Lessons Learned from an Epic Storm

At LMI’s annual Family Picnic on Saturday, the hot topic of conversation was the devastating impacts that the region endured beginning with Friday night’s epic storm. On a day where temperatures easily exceeded 100°F, many, if not all the people I spoke with didn’t yet have power at home. Today’s Monday Tuesday and many of them still don’t.

We can’t say this event, labeled an “in-land hurricane” by some, a “super derecho” by others, is related to a changing climate. I’d just as soon rather not dwell the cause, and focus on the facts.

This event:

·         Lasted 12 hours during its 700 mile run from Indiana to the mid-Atlantic coast

·         Featured gusting winds in excess of 70mph, with some places experiencing 91mph gusts

·         Left more than 1 million without power in the Washington, D.C. area alone (and 2.2 million overall, with “catastrophic damage” to the electrical grid).

The ferocity and timing are amazing to consider. That a storm could sweep through (And quickly! At my house it was a violent half hour and then it was over) and coincide with record high temperatures, is something few could have expected.

Consider the broad impact: the storm damage has disrupted infrastructure and the supply chain, along with regional IT and communications capabilities—parts of Northern Virginia were without 911 services for the entire weekend, and major cloud-based services operated by Amazon, Netflix, Instatgram and Pinterest were among the casualties. These were not small fish that were knocked out, reinforcing just how bad things were.

Add to that the public health issues. Already, the region was bracing for high temperatures—with the standard alerts and warnings that come with a forecasted heat wave. But no one envisioned such an event in which people would be forced to deal with the heat without the benefits of power for air conditioning, cell phone service for checking in on loved ones and coordinating activities, or clean water to drink.

A woman and her great-granddaughter at a Red Cross cooling shelter in Lynchburg, Va. Photo credit: Parker Michels-Boyce/AP

Again, whether or not climate change is at the root of this remains inconsequential so much as what organizations are prepared to do to adapt to these types of events.

This is the type of cross-functional impact that we talk about in our new climate change book—events with impacts that cross over to other areas and demand collaborative action from a multitude of agencies and stakeholders on every level. Whether they represent the private or public sectors, organizations have got to begin developing plans of action to account for their people, processes, and assets when debilitating events occur.

Whether it’s a better system for early warnings, using social media for first response, building hardened infrastructure, or adapting your supply routes, these are wise strategies that should be adopted by state, local, and federal governments, and supported and adopted by private sector organizations. It’s the smart thing to do. And if we do have an event that we can definitively chalk up to climate change, then we’re that much better prepared to respond.