A Guide to Preparing for A Disaster/Collapse

However, in almost all cases, the civilian organization of response to disaster is improving, including in the field of planning, which lessens the need for help from military forces. A significant portion of a good emergency plan will provide instructions on how to relay information to the general public. The role of and tasks allotted to a spokesperson may need to be defined. In democratic countries, the mass media are expected to have a role that is independent of government, but also to bear a sense of responsibility that induces them to provide public service information in times of crisis.

Generally, emergency plans can specify the arrangements for working with the media, but they cannot fully co-opt the media as if they were public servants. In news services, a degree of editorial independence is necessary, in order to draw attention to any abuses of office committed by members of a government, or, for that matter, emergency responders. Increasingly, response to the threat and impact of disaster is a matter of human rights. There are many ways in which this is true. For example, the safety and well being of girls and women need to be ensured in disaster, as well, of course, as at all other times.

Disaster should not be an opportunity for abuses to be committed, or for discrimination against women. In the modern world, disasters have been occasion for forced migration, the imposition of restrictive ideologies, the persecution of minorities, and discrimination against marginalized groups. These are human rights abuses that need to be counteracted. Forced migration has occurred in the wake of disasters in countries as diverse as Myanmar formerly Burma , Indonesia, and the United States. In this, the upheaval caused by disaster, and in particular the destruction of housing and livelihoods, has been used as an opportunity to achieve a form of social engineering, by moving people to settle areas deemed less hazardous.

Concurrently, recovery from disaster has occasionally become the opportunity to impose ideologies, as was the case with the introduction of Islamic Sharia law, after both the tsunami in Banda Aceh and the Padang earthquake in Indonesia. There is little doubt, moreover, that Cyclone Nargis, in in Myanmar, did nothing to alleviate the persecution of the Muslim Rohingya people by the Burmese junta. Generally, disasters have been associated with the occurrence, and possibly intensification, of marginalization right across the board, from the homeless in Tokyo to rural communities in Zimbabwe, minorities in the United States, and the poor of Latin American cities such as Managua and Lima.

At the very least, emergency planners need to ensure that there is nothing in the plans that could be construed as a means of facilitating such abuses. It is as well to remember that the legacy of two world wars was political hostility to emergency planning, which was seen by some politicians as a handmaiden to totalitarianism.

This was because the invocation of special powers to deal with emergency situations was viewed as a dangerous development that could easily be subverted towards forms of dictatorship. Fortunately, these fears have diminished over time. They have largely been supplanted by an understanding of the imperatives of natural and technological hazards, with their capacity to retard human and economic development, or even to throw such processes into reverse.

A cycle is used because many disasters are recurrent, although not all are truly cyclical.

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Clearly, emergency and disaster planning refer primarily to the response phase. However, they have some relevance to all the other phases as well. Emergency planning is largely practiced during the risk mitigation, or resilience-building, phase—the calm periods between major adverse events. It must address the preparation phase as well as the response phase, as there is a need to make preparations systematic, especially where there is enough prior warning of impact for this to be accomplished successfully.

While recovery planning may be regarded as a separate process from emergency planning, the two go together in that the phases of recovery offer an opportunity to improve general emergency planning and readiness for the next impact. In most sudden impact disasters, there is no reason why recovery planning should not begin the day after the event.

Having made that point, however, it is important to note that time is socially necessary in recovery. Consultation must take place, and alternative strategies must be investigated. Recovery from a major disaster can take decades, and during that time socio-economic conditions will change, and so probably will environmental and hazard conditions.

A disaster characterized by death, injury, psychological impairment, destruction, damage, and loss of economic activities, assets, and employment will engender a complex aftermath. In this there is much potential for wrong decisions, unless objectives are carefully set, procedures are clearly identified, and there is a consensus about how the process should take place. Major disasters such as large floods, cyclonic storms, and earthquakes may not only take a large toll of casualties but may also destroy a great deal of housing stock and business premises.

This will stimulate a process of providing shelter, which may involve temporary and transitional solutions to the housing problem before permanent reconstruction of building stock can be achieved. In this process, there is, or rather there should be, a social contract that indicates that survivors will endure the privation of temporary or transitional housing providing it is for a finite and not excessive period of time.

In the aftermath of the March earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan, for example, 88, houses were damaged, most of them being completely demolished by the waves. Reconstruction will take about seven years, which is a remarkable achievement that has required very intensive planning at the local, regional, and national levels. Moreover, the planned reconstruction has to be secure against future tsunamis; land must be elevated, sea walls must be constructed, and residential areas need to be relocated to higher ground, all on an unprecedented scale.

