Create an emergency preparedness plan.

This question, while highly important, is a bit vague. The kind of emergency that we are facing determines the kind of preparedness planning required.

What does that mean?

Working as a technical writer over the last 30 years, I have had to produce emergency procedures documents. The Australian financial industry is subject to myriad regulations and safety procedures. The Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA), created by legislation in 1998, oversees the implementation of risk management procedures by Australian authorised deposit-taking institutions.

The APRA has a standard, CPS 230, Operational Risk Management. This requires that your business institution have a plan in place to continue operations in the event of major disruptions or disasters. Identifying and managing your operational risks requires preparation, and that means having procedures – an emergency plan – in place. What happens when there is a fire, flooding, another pandemic, which severely degrades the capability of your institution to function?

Preparing for such emergencies requires preparation and planning.

Let’s step outside the world of business for a minute, and ask ourselves a question – what happens when private business creates a sociopolitical and environmental problem? Do governments have an emergency plan in place for those kinds of problems?

Why do I ask these questions? A long awaited report in Britain was released only earlier this year. A prolonged enquiry into the dilapidated and failing system of Britain’s waterway regulations and sewage management, the Cunliffe report, this review provides a damning indictment of the privatised water sector in Britain.

For instance, not only have water bills increased for households across Britain, major effusions of untreated sewage are dumped into waterways around the nation. Water stations and equipment are neglected, the companies that run water services, such as Thames Water, are facing bankruptcy, and the mega gallons of effluent in Britain’s rivers pose a significant health risk.

Basically, Britain’s waterways are turning to shit. Why do I use that vulgar colloquialism? The conclusion of an article in Prospect Magazine, which reviews the impact of privatisation on the provision of water and filtration services is ‘How our water went to shit.’

You may find a map of the waterways in England and Wales filled with untreated sewage.

During the prime ministership of Thatcher’s UK conservatives, privatisation of public services, such as water provision, was promoted as a way to revitalise a decrepit sector of the economy. Instead, privatisation has produced leaking pipes, rivers unfit to swim in, and gallons of untreated sewage spilling into waterways.

If a business model fails to provide basic services to the public, then we can reasonably conclude that that particular business model is a failure. It is time for emergency measures, renationalising the water companies to revamp failing infrastructure and respond to the public health threat of unsanitary drinking water.

I am old enough to remember the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the response of the Soviet authorities. The latter were lambasted in the corporate media not only for their alleged incompetence in running a nuclear reactor, but also for their allegedly slow and ineffective response to that serious emergency. If they cannot protect their own citizens from nuclear fallout, so we were told, how can we trust Moscow’s ability to handle other serious ecological disasters?

Whether Moscow’s response to the Chernobyl nuclear accident was adequate or not, I do not know, and is outside the scope of this article. I do know that if the business sector creates an environmental and medical emergency, such as failing to provide clean safe drinking water, then questions must be asked if the guilty parties will be brought to account.

In capitalist societies, the profits are privatised, but the risks and harmful consequences are socialised – the tab is picked up by the public.

Emergency preparedness is not something that can be built up overnight. Planning is essential, to be sure. However, adequate responses to climate emergencies takes decades of information gathering and public investment.

We have all read news about the flash floods which occurred earlier this year in Texas. Flash flooding is nothing new in Texas, and the authorities responded as best they could. Sadly, there was loss of lives, including children, in the recent flooding disaster.

I would like to highlight a measure, long proposed by scientists, engineers and climate experts, which would increase the ability of the relevant authorities to respond and manage such disasters.

For decades, Congressional lawmakers (both Republican and Democrat) have rejected demands to install adequate flood warning gauges and systems across the major waterways and rivers in the United States.

Stream gauges, the necessary equipment to monitor flooding in waterways, are crucial in gathering and providing advance warnings of rising floodwaters. The absence of such gauges is not front page news, but constitutes a serious gap in flood emergency management.

The Trump administration, in the name of saving money, is cutting back funding for climate change and weather forecasting systems even further. Reducing such warning systems will only dilute the capacity of emergency response services to adequately prepare and address these kinds of worsening climate induced disasters.

When we lose the ability to protect life, property, biodiversity, agricultural resources and drinking water from disasters, then it is time to abandon the economic model that prioritises private profits over the public health and hygiene.