Democracy on the Front Lines
City Administrator’s Blog
Walter Denton
May 25, 2010
The catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico does not have any direct implications to the City of O’Fallon, but it did get me thinking about emergency management. BP and Government officials say they are doing everything possible to respond to the crisis, but many people are getting frustrated with the lack of progress and are questioning the resources and abilities committed to the clean-up.
While I am not qualified to judge the competence of BP, the disaster shows the challenge and difficulty of responding to extreme incidents. In the emergency management world, disasters are classified along a spectrum ranging from high probability/low consequence events to low probability/high consequence events.
High probability/low consequence events are emergencies that occur fairly frequently but do not cause much widespread damage. Examples of high probability/low consequence events include fires, car accidents, storms, and localized flash flooding. Tornadoes may even be included here. Governments and organizations plan for these kinds of incidents fairly well because they happen often enough to be quantified and the risk is high enough that it is probable you could be affected by it in the short-term.
At the local government level, we prepare for high probability/low consequence events with police and fire departments, fire prevention building codes, mandatory storm drainage systems, and alert systems such as tornado sirens and CodeRed Reverse-911.
At the other end of the spectrum are low probability/high consequence events. These are catastrophic incidents that rarely occur, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, extreme flooding, major volcano eruptions, and major hurricanes. The damage from these events is truly horrific but they happen so infrequently they are difficult to prepare for. The City of O’Fallon is in an earthquake zone (the New Madrid Fault), but there has not been a major earthquake here since 1812. There is no way to know if the next “big one” will occur tomorrow, next year, five years, or in 100 years. How do you budget and prepare for an event that may never happen?
This is the dilemma facing BP with the oil spill. From what I read, there appeared to be four “fail safe” mechanisms that were designed to prevent the kind of spill that is now occurring. What are the odds that all four would fail at the same time? What are the odds that an oil rig would explode and release millions of gallons of oil at a depth that no one had ever had to plug? What are the odds that BP and the federal government would have to deal with such a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico’s most vulnerable wetlands?
I don’t know how well BP prepared for event like this. There has been a lot of finger-pointing, but I do know it is very difficult to plan for a low probability/high consequence event like this. Since it happens so infrequently, there are not very many people (if any) with any experience in dealing with it and there is virtually no way to prepare for it because it is so extreme. You can write a plan for it and talk about it and train for it, but you really don’t know how to respond until it happens.
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