Preparedness - Disaster Response - Evidence Vs. Opinion

all right welcome to season five of inside my canoe head this canadian podcast it's all about the integration of leading an incredible awesome life individual responsibility individual emergency preparedness and how do we navigate life's incredible wild disruptions that we see among us sit back grab a beverage and enjoy the episodes all right welcome back thanks a lot for uh everybody's wonderful comments on the last uh episode about hurricanes coming great feedback about that uh people realize that preparedness is kind of important which is why today i decided to do this episode on disaster response we're gonna take a quick look at hurricane ian and hurricane fiona as perfect examples as to why we know no one is coming to help you so sit back grab a beverage let's get at her i'm gonna start off this discussion with just a very important point that um seems to be a bit confusing out there in the world and you've seen a lot of linkedin posts lately about the need for these uh you know new disaster response forces you know large-scale human intervention to do all kinds of crazy wonderful little things that need to be done in the face of a disaster and i'm going to offer this to you that we have to remember and everybody should remember whatever you're studying or whatever you're interested in be it geopolitics in the fight in ukraine be it uh the state of food insecurity in western or the sahal in africa it doesn't matter researchers do their work based on evidence we do not do it based upon personal experience and we do not base it upon professional opinions the only thing that matters in research is evidence so when you hear a lot of loud talking mouths including mine talking about preparedness issues or what you have to do what you need to do and what i've said in previous discussions on this uh podcast is you need to look for the evidence so is it just so and so with a whole bunch of post-nominals or a really cute looking position that sounds like they're important and smart are telling you something what's the evidence that they're basing their opinion upon that's where you find the meat and potatoes of what's really going on and so we zero in on the idea that no one is coming to help you it doesn't mean that nobody's coming to help you it's that means there's a statistically insignificant number of first responders available to react in the first i would argue five to seven days of a significant disruption all you have to do is look at the fact that in hurricane ian is the biggest example that hit florida and then went up and smoked the carolinas is the insignificant number of ratios of police officers firing ems to the population don't forget research shows us from hurricane katrina that near 50 of first responders are not going to show up for their shift until such time as they are certain that their own families are safe cared for and then they will go care for the public in their role very few people are altruistic to the point that they're going to leave the people they love in a stressful and dangerous situation without assistance so that they can go assist somebody else's family you may think that that's ideal and that's the way the world is but when you look at hurricane ian and the devastation of florida and the flooding and day five and there still are a number of communities who have yet to see a single rescuer of any time show up and the same thing in canada if you want to zero up here on our experiences when hurricane fiona went in you have parts of the province that are still remain untouched by any rescuer response force uh several days after it happened so this idea that people have in their mind that the government is here to help the government is going to come rescue us and the government is going to come take care of us it's an altruistic thought and i understand i've read all of the research as to why people think that way the evidence points the other direction and in researchers and disaster and any other field we must base our conclusions on evidence and evidence demonstrates that unless you are freakish lucky enough to live next to a fire hall or there's an ambulance just happen to be having a burger next to your house when the shizzy hits the fizzy you are on your own and that's not a failure it's that it is absolutely unrealistic and unsupportable to recommend that there are this massive amount of human beings ready to respond to an emergency except for models similar to and i'm not going to pronounce the german it's called the thw it is their locally trained version of the u.s and australian cert program it's a community emergency response training where the professionals the people with the education trains large portions of a population to be able to do a lot of self-assessments a lot of self and helpful rescue how to look at buildings whether they're good for occupation or not how to purify food how to water how to clear roads all these things this training is provided by the state to the population so that the population can self-rescue but there isn't a state that is coming to help you you are on your own for far longer than as it's been called the 72 hour fallacy that one individual is presenting a demcon uh the disaster emergency management conference in toronto this fall which i i highly recommend if you're interested that you attend at least virtually um that is a fallacy 72 hours nobody's coming to help in a significant incident so because of that we have to look at what you see on tv so the evidence you see and the destruction you see and then you have to look at the level of response we're just in the response phase now we're probably moving into the recovery phase the response phase and disaster emergency management is always the really sexy stuff that's the lights the sirens the cnn hits you know the world is zeroed in on your pain and suffering for an exceptionally short period of time and response generally ends when all of those who can be rescued have been rescued and all of those who injuries identified have been identified and basically now we're in the cleanup when you switch over to a cleanup you switch into the recovery