Zombies and Emergency Preparedness
Using a zombie apocalypse to illustrate the need for emergency preparedness is not a new idea. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) created a zombie preparedness comic book in 2011. Several lecture series companies have also jumped on the bandwagon. It is much more interesting for a conference room of professionals to discuss emergency preparedness in the context of rampaging zombie hordes, rather than a relatively boring snow storm/flood/wind event. Also, if you are trying to prepare for the worst case scenario that you can actually survive (direct hits from thermos-nuclear devices and alien invasions are excluded from this category), legions of cannibalistic undead will get you prepared enough to shelter in place for an influenza outbreak or a large scale power outage. So I would reinforce that if you are going to plan for a really bad day, a zombie preparedness kit is not a bad idea. But could we learn any other emergency management lessons from the undead genre? I think so…
Presidential Policy Directive 8 divides emergency management activities into five categories: prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery. Let’s take a look at them.
Prevention: Science and technology can take some good prevention notes from the zombie genre, the main being look out for unintended consequences. In the Resident Evil franchise, the T-virus was developed for military purposes, containment of the virus is lost, apocalypse. Similar events unfold in the 28 Days Later franchise (I know they were not true zombies, but close). Will Smith’s film version of I Am Legend (vampires in the novella, I know) started when measles were mutated to cure cancer. This sort of genetic manipulation (CRISPR and others) is already here. Pay heed science guys!
Protection: Ok, zombies are starting to pop up. Law enforcement and the military will be our first line of protection. Judging from the genre, communication about the situation might not get out quickly enough. In Fear the Walking Dead, the population and the police seem to be unaware that the “flu” outbreak is creating killer zombies. We saw this sort of uncertainty in messaging and policy with the Ebola cases in the United States this summer. Only a few cases were reported, including one fatality, but exposures of medical personnel happened, and quarantines were broken.
Mitigation: This goes back to learning lessons from things like the Ebola response, and applying them our future outbreaks and research.
Response: Protections have failed, and we have a full zombie epidemic on our hands. Time to respond. Again, Fear the Walking Dead has interesting example of how this would play out. The military will set up some safe zones, and protect the civilian population. But on television and in movies, these safe zones usually turn into death traps, and need to be sterilized. In Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the response was nuking an entire city. To find something a little less sinister, we can look to the Max Brooks novel World War Z (which shares nothing but a title with the Brad Pitt movie). In the novel, humanity does retract into strongholds around the world until it can re-organize.
Recovery: Picking up the pieces and starting over. Most movies and television show don’t go this far, but again, the World War Z novel shows us what this world might look like. After systematically pushing back the zombie hordes, humanity take control. Governments are reformed, cities rebuilt, and society moves forward.
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