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.