portion which is probably the least understood and definitely the least researched portion of disaster and emergency management so you don't need me necessarily to tell you that it would look really bad if you're in the middle of when the shizzy hits the fizzy and something like that happens to you and the government response is anemic at best but that's largely all that they can do i mean if you look in canada and the canadian armed forces uh response and you know a couple hundred folks you know most people expect five to ten thousand soldiers to be deployed to deal with that kind of situation if there really was work for a large-scale human external intervention um but that just simply isn't available enough to different talk in another day as to the state of the canadian armed forces but there's a lot of discussion canada surrounding that that we don't have a cert program or a version of a thw program in uh canada to provide that level of training so that we can train a robust local response so what does the individual do first we're going to deal with the individual does and then we're going to talk about what the community can do so as an individual facing uh you know shizzy hits the fizzy or a significant disruption that's coming your way or as i keep lauding my great friend mr floss out in bc has incredible information preparedness for earthquakes whatever it is you're sitting on and your threat profile and you have a significant hazard where you live and you've accepted that hazard because you still living there you've chosen to live there so what is it that you can do so i've talked at length of this podcast and i'll repeat it here today the best preparedness plan that you have with your family is based against the loss of critical infrastructure so you don't really care why the power's out but the power's out and i did i put out a tweet you know as hurricane fiona was getting ready to smoke the maritime saying folks you got to be prepared to be out of power for at least seven days if not more which has proved to be true you have to be able to take care of yourself because there's very little state capacity that is going to come you're probably going you're going to have to be your own 911 service for the first 72 or more hours which proved to be true 911 was down for almost a week um you're going to have to be fried the first aid so if somebody has a broken leg or a heart attack you're going to have to deal with that 100 on your own without any external intervention irrespective of how much taxes you pay these are just realities so base your capacity to respond base that's your preparedness that's what you're building is your capacity to respond and react to the realization of a hazard an imminent earthquake or the striking of a hurricane you have to be able to deal with all this stuff on your own so always looking past far past what the reality of the information out there is evidence shows clearly and unequivocally that at least seven days after a significant event you are not likely to see any intervention from a state actor in a significant event let me say that again a minimum of seven days that's the evidence based on everything we have all the way back to hurricane andrew in 1993 or 95 i forget up through the hurricanes on the east coast of the united states and canada looking at earthquake damage that has happened anywhere from nepal to india to afghanistan to pakistan to um the ring of fire in the pacific in new zealand and up the west coast of the united states of america seven days is what evidence tells us that's what you have to be able to prepare to provide all services to you and those for whom you're responsible i plan 14 for significant incidents right and the reason i do that is because the reality has told me that it's likely longer than seven that's my opinion right but if you're looking for actual evidence seven days is where the evidence comes down to that is inappropriate so you need to be able to power everything in your house for seven days you need to be able to provide significant and intervention first aid and trauma stabilization for seven days you must be able to provide for fire extinguishing don't forget that if you have a gas leak because of an earthquake nobody's coming to put a fire out but you you have to have the capacity to deal with some port of fire now you're not going to have a fire truck right but dealing with that you're going to have a handful of fire extinguishers right there's good ones that are on sale at costco i mean having four or five of those tucked away is never going to be a bad problem and it's not going to cost you that much money as well and probably just as important as the minimum the evidence is the seven days the evidence also speaks to us about evacuation right if you attempt to evacuate when a mandatory evacuation is down what two things are going to occur number one you're going to be in the middle of everybody else who waited the last minute so traffic is going to be improbably difficult and number two if you waited for the mandatory evacuation to go all the likely hotels in the region of probably 300 kilometers 100 you know 200 miles from your house are already booked right people have already made that call waiting to evacuate until there's a mandatory evacuation is a recipe for failure the time to go if you're going to evacuate and you know i'm a libertarian in heart stay if you want to go if you want to i always say evacuate uh that's my own personal view but if you don't want to fair enough you just get to eat it all on your own um if you decide to evacuate evacuate when a voluntary evacuation is to put in case have a destination predetermined and it should never ever be a rented hotel it always needs to be a friend and family location that is a significant drive away right don't try to drive 100 kilometers from your home you're going to want to go several hours from your home because the place you're selecting to stay needs to be a place that you can stay for a significant period of time if the unfortunate event happens that your structure you live in is damaged and unoccupiable right if you just go rent a hotel the crazy eight motel or a motel six