning across major tectonic faults, and that earthquakes and tsunami’s are at the centre of Japanese disaster planning at every level from Cabinet Ministers to local village disaster committees, the truth is that once the disaster hit, there were major failures at every level of the crisis response management system.

Although the scale of crisis that Japan’s earthquake and subsequent tsunami produced was described as unprecedented, the problems of response management that they highlighted reflected similar problems that had been identified in recent previous disaster response programmes across the world, including the 2004 Indian Ocean Christmas Day tsunami (9.2 Richter scale, 231,000 dead), 2010 China Yushu Earthquake (6.9 magnitude, 3,000 fatalities), May 2008 Burma Cyclone Nargis  (138,000 fatalities, though it is believed that this was a severe under-estimation), 2005 New Orleans Hurricane Katrina (around 1,900 fatalities) and January 2010 Haiti earthquake (7.1 magnitude, 300,000+ fatalities).  Given that the Japanese tragedy, similarly to Hurricane Katrina, took place in an advanced, technologically-enabled nation and was a situation that had had been long predicted and which had been at the center of national disaster response planning for well over 100 years (the Seismology Society of Japan was founded in 1880, twenty-five years before the Seismological Society of America was founded in 1906, following the San Francisco Earthquake and the first professor of seismology chair at Imperial University (Tokyo), Faculty of Science was established in 1886), the question has to be asked as to why government response capability proved  to be so ineffective, and whether there are fundamental flaws still existing at the heart of national disaster planning that creates an inevitability of failure when faced with the realities of actual disaster management.

This paper offers an overview of some of the principle issues that were at the heart of Japanese government disaster management planning, and which led to the relative failure of many of its core components.

It will also use some of the lessons learned in other similar disaster response programmes (both inside Japan and in other countries) as a benchmark to measure whether there has been progress made based upon previously learned lessons.

Having had the privilege to be involved in Japan for almost thirty years, this paper is offered in the spirit of Kizuna, friendship in times of hardship, and in the hope that it will make a small contribution to the prevention of similar crisis response management failures in the future.

Note: It became clear very early on in the post-tsunami recovery process that the issues surrounding the breakdown of safety procedures at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations in the immediate earthquake zone were creating an almost unique ‘double whammy’, convoluting the needs to deliver and manage the survivor recovery programme with the equally pressing issues of dealing with a potentially major radiation incident. However, I will leave issues of nuclear safety to the experts, and in this paper will only refer to the problems caused by the nuclear and radiation crisis in as much as they play a part in the more general disaster response programme.

For full version of the Article please visit the link

http://www.davidrubens-associates.com/PDFS/DRA_Japan%20earthquake%20article_7a_.pdf