Hard Choices: Weighing Present Needs Against Future Risks

The devastation wrought by the Los Angeles fires is heartbreaking - thousands displaced, families who have lost everything, brave firefighters facing impossible odds. But as fires illuminate the night sky over Pacific Palisades, they reveal something beyond the immediate tragedy. In the rush to cast blame and point fingers, we glimpse a fundamental truth about disaster preparedness that echoes far beyond emergency response into the realms of business continuity and organizational resilience.

The Path Forward: Honesty Before Heroics

We need to forge a new social contract between stakeholders, risk management experts, and emergency response leaders. But this isn't just about establishing preparedness levels - it's about having the courage to explicitly name which disaster scenarios we're willing to fund preparation for, and which ones exceed our collective appetite for investment. Most importantly, it's about ending the cynical cycle of underfunding preparation followed by finger-pointing and blame when disasters exceed our agreed-upon capabilities.

A Tale of Two Impossibilities

The current Los Angeles fires, described by experts as "entirely foreseeable," highlight this paradox perfectly. Despite being one of the most fire-aware regions in America, with Los Angeles County facing higher wildfire risks than 99% of U.S. counties, the area still found itself overwhelmed. As Fire Chief Anthony Marrone candidly admitted, "L.A. County and all 29 fire departments in our county are not prepared for this type of widespread disaster."

Consider the three one-million-gallon water tanks positioned throughout the region for firefighting. In the aftermath, as critics sharpen their knives, the questions feel almost reflexive: Why only three? Why not seven? Why not twenty? But this criticism willfully ignores the brutal reality of resource allocation in our communities. Which elected official would survive advocating for tripling the investment in water tanks when local teachers haven't seen a raise in five years? When mental health services struggle for funding? When affordable housing remains a distant dream for so many?

The rush to blame leadership misses the point entirely. This isn't a story of negligence - it's a story of impossible expectations meeting limited resources. When Santa Ana winds reached 70 mph and multiple fires ignited simultaneously, even the most robust preparation proved insufficient. As Professor Char Miller of Pomona College noted, emergency services faced a confluence of factors that no one wanted to see combined.

In this calculus of preparation versus possibility, we face an uncomfortable truth: there will never be enough tanks, enough engines, enough firefighters to completely eliminate risk. And in a world of finite resources, every dollar spent preparing for potential disasters is a dollar not spent addressing immediate human needs. These aren't just difficult choices - they're impossible.

The Business Continuity Mirror

This challenge mirrors what I've witnessed in organizational disaster recovery planning, where the tension between practical preparation and infinite possibility creates painful dilemmas. Companies often grapple with defining their preparation scope - and the conversations can quickly spiral from reasonable scenarios to apocalyptic ones.

I remember sitting in a business continuity planning session where we started discussing preparation for a 36-hour regional power outage affecting our primary data center - a realistic scenario with clear, actionable mitigation strategies. But as often happens in these sessions, the conversation soon ventured into darker territory: "But what if a nuclear strike hits our primary data center and takes out 75% of our workforce?"

The room fell silent. How do you even begin to prepare for such devastation? More importantly, in a world where such an event occurs, would maintaining business continuity even matter? The sobering reality is that some scenarios are so catastrophic that preparing for them might be futile - the world that emerges from such events would be fundamentally different from the one we're preparing to protect.

Just as Los Angeles residents expect complete protection from fires, stakeholders often expect perfect business continuity, regardless of the disaster's scale. But in both cases, the reality of limited resources demands more nuanced conversations. We must find the courage to say: "Here are the specific scenarios we're preparing for, and here are the ones that exceed our capabilities or where preparation might be futile given the broader consequences."

The Preparation Paradox

Here's the uncomfortable truth, one I've confronted repeatedly in my years working in risk management and disaster planning: preparing for the "worst case" is impossible by definition. The worst case is always beyond our imagination's reach, and even if we could define it precisely, we couldn't afford to prepare for it.

When resources are finite—whether they're fire engines, water tanks, or disaster recovery systems—we must make difficult choices about what level of preparedness we're willing to fund and what immediate human and business needs we'll sacrifice to achieve that level. Each decision carries real consequences, both for the disasters we hope never come and the daily challenges we know our communities and businesses face.

A New Social Contract

The solution isn't to abandon preparation but to reframe it through explicit scenario planning and funding commitments. We need an approach where:

1. Stakeholders, experts, and response leaders collectively identify specific disaster scenarios they're preparing for
2. Communities and organizations explicitly acknowledge which scenarios exceed their preparation level
3. Everyone commits to sustained funding for agreed-upon scenarios, even through years without disasters
4. We end the counterproductive cycle of blame when disasters exceed our agreed-upon preparation levels

Most importantly, we need to recognize that beyond these agreed-upon scenarios, negative outcomes aren't failures of leadership but accepted risks of our collective choices about resource allocation.

Moving Forward Together

As I watch the heartbreaking footage of homes burning along Pacific Coast Highway, I'm reminded that blame serves no one. This cycle of underfunding preparation followed by recrimination must end. Instead, we must channel our energy into honest discussions about what specific scenarios we're truly willing and able to prepare for.

But these conversations must happen before disasters strike. We need to explicitly agree on our preparation priorities - which scenarios we will fund, and which ones exceed our collective willingness to invest. Only then can we break free from the destructive pattern of underfunding followed by blame.

The Los Angeles fires teach us that the path to resilience isn't through unlimited preparation but through honest dialogue and shared responsibility. Only by acknowledging our limitations and explicitly agreeing on funded scenarios can we build truly sustainable preparedness strategies—whether we're protecting neighborhoods, networks, communities, or companies.

Let us honor the suffering of those affected by these fires by learning from them, having these difficult but necessary conversations about preparation priorities, and building more resilient systems based not on impossible expectations but on sustainable commitments we're all willing to make and maintain. But most importantly, let's end the cynical cycle of underfunding preparation only to point fingers when disaster strikes.