Here’s our take on the August 2023 #indictment of former President Trump, effectively stemming from the January 6, 2021 attack at the U.S. Capitol, from an #EmergencyManagement perspective. Many different disasters occurred on that day, several of which were life threatening and unfortunately deadly. Emergency Management does not focus on…

and why everyone needs to understand what Emergency Management can do for any type of disaster. In the beginning of June 2023, I got a chance to read the very detailed After-Action Report/Improvement Plan (AAR/IP) produced by the NYU Wagner’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management on the deadly…

We have unfortunately, as the New York Times described it in 2014, lost the “art of the unsent angry letter”, as President Lincoln had mastered himself more than 150 years ago. In 2021, Niklas Göke wrote a really good synopsis and analysis of Konnikova’s piece on Lincoln’s Hot Letters, for…

Dictionary.com has one definition for the word “Prismatic” as “highly varied or faceted. And through a Google search, I found that Hou De Sousa has an art project called “ Prismatic “ — which is described as “a kaleidoscopic experience of light, color, and space that frames a myriad of…

This is the word for the distress caused by environmental change. Disasters can be a big part of this. The term “Solastalgia” was first coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005. Similar in some ways to Nostalgia — the longing for home or place of comfort, which is no…

Undoubtedly you may have heard of the phrase “Death by a Thousand Cuts” — meaning it’s the little, tiny problems that add together to make an insurmountable disaster. I believe there is an antithesis to this as well — there can be “life by a thousand bandages” — meaning it’s…

Edward Lorenz’s more than 50-year-old premise, which starts out that “if a single flap of a butterfly’s wings can be instrumental in generating a tornado” certainly sounds like it has a direct impact on disasters, but it was designed as a metaphor for chaos theory. There’s even a paper published…

The U.S. President — as described by the White House and codified in the U.S. Constitution in Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1 — is also the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces. There were a number of reasons the founders of the country wanted an elected civilian in this…

Solutions can be found in Emergency Management principles, starting with “Unified Command” and “Unity of Effort” — Part 1 — So, here’s the bottom line up front: the current structure of command and control of the safety and security elements (i.e., the U.S. Capitol Police) at the U.S. Capitol Complex is a bureaucratic mess. The Capitol Police Board oversees the steady-state security and safety operations like a mythical Cerberus but…