Rethinking Disasters

The Japanese Prime Minister, Yoshihiko Noda, was quoted in an interesting article in the Financial Times today - - From shaken to awakened.  The article provides an overview on seismic risk in the context of the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan a year ago this week and the rethinking currently underway on how to mitigate the effects of future disasters.  Prime Minister Noda stated:

"We can no longer make the excuse that something unexpected occurred.  Crisis management is about addressing the unexpected and unanticipated."

These two sentences would fundamentally push engineering and planning into the "Black Swan" portions on any normal distribution curve of disaster risk.  Recognizing this, the article pointed out a potential shift that would distinguish between preparing for relatively frequent but manageable disasters and those that are rare and either impossible or too costly to guard against fully.  This would be a shift from disaster prevention (i.e., building higher walls to defend against future tsunamis) to a system rooted in disaster reduction (i.e., restricting development in low-lying coastal communities, with the goal of limiting the number of deaths and property damage).

I also liked this language in the article - - the "hardware" of disaster defences and strong infrastructure combined with the "software" of awareness, training, practice, and habits of of mind.  I would expand the term "software" to also include data collection, information management, and decision making before, during, and after disasters.