DSBlog

September 1st will mark the midway point of the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season. Right on cue, Hurricane Irene reminded Americans of the loss of life and significant property damage these storms can cause, and thus of the vital need for a robust forecasting capability. Too bad, then, that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) saw its budget cut by over $140 million this year, with more reductions likely in the fiscal year beginning October 1st.

Irene finished its destructive run up the Eastern seaboard – spawning tornadoes and massive flooding along the way – only a few days before the six-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It was Katrina, more than any other storm in recent memory, that highlighted the vital role of the government in preparing its people for natural hazards, and what happens when it fails at that task.

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator W. Craig Fugate, who has spent most of his career in hurricane-prone Florida, pointed to FEMA’s Irene response as the culmination of the agency’s post-Katrina turnaround. On Sunday he described what basically amounts to a doctrine of preemption for natural hazards: “[W]e shouldn’t have to wait until a state is overwhelmed to begin getting ready,” he said. “[W]e should be able to go in before the governor’s made a request, have supplies ready, have our teams in the state and work as one team, not waiting for damages to occur and that formal request to come.”

Of course in order to do that one needs a deep bench of meteorological expertise and expensive equipment like remote sensing satellites to make on-the-spot decisions, such as the one that prompted FEMA not to order mass evacuations in Florida because it (accurately) predicted Irene would make landfall in North Carolina rather than farther south.

NOAA’s total FY2011 budget appropriations are $4.52 billion, 3 percent below what was approved in FY2010. More importantly, Congressional appropriators removed a sizeable budget increase requested by the Administration for NOAA satellite programs, including the Joint Polar-Orbiting Satellite System (JPSS). NOAA’s Operations, Research and Facilities account will get $3.185 billion ($119 million below FY2010) and its Procurement, Acquisition and Construction account, which funds the agency’s satellite programs, will get $1.335 billion ($23 million below FY2010, but $865 million below the amount requested by the Administration).

In deliberations over the FY2012 budget request, the momentum for further cuts is already evident. “The future funding for our satellite program is very much in limbo right now,” NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco told National Public Radio in May. “Satellites are a must-have when it comes to being prepared in detecting and tracking dangerous tropical weather. Not having satellites and not applying their latest capabilities could spell disaster.” Nevertheless, she added, “[w]e are likely looking at a period of time a few years down the road where we will not be able to do severe storm warnings and long-term weather forecasts that people have come to expect today.”

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1st through November 30th. As in prior years, NOAA’s National Weather Service issued a pre-season forecast, which we wrote about in mid-May. A few weeks ago it issued its regular August update to that forecast, noting that “storms through October will form more frequently and become more intense than we’ve seen so far this season.”

The agency now sees, with a 70-percent probability, a total of:

• 14 to 19 named storms (top winds of 39 mph or higher), including:
• 7 to 10 hurricanes (top winds of 74 mph or higher), of which:
• 3 to 5 could be major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5; winds of at least 111 mph)

“These ranges are indicative of an active season, and extend well above the long-term seasonal averages of 11 named storms, six hurricanes and two major hurricanes,” NOAA says.

As Congress deliberates the FY2012 NOAA and FEMA budgets amidst an unprecedented wave of pressure for wholesale federal budget cuts and a move to freeze discretionary spending at 2008 levels, it should keep in mind what’s still in store for the Eastern seaboard just in the way of hurricanes – and try to remember that at least some government programs are not a complete waste of money.

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Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is inviting public comments on the “foundational concepts” of its recently released Presidential Policy Directive 8 (PPD-8) on National Preparedness, and more specifically on the draft National Preparedness Goal (NPG) now in development.

PPD-8 specifically mandates the development of “a national preparedness goal that identifies the core capabilities necessary for preparedness and a national preparedness system to guide activities that will enable the Nation to achieve the goal. The system will allow the Nation to track the progress of our ability to build and improve the capabilities necessary to prevent, protect against, mitigate the effects of, respond to, and recover from those threats that pose the greatest risk to the security of the Nation.”

Keeping up the brisk pace of deadlines outlined in the PPD-8 Implementation Plan, FEMA will take comments regarding the NPG on a specially configured website only until noon on September 2. The first edition of the NPG is expeced to hit the President’s desk by September 25. An initial description of the National Preparedness System is due by November 24.

For background reference, readers can view our analysis of the original PPD-8 Directive here, and of the PPD-8 Implementation Plan here and here.

A review package with the first draft of the NPG can be found here. Website commenters will first need to register, which they can do by visiting FEMA’s Collaboration Community.

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Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.

In the past three weeks, law enforcement and public safety authorities in several British and American metropolitan areas have faced an unprecedented surge in social disruption and violent crime at the hands of so-called ‘flash mobs’ – public gatherings organized largely via social media and email with little advance notice.

Most flash events are intended to be fun or even silly rather than destructive (group singing or dancing, the occasional mass pillow fight), even though all require the attention and resources of local law enforcement. But even a cursory look at the recent U.K. and U.S. cases shows just how variegated these events really were – and thus how tricky it can be to formulate a properly calibrated response.

Manchester, Birmingham and London: These were the most violent and prolonged of the recent cases, involving nightly rioting, looting and arson that went on for several days before being contained by a massive police response in which netted over 1,200 arrests. Manchester police used Flickr to publish security-camera photos of looting suspects and then did a name-and-shame exercise by tweeting the names, birth dates and partial addresses of those convicted. And in a speech before an emergency session of Parliament, Prime Minister David Cameron said that “we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via [social media] websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality. I have also asked the police if they need any other new powers.”

