Libya Floods- A failure in Crisis management

Africa’s deadliest storm in recorded history struck eastern Libya on Sunday and Monday, leaving thousands dead and an already struggling society faced with a gigantic recovery effort. Storm Daniel’s preliminary death toll of 5,300 in Libya as of Wednesday morning surpasses the 1927 floods in Algeria (3,000 killed) as the deadliest storm in Africa since 1900, according to statistics from EM-DAT, the international disaster database.

Daniel — dubbed a “medicane” for its hurricane-like characteristics – drew enormous energy from extremely warm sea water. And a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor that can fall as rain, experts said. Medicanes form once or twice a year in the Mediterranean and are most common from September to January. They're not generally true hurricanes, but can reach hurricane strength on rare occasions, said Simon Mason, chief climate scientist at the Columbia Climate School’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society.

Human activity and climate change (ESG Risks) together are producing compound effects of storms and land use. Flooding in Greece was worsened by wildfires, loss of vegetation, and loose soils and the catastrophic flooding in Libya was made worse by poorly maintained infrastructure.

The United Nations said that most of the thousands of deaths in Libya's flood disaster could have been averted if early warning and emergency management systems (preventive controls) had functioned properly. Libya’s National Meteorological Center did indeed issue early warnings for this extreme weather event, which saw unprecedented rainfall levels (414.1 mm in 24 hours in one station) which caused the flash floods and the collapse of the dams. The warnings were issued for heavy precipitation and floods but didn’t address the risk posed by the ageing dams (ineffective controls). The enormous surge of water burst two upstream river dams and reduced the city of Derna to an apocalyptic wasteland where entire city blocks and untold numbers of people were washed into the Mediterranean Sea. Lacking weather forecasting, dissemination and action on early warnings was a large contributor to the size of the disaster. This combined with the years-long internal conflict (Political risk) wracking the country meant its meteorological observing IT network has been very much destroyed or outdated (IT/Technology Risks). While no evacuation was ordered (business continuity risk), a curfew was ordered in several eastern towns, including Derna, meaning most people were in their homes when the dams burst. One cannot deny the fact that there was no capacity to handle such a situation (Manpower risk), especially as the failure of the two dams created an "unprecedented" situation. Crisis management failed and disaster management has been broken down. ?The National Meteorological Center faces major gaps in its observing systems.

This brings up a key point on the need of a Crisis management plan and its regular testing. Crisis management is all about planning, preparation, and response. It’s a process that will help organizations and nations deal with unexpected tragedies and difficult situations. Why then do organizations and nations ignore early warning signs with alarming regularities? Part of the problem is that our minds are programmed to see what we want to see and disregard the rest. This is a combination of two forces: the almost overwhelming urge to listen to ideas that confirm what we believe, and the enormous difficulty we have in estimating the probability of events that are unusual for us. These forces have major implications. In organizations, this pushes C-level managers to overlook early warning signals and treat Risk managers as noise or as if they do not exist as they aren’t revenue generating functions. While organizations may recognize early warning signals as important and urgent, they underestimate their impact and continue to procrastinate, believing that inaction will not have serious consequences, or at least not soon. Crisis signals, crisis and crisis management are activities that people are reluctant to engage in. My prayers and condolences to the people of Libya and I sincerely hope organizations focus on the long term and consequences of what needs to be done so that the company comes out of the crisis stronger. It’s a Wake up call.