Jim Rush posted to Big Medicine about how the need for us to become a true readiness culture is so important. Some of the forces at work that prevent this readiness include:
- Refusal to accept reality - Many in positions of leadership hold to the belief that this terrorism phenomenon is limited in both size and scope. Rush states, "Catastrophic events are listed int he Federal Planning Scenarios for planning activities at the state, local and federal levels, but there is little evidence that there could be an effective response and recovery for any catastrophic event. There seems to be good progress int he prevention of large scale disasters, but almost no capabilities for 'consequence management.' A National Healthcare Capabilities Plan to manage hundreds of thousands of casualties and millions of affected human being has yet to be developed."
- Prejudice - There seems to be a prejudgement that people who would engage in terrorism are just thugs and that any deviation from this pre-determined image would be people who are influenced by thugs. Rather, Rush suggests that "We have pre-judged that terrorists are criminals and not soldiers in a war against us." We are also taking precautions based on what happened in the past and not taking steps to thwart the next attack.
- Need for normalcy - Rush indicates that, in general, society will shifts from a very high level of anxiety about security and well-being and then right back to complacency. Not indicating that people are stupid but rather the need for normalcy is so great that vigilance is released.
- Optimistic Bias - Too many emergency workers show a tendency to resist maintaining vigilance and "somewhere deep in their psyche" these professionals -- even in the face of the Hazard Vulnerability Assessment (HVA) depicting catastrophic events -- think of the planning for those events as optional.
Finally, Rush asks these questions: Would a crisis planner or emergency manager be guilty of dereliction of duty if they chose to ignore a horrific HVA planning scenario? Do we have to wait for a catastrophe to occur before we define dereliction of duty?