San Francisco: Authorities at the city’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) commuter rail network, caught unprepared by a July 11 protest against the recent shooting death of a knife-wielding homeless man by transit police, which halted rush-hour service on two-thirds of its trains, learned of a second protest planned for August 11 (using cell phones for coordination) and temporarily switched off cellular signals on its underground train platforms at 4:00 PM that day. No protest materialized, although BART’s website was subsequently hacked in protest of its preemptive move. BART defended its action by noting that it its riders have “a constitutional right to safety.”

Philadelphia, et al.: Small bands of roving youths indiscriminately assaulted pedestrians while larger gatherings shut down sections of the City of Brotherly Love. Several other urban areas around the country suffered store robberies, shootings and other random attacks– most the result of flash events organized over social media. The responses in Philly, Kansas City, Cleveland and a few other places were curfews for youths under 18, with broader calls for legislative or executive action aimed at curbing the use of social media in such instances.

Los Angeles: In the strangest case yet, but also one that attracted a great deal of attention, the rapper known as The Game tweeted his 580,000 followers about a music internship that gave the help line number of the busy Compton Station of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. He deleted the tweet, calling it accidental, after the Sheriff’s Office complained, but not before the line was tied up for close to three hours. It was a virtual flash mob or, if you prefer, a low-tech version of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. After initial talk of filing a criminal complaint the Compton Station dropped the idea but was reportedly consulting with legal experts to see whether legislation could be developed to address social media messages that may cause harm to public safety, while still respecting individuals’ rights to freedom of speech.

We wrote about the rise of flash events last February in a report on special-event security and Super Bowl XLV in Texas in which we noted that such events “are now proliferating at such a rapid rate that the security profession is seeking innovative solutions to handle them.”

Some of those solutions may appear quickly in the form of new technological or procedural approaches, but it will take more time for cooler heads to think through the broader implications of flash events and official government responses to them – especially since they touch directly on important constitutional issues such as freedom of speech and assembly.

We will offer some thoughts of our own in a future post, but it’s already clear that the issue does not lend itself to easy solutions, nor will a one-size-fits-all approach be likely to work. That said, it’s equally clear that, as we put it in our paper, “flash events are here to stay.”

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Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.

As if a combined earthquake and tsunami were not enough to command the attention of the world’s nuclear power authorities, a new report says they should be adding solar storms to the list of natural hazard risks that have the potential to trigger nuclear reactor failures.

Just six months ago, the first two of this trifecta of hazards inflicted massive damage on northeastern Japan’s nuclear power plants (not to mention a wide swath of the region’s communities, farms and businesses). Now, the International Business Times reports that severe solar storm activity could “induce geomagnetic currents that could destroy a substantial fraction of the very largest transformers on the power grid,” knocking out electric power “for a period of years and possibly decades.”

“Last month,” IBT writes, “the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that U.S. plants affected by a blackout should be able to cope without electricity for at least eight hours and should have procedures to keep the reactor and spent-fuel pool cool for 72 hours.” Any longer-lasting electrical power outage obviously would increase the risk of a meltdown. The article also pointed to a recent report by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which “discloses that over the standard 40-year license term of nuclear power plants, solar flare activity provides a 33 percent chance of long-term power loss. This is a risk far greater than most other natural disasters, including major earthquakes and tsunamis.”

The issue of solar flares is not new one, but it came into focus again after a surge of geomagnetic activity reported last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. Our friends at the All Hazards blog reported that at one point, “the Kp index (a measure of the amount of geomagnetic disturbance…) hit ‘8’ which is pretty impressive.” (See graph at right, courtesy of NOAA.) As for the impact of such activity, it noted that a widespread outage of even a few days “could cause some big problems for nuclear power plants. Such a long-term power outage really needs to be on our preparedness radar – both for individuals (e.g., by keeping a rolling food store) and for emergency managers.”

For further reading on space weather and its impact on the planet, check out the two-part series that ran in March of this year in The Washington Post (Part 1 here and Part 2 [which addresses the impact on nuclear power] here). The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign published an eight-page paper in May entitled “Solar Storms Effects on Nuclear and Electrical Installations.” And in February, All Hazards published its own “Quick Guide to Space Weather and Solar Flares.”

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Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.

The German police have rejected the use of body scanners after testing the equipment at Hamburg Airport for 10 months and finding it sorely lacking. Security officials cited slow processing speeds and an excessive number of false positives, as well as concerns over both the health and privacy of travelers.

According to a story in the German weekly Welt am Sonntag that was picked up and translated into English by Agence France-Presse,  “35 percent of the 730,000 passengers checked by the scanners set off the alarm more than once despite being innocent.”

These are the same scanners, made by L-3 Communications, that have been rolled out in many U.S. airports, without much public debate in advance, and to similar criticism and concerns.

The report noted that the U.S. “stepped up the deployment of body scanners at airports after a Nigerian man was accused of trying to ignite explosives concealed in his underwear during a Christmas day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in 2009. Washington then urged the European Union to follow suit but Europeans decided to first study their impact on health and privacy.”

Other European states that are testing body scanners include Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Finland.

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Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.