How do you eat an elephant?

One of the biggest challenges in modern emergency management is figuring out were to begin. Emergency Managers must be able to evaluate a site with a critical eye toward what likely problems might arise (intentional or accidental),  and if something does occur, what is the impact in terms of damage, injury and disruption to operations. I can't tell you how many times I've sat around the table with collegues throwing around the hypothetical, "If we really wanted to do some damage here where would we start?", trying to put ourselves in the perspective of the badguy. Without a systematic approach the process will overwhelm most people and the result is that nothing is accomplished, even by well represented committees with the best of intentions.

The Hazard Vulnerability Analysis (HVA) is a subjective assessment routinely used by safety professionals to create an assessment of potential risks that a site, facility or community may face. The process involves identifying hazards and the potential negative impacts that would arise if the situation should actually come to fruition.  

I am working on augmenting a standard HVA so that it could be used to consider the impact of a disaster on a site and include elements of sustainable design. The goal is to identify and quantify the risks that are most probable to affect the people, structures and contents, as well as impact on operations. Every assessment process includes some level of subjectivity that is influenced by the individual assessor’s experience, education, or perspective.

To achieve a balance of those factors, the HVA tool is distributed to a variety of persons representing disciplines from both inside and outside of the target facility or community seeking their input. Each evaluator brings their personal knowledge and expertise to the practice resulting in a comprehensive evaluation process.  The total average scores as presented by all the participants for each category will be calculated to determine the overall assessed level of probability and severity for each considered hazard. It's far from perfect but what it does do well is make a clear recommendation on where to focus planning and mitigation efforts otherwise the process can be completely overwhelming.

sample of an HVA

I am wondering how this could be integrated with the LEED guidelines so that they could be truly Renewable, Reliable and Remarkable.

So, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!