Most industrial parks don’t include SCUBA divers in their recovery plans. But car companies and a shoe maker in Thailand – but nowhere near the ocean – had to hire divers to retrieve hard-to-replace moulds from submerged factories in November. “No one thought about such a worst-case scenario”, said one company president. “In future we will need to reconsider the flood risk.”

They sure will. Three (3) major rivers – the Chao Phraya, Lopburi and Pa Sak – converge around the industrial estates in Ayutthaya. But companies obviously decided that tax incentives and the proximity of suppliers outweighed the risks of catastrophic flooding. Or maybe they just skipped a risk assessment entirely.

Supply chain resilience strategy: don’t build a shoe-, car- or disk drive factory in a floodplain. Some companies may even avoid Thailand. Impact: if one Japanese multinational were to choose, say, Vietnam or Myanmar for its next factory, others would follow, beginning a chain of falling dominoes for Thailand – eventually. Prime Minister Shinawatra’s crisis management effort is just beginning.

• In addition to flooding and storms, risks in Asia include volcanoes, earthquakes and volcanoes with earthquakes – not generally worries in Europe or North America.

Would you invite the one person in the world most associated with incompetent flood preparedness and response to be the chairman of a conference on flood preparedness and response? Me, neither.

Here’s the program agenda for a “Flood Fighters” conference that started today in the U.K. It’s a “forum for all agencies to plan and work together,” according to its web site. There’s a concurrent Flood Fighters workshop, targeted at “individuals who will manage teams of responders and rescuers at water and flood incidents.”

The conference chairman is Michael D. Brown, former head of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during hurricane Katrina.

You probably remember Mr. Brown and FEMA’s under-funded, uncoordinated, incredibly slow response to the flooding of New Orleans. U.S. President Bush mistakenly – but memorably – said of Brown’s performance: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” That Michael Brown.

Mr. Brown had no emergency management experience prior to joining FEMA as General Counsel in 2001. He had been a lawyer, teacher, legislative staffer and the Judges and Stewards Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. He resigned from FEMA in ignominy after hurricane Katrina. He is now an advisor to a company selling data analysis systems for homeland security.  Read more... (677 words, 1 image, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)

I think it disgraceful that a nation that spends USD $275 million per day on rebuilding Iraq cannot clean and paint a dozen, life-saving fire stations in New Orleans in the year-and-a-half since Hurricane Katrina.

So in April I volunteered with Continuity Cares to assist for a day in repair and rehabilitation in America’s home of gumbo, jazz, Fat Tuesday – and oil refining.

Continuity Cares is the public-spirit inspiration of Bob Nakao of Continuity Insights – a controlled-circulation magazine and a genuinely-useful annual BCP conference that I attended a few days earlier – with the sponsorship of French bank BNP Paribas North America and the Sheraton New Orleans hotel.

With about 20 other people, I spent an afternoon at the District 4 firehouse in the Read Boulevard East neighborhood.  Here’s a short slide show (17 photos).

We scraped, sanded and painted the entire inside of the building, helping its firefighters whose “station” has been a trailer since August, 2005. Many of them have been living in trailers, too, because their homes were destroyed.

The firefighter in this picture shows how high the flood waters rose outside the firehouse. Inside, the water was eighteen inches (45 cm) deep – for days.

This is only the twelfth (12^th) of New Orleans’ twenty-five (25) fire stations to be repaired. Half of the city’s stations are still unusable.  Read more... (564 words, 1 image, estimated 2:15 mins reading time)

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and the Belgian Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters report that 360 natural disasters in 2005 (an average of one each day) caused US$160 billion in damage; Hurricane Katrina damage was 78% ($125 billion) of that amount. This is the summary: more people were affected by more disasters, but there were fewer deaths. Here are the report’s graphics.