wherever you go and then your house is knocked out well you could be 30 days and you know it may be longer than that before you can get an insurance adjuster to get down and i don't know do you have 30 days worth of hotel per diem and food on your credit card ready to go do you have that much in your emergency plan or your emergency fund so the idea behind evacuation is always it's up to you to predetermine your destination if you ever have to evacuate you should have that done now have that negotiated with a friend or family member that they know they're on the hook should something happen to you and that you have a primary and an alternate transportation route depending on the world situation at the time this is something you need to do it costs nothing to figure out and plan and trust me it takes a massive amount of stress off of everybody when you can just say to your family hey listen you know that hurricane looks like it might hit us we're going to take a couple day vacation we're going to go to uncle bob's um we're going to hang out there just to make sure nothing happens to the house in other words you're going to go during the voluntary evacuation there's not a lot of people on the road because people generally aren't smart enough to do it this way you get to the destination you're not forking out hundreds of dollars a night in a hotel room in a competitive environment uh which means hotel rates boost through the roof supply and demand uh and your family is safe and then if necessary you can just return to the house if nothing bad happened uh and if something significant does happen you're well secured and when you evacuate during the voluntary evacuation period you have time to take it's not a massive panic you can go about your house take about the only important documents all other bs they tell you uh that can all be replaced by the way what i'm saying is you get to go through the house in a calm and orderly fashion and determine what you'd like to take with you determine the clothes and things like that you have time to finish the laundry like you have time to do normal things to prepare to leave when the mandatory evacuation hits you don't have time to do that stuff and now you're competing against the horde of last minute humanity now from the collective part we know what you got to do personally we get it right from the collective part this is where my research steps in i research social capital which is human bonds in communities for individual and community emergency preparedness this next what i'm going to talk about now is my research area of expertise when you look at the local community and i'll bring in some military thought here we have the lowest sizable unit that we'll talk about in the military we call it the squad right so in canada that's eight different tiers or a tank crew or something along that lines the point being is you break it down to your neighborhood think about your neighborhood and all the things that you have to do to prepare your neighborhood to deal with whatever may come and the idea of social capital social capital is the access is the network of friends and family that you have those close personal people that you trust and it builds a mesh network if you were to put sally bob joe muhammad ismail and put everybody together and then draw lines between who knows who within your close little neighborhood you start to see your web of your social network and as you get to know people in your neighborhood and you familiarize yourself with them and they familiarize themselves with you you create a social bond the people who are going to rescue you out of your collapsed building are not the fire department it's going to be your neighbors right that's how humanity works when the shizzy hits the fizzy and power and everything's cut off for a couple of weeks if not more because of a major disaster like hurricane fiona all of those stuck in your community you're going to rally together to respond so the idea of building social capital in advance ensures that you have a greater capacity to respond you get access to their resources they get access to your resources and you get access to their external community it's about trust and you build these networks and i've always said the first most important thing that you can do to start a journey of preparedness is to meet your neighbor that's far more important than buying a 72-hour kit on you know some yahoo charlatan online research shows in over 100 years of research that's been done into earthquakes and disasters research shows that communities with strong social bonds respond better and recover far faster so those communities that are rich in social bonds have strong relations and take care of each other know each other and value each other within the neighborhood they recover better they come out of disasters faster they get better access to municipal resources because they're organized and they disproportionately have higher recovery rates not just the frequency but also the time what basically means is that if you have a strong interconnected small neighborhood would call it a street imagine if you lived on a cul-de-sac right these roundabout streets that have no exits if everybody on that were together and you had some form of reasonable disaster preparedness plan amongst your families that are on there everybody looked out for each other and then a hurricane fiona hits that street will bounce back far faster and far better than all the streets around it that's what evidence shows it's not opinion right it's not conjecture it's not professional experience it's what the research tells us that's where your bonds grow and that's where you can have the greatest impact on your family's recovery should you need to stay and not evacuate or something quickly happens like you can't evacuate uh for an earthquake right you can evacuate from the tsunami i get it absolutely if there's anything left of the roads to evacuate on but the point is is that when an earthquake hits you're dealing with what's there and if you have these strong social bonds and these strong networks on your street you're going to recover faster and you're going to cover better and you're