Resilience is often seen by some through the lens of how many fire tenders or ambulances can be deployed into the scene of a disaster. Practitioners, however, know that underneath the somewhat numerical approach that can often be deemed suitable by those adept in counting beans there lies a far greater set of issues. Crisis Response is going to address these wider issues in a new series of articles that will be written by Dr Dave Sloggett entitled Resilience: Taking the wider view. 

Throughout a varied career extending over 40 years, Dr Dave Sloggett has worked with the military and the emergency services in a variety of roles as an advisor and mentor. He has travelled extensively, visiting Iceland, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans. His interests and professional activities have involved developing approaches to countering the impacts of terrorism, criminality and the use of satellite-based observations, in conjunction with in-situ observations, to monitor a range of natural disasters, such as volcanic eruptions, forest fires and major oceanic phenomena, in order to help target relief into affected areas.

The initial series of articles will cover four major themes. The first of these will take a detailed look at the events in London on July 7, 2005 and other historical terrorist events in the United Kingdom. The headline figure of 52 people who died tragically that day needs to be seen through a wider lens. The article will look at the time window in which the attack occurred and highlight how a small shift in its timing, measured in a matter of seconds, could have had a very different impact in terms of the casualty counts and the stress placed on the emergency services and specifically the hospitals involved. It concludes that the outcome could have been far worse.

The second article in the series will consider lessons that can be learnt from terrorist events that have occurred on the international stage, such as the train bombings in Madrid and Mumbai and the attacks on the hotels, hospitals and cafes in Mumbai on November 26 and 27, 2008.  The focus of this piece will also be on the issues of resilience and how the casualty counts could have varied if the circumstances of the attack had varied. In Madrid, for example, only ten of the 14 bombs placed actually detonated.

The third piece in the series will address the CB elements of a CBRN attack and the challenges that places on developing a resilient response. The Sarin Gas attack on the Tokyo Underground will be used as a case study. It is often forgotten in the analysis of that incident that the night before it took place the group planning the attack diluted the concentration levels of the Sarin significantly. The headline figure of 12 people killed and nearly 1,000 people affected by exposure to the gas could have been so much worse.

The final piece in the series will address the RN elements of CBRN. This will draw on events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to provide a baseline from which the kind of area immediately affected in a nuclear detonation can be estimated. Allowances will be factored into the analysis for the kind of yields that terrorist groups might be able to achieve given their access to materials and designs. The radiological element of CBRN will be addressed through analysis of the issues of fallout from Chernobyl and the recent tragedies in Japan. The use of polonium to kill the dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London will also form a case study in the piece.

The aim of the series is to inform those developing plans to handle such emergencies about the range of variables that can dramatically change the nature of the casualty counts involved and to create a debate on the nature of providing resilient responses to all forms of emergency situations; both man made and those that arise when the power of mother nature is unleashed. While many large-scale emergencies are often regarded as one-off events, history shows us that this is not the case. Organisations are simply often too busy to look into the history and use that to inform current approaches to preparedness. Knowledge management is not a primary focus for organisations whose preoccupation is the day job.

The hope is that through this series of articles and its associated debate, lessons can be learnt from history that will assist those involved in planning responses to international emergencies to be slightly better prepared.

Crisis Response Journal, Issue 7:1, is published at the end of May 2011.