In this sense, when Cyclone Haiyan known locally as Yolanda made landfall in the Philippine province of Eastern Visayas in November , the storm surge, which reached 5 meters in height, was very much like a tsunami and every bit as devastating. Evacuation saved many lives, but 7, people nevertheless died and almost 29, were injured. In this economic backwater of Philippine life, recovery was slow and patchy. Many survivors received very little assistance, which helped to perpetuate vulnerability.

Although evacuation was more successful when the next major cyclone named Hagupit struck in December , many of the reconstructed shelters of poor people living in coastal communities were once again washed away. One of the most complex and challenging aspects for recovery planners is the rebuilding of critical infrastructure. In the case of the Japanese Sanriku coast, where the tsunami came on land, much of the infrastructure was completely devastated: Critical infrastructure which also includes sectors such as food distribution and banking can be divided broadly into that of national importance and that of purely local significance.

In many cases, resilience in networks is a function of being able to find different routes through the network. However, blockages can be critical, and infrastructure may be peculiarly susceptible to cascading disasters. The tsunami also caused failures in manufacturing supply chains around the world, as a result of shutting down vehicle production in Japan. Supply chains are essential to humanitarian operations and emergency responses.

Emergency planning for them has two aspects. The first is an element of business continuity. It seeks alternative ways to ensure supplies of goods or services, in order to keep productivity from falling as a result of interruption of normal business. It thus depends on redundancy, which is potentially an expensive quality, as it may require the duplication of assets. This requires planners to determine which assets are critical, and where the destruction or failure of assets may have a critical effect on the whole production cycle. The second aspect of supply chain planning involves ensuring efficiency in humanitarian supply, such that the forces on the ground are not left bereft of the equipment, goods, and manpower that are needed to tackle the emergency effectively.

Planning to manage the reconstruction of housing involves some difficult choices about who should build what and where. It is important to avoid excessive price rises in the market for building materials.

It is also essential to involve local people, the beneficiaries in the process of designing, constructing, and adapting permanent housing. An important matter in reconstruction planning is the extent to which transitional shelter should be provided. In Japan, transitional shelters erected after the tsunami had floor areas of 27—33 square meters, while those in Sichuan, China constructed after the Wenchuan earthquake were slightly smaller than 20 square meters in floor area.

Hence, the figure tends to be lower in Asian countries, were urban space is limited and populations are large. One risk of transitional housing is that it may reduce the impetus for permanent reconstruction, and thus leave the survivors in limbo for years or decades. The solution lies in both a constant provision of resources for recovery and a transparent, democratic process of achieving it, with ample public participation. Recovery and reconstruction planning should aim to revive the local area while at the same time making it safer against future disasters. Revival means rebuilding basic facilities, such as housing, infrastructure, and amenities, but it also means ensuring that livelihoods and the local economy are rebuilt.

Experience suggests that this is easiest for settlements that are well connected politically and geographically, and hardest for those that are politically, spatially and economically marginalized. There is a welfare function in recovery from disaster, and this begs the question of what welfare should involve. At its worst, copious but ill-thought-out assistance to a disaster area can bring the population into a state of aid dependency that is bound to end in negative consequences, as the assistance is unlikely to be perpetual. Reviving the local economy can instead create self-sufficiency and tax revenues that help the area revive itself.

The fundamental purpose of welfare is to support people who lack the ability and resources to provide themselves with a minimum acceptable standard of living. Disaster throws this issue into high relief by differentially affecting the poor and needy more than the wealthy. Welfare should not mean largesse, however attractive this may seem to politicians when they remember that disaster victims are also voters. Instead, scarce resources should be utilized to provide a safety net for the most vulnerable people in society, and thus to mitigate the differential effect of disaster.

From these reflections, it should be apparent that there will be parallel processes of planning that have different weights and salience at different points in the cycle of recurrent disasters Figure 6. To ensure a holistic response to the threat of disaster, recovery, and reconstruction, planning should be linked to on-going emergency planning initiatives and to business continuity planning. Parallel forms of planning in the sequence of response to and recovery from disasters. In recent decades, there has been a consistent upward trend in the impact of disasters.

Rising populations in the areas of greatest hazard, increasing investment in fixed capital in such places, the complexity of global interconnections, and the impact of climate change in producing more extreme meteorological events all conspire to drive this trend. Standards and guidelines for disaster planning do exist, although none has been universally accepted as the basic model.

Nevertheless, there is a gathering consensus on what emergency plans should seek to achieve and how they should be structured. Dealing with disaster is a social process that has environmental and economic ramifications and implications in terms of governance.

Emergency planning needs to fit into a comprehensive program of risk reduction, in which structural defenses are built—for example, river levees and sea walls; non-structural measures are used in a diversified strategy to bring risk under control and reduce the impact of disasters.

