Disaster Accountability, Airport Disruptions, Stalking in Sports & More
Profiles in Preparedness #37
When we launched the Watch Office service in March, our goal was clear: to give Academy subscribers proactive, forward-looking intelligence about the threats and hazards that could impact them. Over the past few months, we’ve steadily expanded the number of cities and regions covered each week. But our mission has never been about producing the most reports. Our mission is to help every organization get—and stay—left of bang.
This week, we changed how we’re going to do that.
First, instead of continuing to add new locations in response to requests, we’re making the process we use to produce each situation report available to Academy subscribers through our Operational Readiness Playbook. This shift allows us to support far more organizations than we could ever reach by producing reports ourselves. It also ensures that subscribers can leverage AI, combine it with their own in-depth local expertise and context, and build reports tailored to the Watch Points and Action Points that matter most to them. To learn more about why we made this change, you can read our announcement here.
Second, we are making the U.S. and Colorado Front Range Situation Reports available to all subscribers. If you’d like to receive either of these reports in your inbox each week, read "Your Week, Left of Bang," where you’ll find details about what to expect and insturctions about how to sign up for those reports.
As always, thank you for reading and we hope you enjoy this week’s round up of articles.
Inside The CP Journal
Here are some of the articles that were added to the site this week.
The way we present and talk about “getting left of bang” continues to evolve as we support new industries, speak with organizational leaders with new demands, and consider a shifting risk landscape.
We refreshed our foundational article this week with many of the new takeaways, visuals, opportunities, and challenges organizations face when implementing a left of bang strategy.
From the Fall of 2020 to the Spring of 2022, I had the opportunity to lead a research team examining the integration of crisis management and business continuity at our nation's airports as the aviation industry navigated an unprecedented collapse during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article focuses on four of the more significant takeaways from that project that operations leaders, regardless of the industry they work in, can use to consider how they prepare their organizations for an uncertain future.
Before resources start moving, before meetings start multiplying, before your inbox fills with “quick questions” about the project, you need to make sure everyone is looking at the same map.
🔒For Academy Subscribers, we added this article about a key milestone in launching a new project to our Project Management in Emergency Management Playbook.
This Week‘s Reads
Here are a few standout reads from this week with insights, ideas, and perspectives that caught my attention.
Article | Owners said a Texas RV park was safe. Then flooding killed 37 people. This Washington Post investigation should be required reading for city and county leaders. It shows how revenue pressures, business interests, and a lack of responsibility converged1 to put lives at risk in an RV park along the Guadalupe River—ultimately leading to 37 deaths over the July 4th holiday. Here’s the takeaway: after a disaster, accountability is increasingly landing on local governments and the individuals within them. Expectations are rising, and responsibility isn’t being shared when decisions go wrong.
Series | Stalking in Sports. In this series of articles produced by The Athletic this week, they share the gripping stories that lead to a current situation where "more American athletes and other celebrities have been stalked and attacked in the last decade than in all previous U.S. history." Their investigation, which reveals 52 cases of stalking in sports since 2020, tells the story of NFL Hall of Famer Aaron Donald's case, shares stories from golf, and explains why tennis is the epicenter of the problem. If you’re a sports fan or concerned about this type of threat, the articles are worth reading.
Report | Disasters and the Gulf Coast, 20 Years after Hurricane Katrina. As we approach the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it can be easy for some of the details about how significant this disaster was to fade with time. "More than 1,800 people died, and hundreds of thousands were displaced from their homes, schools, churches, and communities. The major industries of the region—including oil, gas, agriculture, and tourism—were severely disrupted." The report examines the last two decades of disasters in the region since Katrina, focusing on how federal spending has influenced disaster response, recovery, and hazard mitigation efforts. Here is a stat that stood out: every county in the Gulf Coast has suffered at least 3 major disasters since Katrina, and many have experienced 10 or more (while excluding the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the COVID-19 pandemic).
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One noteworthy point: the businesses, seeking a favorable decision, downplayed the risk by assuring officials that “guests would have time to flee in the event of a flood.” After the fact, their statements shifted to blaming “failures in public warning systems” for the lack of advance notice. The outcome is that they tied their risk assessment to the government’s alerting capability rather than their own responsibility. As we’re now seeing in related coverage and legislative action, jurisdictions might want to think about how they ensure they can meet those demands before accepting the additional risk.