going to get a disproportionate amount of resources from the municipality that's just research it doesn't matter whether you think that's true or not that's what the research says take the time to build your social community take the time to build your personal preparedness for the evidence says seven days now my personal opinion is 14 you do you but the evidence clearly tells us for a minimum of seven days no one is coming to help you in a significant disaster and the only people that are going to come help you are your neighbors so why not take the effort to build that social capital this is the basis for how cert works and i spoke earlier about the thw in germany it's the same thing so what the state's idea behind a cert program is you get a group of neighbors together like a cul-de-sac resident say you have 30 homes on there 30 families they get together they get collectively trained on things like damage assessments for building extended first aid they get um training on how to clear roads how to safely take down trees how to safely move obstacles how to create shelter how to create warming centers and all the things that need to be done to save human lives in the days that fall in the moments and the days that follow a disaster formal training is given now in some projects in areas of new zealand they've actually the state has actually come out and said okay if you're willing to organize as a street if you're willing to take the training as a cert we're going to give you the resources so in one project they gave residents resources so the chainsaws the picks the first aid kits the cots the portable shelters they were all provided by the state to that cul-de-sac so that that state is ready because remember um new zealand has earthquakes regularly and they're pretty significant and they sit on the ring of fire and they're pretty shortly due for another big one right so because of that they know that the state can't come help these people so what they do is they provide the training and they provide the equipment so that these people are best suited to rescue themselves which accepts reality you may not like it that the government's not coming to help you but they're not so these are where the cert and the thw programs do exceptionally well is because what you have is the local community taking the necessary education and gaining the necessary experience and equipment to be able to respond to its own emergency and if the state has the capacity to help that's great but state response for the immediate injuries etc is a nice to have but not a necessity now you and a cert team you're not going to regenerate power and set power back up the state has to do that but you're going to have the capacity to maintain minimal acceptable power loads at everybody's house so that people's freezers worth of food are not lost people a refrigerator can kept going for those that need refrigerated medication um depending on the time of year that an earthquake happens uh you may actually need to heat people so you need the ability to have heat sources running right so that's what the cert and the thw models work so right now as you're sitting on your couch and you've listened to me for 25 minutes i'm asking you to simply reflect on your own state of personal preparedness for a significant event do you have an evacuation plan that's real a destination predetermined with agreements in place and a primary and alternate route to get there do you have a minimum of evidence tells us seven days of supplies in your house that means you have the ability to feed water house protect and provide first aid for your family however you define that in the modern century right now and have you reached out to the community and a great idea is if you live in high density housing this social capital and cert programs work really really well for apartment buildings imagine if you had a 60 unit apartment building that has a significant cert program and everybody was aware right you were actually aware that the elderly lady in 6b actually was on oxygen and she doesn't go out much so most people might not notice her or even know she's in 6b and that if there is a significant incident where loss of utilities you know the vulnerable in your community and you can build a plan to help them somebody can go knock on 6b and ask if she's okay if there's something they can do to help her this could be a heat emergency this could be a cold emergency that's the idea of building social capital within your community enhancing that with cert training to build this rock solid object called your neighborhood that is fully and robustly capable to respond to a disaster all that can happen with the state's help but what fails every time is if you're waiting for the state to come do the rescuing and to feed house and water you if that's your outcome then you are not going to have a likely positive outcome that's what the research tells us so thank you very much for joining us this week on inside my canoehead if you like what we do here continue to drop by our website inside my canoehead.ca uh buy me a coffee it'll cost you three dollars canadian i cover your credit card fees it would be awesome i'm fueled by wonderful simple black coffee um give us your opinion ideas for future episodes i get them regularly uh if you don't want to send me an email at jeff at preparedness lives.ca hop over on instagram i'm on inside my canoehead at instagram i put a whole bunch of fun stuff up there um drop me a dm on instagram right uh just tell me what you want to hear tell me what you're interested in uh tell me what matters to you and we'll put a podcast episode together and if you're interested in coming on the podcast episode heck we can do that too that's not a problem whatsoever so thanks again uh please heed what i put on out here this is what evidence does right there's a lot of people out there that are yakking on the internet with their professional opinion and their 20 years of experience that's great but in research that really doesn't matter we don't pay that much attention to it be frank we look at evidence and evidence says what i've put on here is what you should do so take care stay safe you