In the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in the number of catastrophic events worldwide. Most notably Hurricane Sandy, the Haiti Earthquake, the Icelandic Volcano, the Gulf Oil Spill, and the 2011 Japan Tsunami. With each passing disaster, the death, injury, economic and environmental impacts seem to exponentially increase in size and scope. Therefore, what constitutes a disaster is the pressing question that weighs heavily on those charged with protecting people, enterprise, and the environment. A disaster is only a disaster when the effected area must rely on assistance from private, local, state, federal or international agencies and aid organizations that are outside of the immediate resources and expertise of the effected area or organization.
DISASTER CLONE
© is designed to be an effective resource management and disaster preparedness tool. The model achieves this objective only through the advanced planning and due
diligence of risk managers and their ability to design and execute robust disaster strategies that incorporate mitigation, preparedness, recovery and response actions that keenly anticipate and accurately forecast the emergency needs of the organization. These comprehensive disaster strategies are codified as the five pillars of disaster. Each of the five pillars is built on the CLONE foundation and is discussed at length in the below sections. CLONE is scalable to small businesses and large enterprises within the domestic, international, public and private sectors.
Make a CLONE of your organization to make it more resilient to disasters.
The formula and analysis follows:
CLONE =
Catastrophic Events
+
Level of Readiness +
Operational Controls+
Neural Networks +
Emergency Planning
Catastrophic Events: There are two categories of disasters that organizations are subject to: natural disasters which originate from the earth; and large-scale man made disasters which are a result of mechanical failure, human error, and adversarial attack. A few examples of catastrophic events include major fire, loss of power, blackouts, explosions, major structural failure, chemical release, technological disruption, solar flares, sun spots, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, landslides, tornadoes, hurricanes (cyclones/typhoons), tsunamis, blizzards, disease and pandemics. Very specific planning is required for each of these catastrophic events, and details will be provided throughout DISASTER CLONE. Organizations should develop their contingency plans based on historical environmental trends, current adversarial threat data and other known or anticipated events that are likely to occur within the region. Adopting an "all threats, all hazards" approach ensures organizational resiliency since focusing only on a few events may overlook the one key event that actually occurs.
Is your organization at direct or indirect risk of being exposed to any of these catastrophic events? Even if the nature of your operations is relatively safe, is your site within close proximity to major industrial areas or critical infrastructure where an accident at that nearby location will have a severe impact on your operations by either requiring a possible community-wide evacuation leaving your operations potentially unattended; or
will commercial inter-dependencies such as supply chain or electric power flow disruptions
cause your operations to come to a halt? Analyze and evaluate the level of resilience that your organization has in relation to each of these hazards by conducting a comprehensive risk assessment to identify potentially disruptive incidents, precursors or shortfalls that will help you to establish optimal solutions to address these concerns. Keep in mind that disasters can be mitigated to the extend that proper planning can identify appropriate personnel, training, and resources that can be brought to bear to lessen the death and destruction from the catastrophic scenario.
When creating disaster preparedness plans, organizations should consider hyper extraordinary risks (i.e., worst-case scenarios) with the understanding that the organization may be significantly challenged by implementing mitigation strategies that may have associated hyper extraordinary costs. Hence the dilemma for security and emergency management since countermeasures must be precise and effective, however not so precise and effective that the organization is driven into bankruptcy or operations become severely diminished due to high implementation costs. Despite budgetary limits, strict liability (i.e., punitive damages, civil and possibly criminal lawsuits) may apply if the organization fails to exercise due care in providing its constituents with appropriate levels of safety and security while limiting their exposure to ultra-hazardous activity. With this in mind, organizations must truly understand from a 360 degree perspective all risks, threats, hazards and vulnerabilities that exists within the organization to properly implement mitigation, preparedness, response, continuity and recovery plans that provide its personnel with acceptable courses of actions before, during and after a disaster occurs. For more on identifying your organization's risks, click here.
