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The following is an excerpt from “All Disasters Are Local,” the second paper in our Inside The Box series.

“While certain areas [of the U.S.] may carry an outsized share of the nation’s natural hazard risk burdens, no state or region or town is completely immune. In such an environment, well-applied risk management principles allow the individuals responsible for the safety of people and assets to sleep better at night, fully aware that while they may be selectively ignoring some of the major hazards… they are paying proportionately closer attention to the ones most likely to come their way and inflict major losses.

This is hardly an unimportant point. In fact we would argue that a well-grounded sense of what not to worry about lies at the heart of risk management. It liberates small private asset owners from worrying needlessly about many remote or nonexistent possibilities and allows them to focus instead on the few hazards of greatest likelihood, thus giving them a better chance of deploying the resources needed to control or avoid them.

By the same token, emergency managers at the county or state level – whose geographic responsibilities are sufficiently broad to ensure that most every natural hazard scenario will happen someday, and whose jobs it will be to respond no matter how small the event – are potentially the biggest beneficiaries of a comprehensive, prioritized multi-hazard picture. For them it holds the key to preparing well for any eventuality, even if they end up confronting only a handful of crises during their careers.”

Read the full paper here.

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