“My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.”
- Hedley Lamar, Blazing Saddles
Cascading Events and Unintended Consequences
At the end of 2007, Warren Buffett predicted that if unemployment continued, “the dominoes would fall” and the U.S. economy would fall into recession in 2008. He warned that trading in financial derivatives would create catastrophic risks for the U.S. economy, and he was correct. As we saw in 2008, the U.S. economy collapsed and a domino effect occurred not only throughout the U.S., but throughout the global economy. But what was the root cause of this collapse? The Queen of England asked this question of the British Academy to better understand how such a thing could happen. She was told that everyone seemed to be doing their own job properly and many were doing it well. “The failure was to see how collectively this added up to a series of interconnected imbalances… Individual risks may rightly have been viewed as small, but the risk to the system as a whole was vast”.
Emergency management is the same type of system. It involves various parts and pieces all working together toward a common goal, whether that goal is to better prepare a community, mitigate against future harm, respond to an event, or provide for the effective recovery of a community after disaster. Each piece is important to the success of the networked system, and one failure can lead to a cascade of failures much like the intricacies found in the U.S. financial market.
Click. The domino falls.
This has recently been seen in Colorado with a series of disasters and the ripple effects that have followed. In 2012, a number of large-scale wildfires occurred throughout the state, leading to the greatest devastation in the state’s history. The following year, the wildfires continued with more devastation only to be followed by the worst disaster in Colorado history — a catastrophic flood that caused destruction in seventeen counties. When people talk about these disasters, they speak as if it was some anomaly that will never happen again. This can be a very dangerous notion as it does not allow these folks to see the next cascade coming.
Click. Another domino falls.
The wildfires and floods weren’t random events. In many ways, they could have been predicted much like the financial crisis. Let’s take wildfires for example.
1. Anyone living in the western United States knows that forest management practices in the 1960s led to the overgrowth of our forests, creating an environment of high fuel load.
2. On top of that, Colorado spent over a decade in a severe drought, drying out all of this fuel.
3. Along with this drought came the changing of the soils, no longer able to handle the same amount of moisture as before.
4. And let’s not forget about climate change — which has caused weather changes throughout the United States.
Click.
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So how do you stop the dominoes from falling? How do you end the cascade of events that follow a catastrophic incident? Primarily, it is necessary to remain aware of the possibility of the cascade occurring. The wildfire season of 2012 was not completely unpredictable. Many fire managers warned of catastrophic wildfire events, but were ignored because past history didn’t line up with their predictions. Policy makers were unable to see the pieces and parts in their individual forms as a threat. It was only those who looked at the system as a whole who were able to see the dominoes fall. And they did…
Click.
The weather changed. Lightning sparked the scorched land and the winds drove the embers into a raging firestorm destroying everything in its path. The earth, scorched from the extreme heat, was no longer able to absorb moisture. Then the rains came.
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The burn areas all flooded, sending debris flows and sediment into the waterways. The rain continued past the initial storm and filled rivers and streams so fast that thousands became trapped in the mountains with no way out until the National Guard provided a ride out of the area.
Many think it’s over, that we are out of the woods. But I see that the cascade is continuing. What they fail to see is something very simple — the tall green grass in the hills of Colorado. The rains caused the grasses to grow, lush and long, and with the next dry season, those grasses will become one more element in the increased fire load.
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A failure to look forward and see the cascade can very well lead to another domino falling causing a collapse of the entire system as was shown in the Hurricane Katrina disaster in Louisiana, and more recently in Ferguson, Missouri. Initially only affecting the small community, events that followed have created a ripple throughout the United States with rioting and protests.
Some disasters cannot be predicted. Some disasters cannot be stopped. But in many cases, those disasters can be minimized by looking ahead, and by looking from a systems perspective to see not only the individual parts and pieces but also how each part affects the whole. By doing this, we may be able to identify small failures early and correct them before they cause the next domino to fall.
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