Two Cans of Tomato Paste and Some Cocktail Olives

Personal disaster preparedness is an odd thing. It wasn’t until one crisp fall morning in October 2005 that I frankly paid any real attention to my personal emergency preparedness. I always figured that I would be at work, so why worry? But there I was mid-way through my Cheerios when the news story on the radio managed to penetrated the early morning mental fog. Some very stuffy PhD type from the CDC was using words like “catastrophic” and “inevitable” and the feature story was pandemic influenza.

At the time I was working as a continuity of operations specialist and I had been aware of the rumblings around H5N1. In my role as an action officer in our organizations emergency operations center with specific training in both emergency management and outbreaks of communicable disease, it was my job to be prepared to respond to a wide range of hazards. I was actually monitoring the developing situation with H5N1, but until that morning I had never previously heard a public health official openly use such blunt language. Whether it was the tone or the content, it made me stop and consider for the first time how prepared I really was for a pandemic. By the end of the feature I was standing in my kitchen looking at two cans of tomato paste and some cocktail olives. These three tasty items combined with some unidentifiable hunks of frozen mysteries in the icebox was the sum total of my personal preparedness. The emergency radio didn’t have batteries. The first aid kit which had once been a great EMT bag, had been ransacked and was in a sorry state. Here I was a professional in the field and somehow I had managed not to internalize the importance of my own personal preparedness.

If you are a single urban professional, its likely your pantry looks something like mine. The question is why? Why don’t we prepare? The National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University has conducted an annual “Survey of the American Public” each year for the last five years. In the fall of 2006 they published the latest titled “Where the American Public Stands on Terrorism, Security and Disaster Preparedness: Five-Years after September 11, One-Year after Hurricane Katrina”. It is worth reading the full report (found here: http://www.ncdp.mailman.columbia.edu/files/2006_white_paper.pdf ). What they found goes to the heart of the question of why. Over five years after the tragedy of 9-11, less than a third of Americans have a family emergency preparedness plan that everyone in the family is aware of. The staggering images from Katrina strangely did not change this number. Less than a third of American’s have a family emergency plan despite the fact that only 44% of Americans believe the government can protect them from terrorism, only 33% are confident that the government is ready for pandemic, and only about half believe their local communities can manage an adequate response in the event of a natural disaster or severe weather event.

And yet we don’t prepare. In this particular survey 26% of respondents said they were too busy, 21% said they were unsure what they should do, and 21% said they didn’t prepare because an emergency was unlikely. As humans I think we have a wonderful capacity to simultaneously hold conflicting conclusions in our minds. If you ask people what potential hazards might impact them, they can give you a list, but it doesn’t translate to personal action. Even those most educated about the real risks around us too often end up like I did, looking at the cocktail olives and scratching their heads. Public agencies at all levels have focused a great deal of effort since 9-11, and particularly since Katrina, emphasizing individual emergency preparedness. Public service announcements run constantly on everything from Hurricane preparedness to pandemic influenza. But we are not prepared.

In May of this year the good folks in Florida conducted a survey in the Gulf States and found that even after Katrina and Rita, 53% said they didn’t feel vulnerable to hurricanes or tornados. Over 52% had no family plan, over 61% had no hurricane appropriate disaster kit, and 88% had taken no steps to make their homes stronger. In addition to the immediate life-safety issues, over 21% still did not know what their insurance policy covered and four in ten hadn’t reviewed their policy in last year. A full 25% of American’s surveyed still didn’t know they need separate insurance for water and flood damage.

So even in regions plagued often by catastrophe, preparedness doesn’t stick. Why not? We could discuss at length the uniqueness of human psychology, of the limits of our biology to conceive of the real threat of a disaster before it happens. We could, as we have been, keep publishing unique and even creative public service announcements (for great examples see the 5th guy www.5thguy.com or http://www.codeready.com/) and urging the American citizenry to prepare. But it’s not working. The people open to the message, the people who already “get it”, see these announcements and take the warnings and urgings of governments seriously, but we don’t seem to be making much progress with everyone else. In fact some surveys show individual levels of preparedness eroding.

The reality of the world we live in is the simple fact that disastrous events are increasing in frequency and severity. Most of us live in areas with known and significant hazards. The ethic of individual preparedness needs something new, perhaps the able hand of a truly world-class marketing firm. It needs to get modern, it needs multiple channels, it needs to stop sounding like something our Mom told us to do when we were kids and more like something everybody’s doing, it needs to get sticky, it needs to be more approachable, and it needs to appeal to various audiences. And somehow we have to take the fear out of it –because I suspect underneath all that denial is a measure of fear, a “weirdness factor”, that is grounded in the thought that if you think too much about emergency preparedness then you have to think about some pretty unpleasant stuff.

Individual disaster preparedness is the cornerstone to any successful community emergency plan. It seems the right time for business to lend a hand…providing uber-sharp private sector marketing skills pro-bono to this problem would be the ultimate in community service. Do it because you are a great corporate citizen, do it for purely selfish corporate reasons (the better prepared individuals are, the more resilient the community and the smaller the impact to your business), but I am looking for that wonder firm or group of firms that can make all the difference.

Know a business up to the challenge?