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The non-structural approach includes not only emergency planning and management but also land-use control, public education, and possibly, relocation of the premises that are most at risk. Emergency planning now has to face up to the challenges of the information age, in which there is much more immediacy to the means of communication.

For example, social media have begun to have an important role in accounting for missing people in disaster. Crowd sourcing and cooperative efforts can be powerful tools in the response to crises and emergency situations. Hence, social media and Internet communications need to be taken into account in emergency planning. Over the period —, almost two billion people were directly affected by disaster. Emergency planning is thus facing a challenge that is very much greater and more complex than it appeared to be in the s, when the first attempts were made to devise a systematic approach to it.

Emergency planners will need to be more professional and to benefit from more, and more sophisticated, training. Information technology will play an increasing role in planning. It is already prominent, for instance, in the use of geographic information systems GISs to depict hazards, vulnerabilities, and patterns of emergency response. GIS is already an integral part of many emergency plans. Another challenge of contemporary emergency planning is internationalization. Cross-border disasters are common, and any increase in the size and strength of meteorological disasters will increase their importance.

Most emergency planning is designed to cope with local, regional, or at least domestic inputs, but less so international ones, as these tend to be much less predictable. However, it will become increasingly necessary to guarantee international interoperability, common supply chains, reciprocal aid arrangements, and procedures for working together across borders. Finally, more informed decisions will have to be made about the magnitude of events for which a response needs to be planned.

Disaster and Emergency Planning for Preparedness, Response, and Recovery

The apparent tendency for climate to drive increases in extreme meteorological events is only one element of a complex picture in which the distributions of magnitudes and frequencies are not accurately known. Resources are too scarce to permit lavish preparations for notional high-impact events that may occur only once in a millennium. However, preparedness does need to raise its sights and tackle larger events than those that can confidently be expected to occur in a decade. Given restrictions on public spending, this will mean achieving efficiencies and reducing waste in emergency response, as well as developing a robust moral philosophy and ethical position on who deserves what in the post-disaster period.

How to survive a global disaster: a handy guide | Games | The Guardian

Future emergency plans will be digital creations that are networked, interactive, and dynamically supported by different kinds of media, including real-time filming and photography and networked teleconferencing. One challenge here is to ensure that the increasing dependency on sophisticated electronic algorithms and communications does not create vulnerability in its own right. Discharged batteries and failed networks of electricity supplies can be enough to make information and communications technologies useless at the height of a crisis. As noted, emergency planning needs to be a co-operative endeavor and, as such, it is bound up with questions of rights, responsibilities, and democratic participation.

The plans that work the best have the broadest support. They are also well known to participants and are frequently referred to. Like all of the principal aspects of modern life, emergency planning and management need to be sustainable endeavors. There are two sides to this. One is to ensure that the planning process is continuous, and support for the civil protection system in which it takes places does not wane during the intervals between disasters. Budget cuts can throw valid programs of safety and security into reverse, but disasters are, unfortunately, inevitable events.

The other side is the need to integrate emergency planning into the general process of planning to make human life more sustainable. It will therefore require interfaces with climate change adaptation plans and programs of sustainable resource usage. The alternatives, inefficient and ineffective responses to the threat and impact of disasters, delayed recovery, and vulnerable reconstruction, should not be allowed in any society, rich or poor. Principles of emergency planning and management.

Towards the development of a standard in emergency planning. Disaster Prevention and Management , 14 2 , — Emergency and disaster planning. International lessons in risk reduction, response and recovery pp. Enhancing organizational resilience through emergency planning: Learnings from cross-sectoral lessons. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management , 17 1 , 24— Emergency planning and response for libraries, archives and museums.

Building an emergency plan: A guide for museums and other cultural institutions. A practical guide to emergency management and business continuity management for schools. Handbook of disaster policies and institutions. Emergency planning and response: Case studies and lessons learned.

The definitive handbook of business continuity management 3d ed. A framework for improving operational effectiveness and cost efficiency in emergency planning and response. Disaster Prevention and Management , 4 3 , 25— Catastrophic disaster planning and response. Building household and community capacity. Preparedness for emergency response: Guidelines for the emergency planning process. Disasters , 27 4 , — Ten research derived principles of disaster planning.

Disaster Management , 2 , 23— The American experience, — 2d ed. Emergency planning and community preparedness. Emergency management planning as collaborative community work. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management , 5 1 , 1— The status of general aviation airports in disaster response planning.

Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management , 9 2 , 1— Strategic planning for emergency managers. Journal of Emergency Management , 5 2 , 41— Federal Emergency Management Agency. A guide for all-hazard emergency operations planning for state, territorial, local, and tribal governments. Comprehensive Preparedness Guide Human adjustment to floods: A geographical approach to the flood problem in the United States.

