'Predictable Surprises' Must be Better Managed, Featherstone Tells All-Hazards Summit Attendees

by Jim McKay on October 23, 2009

Photo: An aerial view of Ground Zero six months after the World Trade Center attack.

A magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake would stun and possibly devastate the Southern California region and might fall into the category of what Los Angeles Emergency Management General Manager James Featherstone called "predictable surprises."

Other predictable surprises were Katrina and 9/11 and managing for that type of event is a cornerstone in his region Featherstone told a packed Sheraton Hotel ballroom at the Emergency Management 2009 All-Hazards, All-Stakeholders Summit on Thursday in Los Angeles.

"If we know how bad it can become we can do something about it," Featherstone said. "You know there's a problem and it's going to get worse." In Los Angeles a multiagency, multijurisdictional think tank — The Alliance — is charged with looking ahead for those predictable surprises.

Featherstone said having your hands at the 10 and 2 position while looking ahead is not enough. "You have to be looking two or three blocks down the road. It's a professional and moral imperative that we begin to manage the predictable surprises."

Exercising at Policy Level

Managing those efforts has to start at the policy level and the strategy has to be engrained, Featherstone said. He said exercising at the tactical level is fine, but it has to done at the policy level as well. He compared it to athletes developing muscle memory from repetition and said that kind of "muscle memory" has to be developed at the policy level.

Developing a resilient community and developing muscle memory at the policy level starts with acknowledging "what you're not good at," and collaborating regionally to get better, Featherstone said. "Recovery and logistics are our Achilles’ heels here in Los Angeles. Recovery is the most expensive and the longest of the phases. We don't do recovery well."

He said participating in regional conferences or just brown bagging it with regional partners will help "reduce the number of things you don't know you don't know," and go a long way toward improving weaknesses.

Garry Briese, former Federal Emergency Management Agency regional administrator for Region 8 and former executive director of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, joined Featherstone among the speakers. Briese, who now heads the Center for New Media and Resiliency, said what emergency managers plan for a crisis and what citizens do during a crisis differ because of new media.

He said by the time first responders have arrived at the scene of a crisis, thousands of e-mails and photos about the event have been shared by citizens but the first responders are, for the most part, in the dark until they get there.

The summit was the first of four scheduled for 2009. The final three will be held in Miami, Houston and Boston. For more information, contact Marty Pastula at mpastula@govtech.net or 916/932-1497.