When Mother Nature Bites Back
Be prepared was the motto of the scouting movement, I looked?again today and now it's:
“be inspired, be different, be prepared!”
How far have we come that it’s no longer a matter of routine to be prepared??Our national resilience thinking talks about the need to deal with the long term stresses as well as the short term shocks, such as Storm Arwen.?During the current pandemic, a number of resilience professionals have commented on the gap between central and local government in the areas of disaster planning and response, the recent review of national resilience by the House of Lords reported that :
“Local-level discussions on risk pre-pandemic were far stronger than they were centrally.”413
Understanding the need to take planning decisions locally and to act locally are perhaps two of the Resilience take-aways from the pandemic. Back in the summer, we had a call from a client whose site is located in a pre-war commercial development: they got a text late at night telling them that their power had gone off around their premisses due to a substation fault and that this would be fixed in the hour.?This happens from time to time and is usually fixed in short order, the “sub-station fault” is often the default response for some power suppliers’ call centres. The following morning further texts revealed that the power had not been fixed.?After 90 years of rain and frost-action, the legacy distribution cable had corroded though and short-circuited to earth.?Rather than being cased by an immediate shock, the cumulative freeze-thaw action had created long term stress on the feeder cable ultimately causing it to fail.?
This took the power company time to find the fault, cut out the corroded section and make good a repair.?As a small service-oriented business our customer was not impacted by this. They were in fact delighted that the UPS we had specified had kept their CCTV and security system in operation.?But what if they were a business that had?more critical systems? What if they were an employer who contributed to the local economy? This is certainly just a local issue, but what does it tell us about the way our critical infrastructure is run??Might it suggest that utilities we have traditionally taken for granted are, due to age, not as reliable as they were say 50 or 100 years ago? ?
The recent House Of Lords report: Preparing for Extreme Risks: Building a Resilient Society echoed the fact that our infrastructure will degrade over time, they made over thirty recommendations, the third on their list was the need to recognise that our critical infrastructure is depreciating. IE: we are not investing in it.
The report identifies that our critical infrastructure is depreciating and that it needs investment.?What is not clear is when and where that investment will arrive and where it will come from.?With governance obligations to meet, many businesses and many local authorities are not in a position to wait for these kinds of investment decisions. To revert back to the Scouts, you might want to be different and be prepared. As Winter draws in here are a few things to consider:
If you need help starting down the road, then please get in touch?
#Resilience #CriticalInfrastucture #EmergencyPlanning #SME #SmallBusiness #BusinessImpactAnalysis #Arwen #PowerSupply
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