Department of Geography, University of Chicago. A manual for managers and policy-makers. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice. Publications Pages Publications Pages. What Is Emergency Planning? The Evolution of Emergency and Disaster Planning As we know it today, emergency planning for disasters derives from civil defense, a form of social organization designed to protect civilians against armed aggression. From Incident to Catastrophe: The Range of Impacts Most civil contingencies are small enough to be resolved adequately without qualitative changes in daily management procedures or quantitative changes in the availability of resources.

Emergency and Disaster Planning as a Process Above all, emergency planning should be a process , rather than a product or outcome. Thresholds of Capacity in Emergency Response Local incident Local response A Threshold of local capacity Small regional incident Co-ordinated local response B Threshold of intermunicipal capacity Major regional incident Intermunicipal and regional response B Threshold of regional capacity National disaster Intermunicipal, regional, and national response C Threshold of national capacity International catastrophe Intermunicipal, regional, and national response, with international assistance C Note.

For What Should One Plan? Click to view larger Figure 1. In the Fallout series of post-apocalyptic role-playing games, survivors are able to utilise an old closed network called PoseidoNet, which has survived the nuclear war — there are terminals placed throughout the world. So could we, in real life, somehow access corporate, academic or even military networks to communicate? All major governments have contingency plans in place to ensure their survival after a global disaster.

In , for example, George Bush signed into place the National Security Presidential Directive, which claims the power to execute certain orders in the event of a catastrophic emergency — President Obama also signed a National Preparedness executive order in What we can be fairly certain of, however, is that it will involve the suspension of constitutional government and the instalment of martial law.

We saw this during the Olympics when the security contractor effectively collapsed and the army had to come in.

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It showed the need to maintain discipline, and it also showed that the army is trained to respond to a situation where systems start to break down. Instead, we should be using our fledgling communication networks to gather public support and ask questions. Populations need to be asking, when is this situation going to end? At what point is this temporary suspension of our normal consititution going to lead back to the normal way of things?

In the west, we know there is a certain degree of discipline and accountability that our militaries do have — there are rules of engagement. But we know from history that when you have this sort of situation, there is all sorts of scope for abuse. So you have your agricultural land, your solar powered generators and Raspberry Pi communications network, but the big question is: Or in other words, how long before Netflix is working again?

Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Across the ages, in every survival story, a disaster of some sort plays a prominent role. Sometimes the part is played by the government, sometimes it is played by Mother Nature, and other times, the role is taken on by a random mishap.

If we have learned one thing studying the history of disasters, it is this: A crisis rarely stops with a triggering event. The aftermath can spiral, having the capacity to cripple our normal ways of life. Because of this, it's important to have a well-rounded approach to our preparedness efforts.

Due to the overwhelming nature of preparedness, we have created the Prepper's Blueprint to help get you and your family ready for life's unexpected emergencies. To make a more comprehensive, easy-to-follow program, The Prepper's Blueprint has been simplified and divided up in a way to help you make sense of all the preparedness concepts and supply lists provided. We have divided the chapters into layers of preparedness. Chapters , prepares you for those everyday disasters that have shorter-term effects: Chapters help you to get ready for disasters that turn out to be much longer-lasting: Chapters prepares you for the long haul and a complete change of lifestyle, the end of the world as we know it: The goal of The Prepper's Blueprint is to help you find freedom through self-reliance, and ultimately, to get you and your family to a point where you can not only survive, but thrive, in a world that may be permanently altered.

Read more Read less. Add all three to Cart Add all three to List. One of these items ships sooner than the other. Buy the selected items together This item: Ships from and sold by Amazon. Prepper's Long-Term Survival Guide: The Prepper's Water Survival Guide: Customers who bought this item also bought. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Alton's Antibiotics and Infectious Disease: The Prepper's Canning Guide: Here's how restrictions apply. Review Never with this much conviction have I recommended that a book must be purchased and read from cover-to-cover.

This page resource starts your preparedness efforts from the beginning two week disaster and takes you through, step-by-step, to more longer term disasters. I'd like to read this book on Kindle Don't have a Kindle? Is this feature helpful? Thank you for your feedback. Share your thoughts with other customers.

Write a customer review. See all customer images. Read reviews that mention prepper blueprint tess pennington highly recommend common sense easy to read short term long term great book everyone needs easy to understand seems like food storage covers just about everything highly recommended clear and concise like the fact recommend this book everything you need well written well worth. Showing of reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now.

How to survive a global disaster: a handy guide

Please try again later. I have been following the author's on-line posts for years. Tess Pennington has a very good series on her web site: In order to prepare the 52 week series, Tess interviewed a lot of experts in the field; many contributed articles for the series. This book is based on that series.

I recommend that you go to the web link above and check out the series. If you like what the author posted on her site, you will like this book.