All-Hazards

The term All-Hazards is used by professional emergency managers to recognize the span of possible scenarios a community (or facility) could be facing when a disruption of services occurs. In general, hazards can be categorized as natural, technological, civil or public health related.

Common examples of natural hazards come from severe weather (blizzards, tornados or lightening are a few) but could also be earthquakes, landslides or tsunamis. Technological problems arise when man-made infrastructure becomes compromised. Electrical blackouts, failure of communication networks or web-based systems, or loss of water services are examples of problems that communities encounter rather frequently. Civil emergencies involve disruptions primarily due to human behavior (think: riots or labor strikes), and examples of public health emergencies are pandemics or contamination of municipal water source.

The impact on a community will increase dramatically as hazards begin to compound upon one another, forming complex emergencies requiring a multi-disciplinary team approach and can often span an extended period of time to resolve.

Consider Hurricane Katrina... A hurricane (natural hazard) led to a failure of the city levy system (technological hazard) which eventually created civil unrest by people needing services. An acute public health emergency was narrowly averted but could have easily developed considering the environment that had been created.

Some emergency management professionals consider terrorism a separate category of hazard. I am  undecided on the point because a terrorist act creates an emergency in the community (bombing, mass shooting, tactical disruption of public service) that ultimately results in a technological, civil or public health hazard. The added element is the role of law enforcement and crime scene investigation, which, while certainly further complicates an already chaotic scene, ultimately falls into one of the previously identified categories.


So where are the opportunities to collaborate? Where are the GreenZoneSolutions? 

Redundancy without duplication...

Many modern technological systems have sustainable alternatives under development and would provide a logical backup to failure (or to augment) a primary system. Electrical systems goes down? No problem, we have a distributed energy system that works in tandem with our grid provider and not only creates redundancy during failure but is an additional source of revenue when we sell electricity back to them. But the systems must work well. They have to shift seamlessly from one system to another with no (or minimal) effort built in. In this case, design refers to the experience of the operator, rather than aesthetic appeal.

Dikes and levies can become part of a landscape - both functional and beautiful - while providing a vital infrastructure and disaster mitigation effort. And developing a volunteer workforce to supplement fulltime public health staff facing a surge could be built on a platform of community organizing and strengthen local resources on a more routine basis so they are better prepared to deal with the high stress of a crisis.

But all these efforts take creative approaches that are often outside the comfort zone or expertise of emergency management professionals. It will take a diverse team to tackle the complicated problems that we will be facing going forward. It will take GreenZoneSolutions to solve problems so that they are Renewable, Reliable and Remarkable.