Tag Hong Kong

Hurricane Sandy was a Surprise?

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

The second to last paragraph of this ABC News article contains a pretty shocking statement made by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “The city was not expecting Sandy.”  Really?  I think Mayor Bloomberg should have spoken to the good folks in his Emergency Management agency.  Or read one of the several reports cited in this article.  Or spoken to Michael Balboni who has been involved in emergency management and homeland security in New York State for many years.  Or looked at a map.

Optimistically, I think the Mayor’s intent here was to say that the chances of something like Hurricane Sandy happening were so low that there wasn’t much focus on it.  I’m still not thrilled with that, either, but I think that’s where he was going.

Folks, while the chance of such a strong system making landfall in the greater New York City area was pretty slim, it was still a possibility – and a very dangerous one.  A possibility, in fact, that a great deal of discussion and preparation had gone into.  The preparations that were done were good, but clearly not enough.  There needed to be massive investments of resilient, disaster mitigating infrastructure that would protect against the impacts of a storm such as this.  But we’re not too late.  We can still do these things.  Sadly, there isn’t a lot of money behind it, but we need to engage the political momentum behind this storm – just as we’ve seen in the aftermath of other major disasters such as 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina – which have funded massive projects.  We’ve seen ideas like a giant sea wall, which I’ve previously blogged about.  Or the mitigation projects engineered in, under, and around the city of Hong Kong, which I’ve also recently blogged about.  All these things are possible and very much necessary for the City of New York and other high risk coastal areas.

It’s time for our elected officials to take emergency management seriously.  The investments made in preparedness and mitigation can drastically reduce the loss of lives and property.

Disaster Preparedness – Hong Kong

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 1 Comment
Seal of Hong Kong

Seal of Hong Kong

I’m interrupting my series on exercise program management (which I’m sure I’ll do several more times) to highlight a news spot I first saw on last night’s NBC News.  The segment was about Storm Preparedness in Hong Kong.  In it they briefly outline the threats to Hong Kong, including being struck by a cyclone seven times a year on average, and they highlight the preparations they’ve taken.  These preparations include underground reservoirs to contain flood waters and runoff and a system of barrier fences to mitigate against landslides.  I always like to see how other people around the world are prepared for their hazards.  Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and other places around the globe have come up with innovative ways to protect themselves from natural disasters.  Comparisons were made in this brief segment between NYC and Hong Kong – with the silent inference that if these measures are already being taken elsewhere, then certainly the City of New York can do it.

One thing I noticed wasn’t actually discussed in the video – they showed a brief clip of a Hong Kong area news broadcast which was alerting citizens. Broadcasts are the cornerstone of their notification and alert system and use levels of ‘signals’ to communicate the severity of the threat (the Hong Kong broadcast clip that NBC includes shows them issuing a Signal 10, their most serious).  An easy internet search led me to the Hong Kong Security Bureau which handles emergency management.  This preparedness guide explains their signal system and shows how they color code other hazards based on level of severity such as wild fires and storms.  Their documents are in both Chinese and English.

A little more poking around their website found versions of their contingency plans.  I quickly perused their contingency plan for natural disasters which seemed to include all the right elements.  Certainly, with an average of seven cyclones annually along with the threat of wild fires and landslides all around the city, Hong Kong is well versed in preparedness.  While a quick search for any studies on citizen preparedness didn’t come up with much, I’m hopeful that the preparedness message is getting to them as well.  The broadcast indicated that Hong Kong had recently suffered through a storm event of similar strength as Hurricane Sandy, and survived with no fatalities.  Based on this alone, it would seem to me that the citizens of Hong Kong do take this seriously.

We can always learn from others – especially those who haven’t been jaded by our way of doing things, which I think more often than not holds us all back.  We need to look beyond our borders and share ideas.  It seems to be done in many other fields, but not so much in emergency management.