EDMG503Wk5

No disaster exists in isolation. One disaster such as an earthquake might bring about other disasters such as destruction of fragile economic and social systems, as happened in Haiti. In Japan, one disaster--an earthquake and tsunami--brought about another disaster--nuclear meltdown. It is always important when evaluating the potential for disaster to view the impact as an impact to a system.

One system that is always impacted is the economy. Impacts pretty much always occur to the personal, private, and public sectors in every disaster. The irony is that this can be planned for through mitigation and resilience development at a significantly lower cost than through recovery and restoration. We simply don't have the foresight, as a people, to be able to view it that way. We have to first be burned before we consider something to be hot. After we get burned, we tend to develop more and better foresight.

One of the 'agree to disagree' or 'vehemently disagree' topics will always be personal vs. collective responsibility for disaster preparation and recovery. These literally depend on which way the political winds are blowing, and represent a perpetual challenge for the emergency manager, who must not only walk the fine line of attempting to accomplish both to the maximum extent possible at the same time, but also be prepared for the wind to start blowing the opposite direction at any given time.