In This Issue
                      Emergency manager: job of the future at US $48,000 per year
                      H2O BCP
                      Pacific Wisdom                     
                      Bollywood BCP
                      Which way to run in a tunnel

Emergency manager: job of the future at US $48,000 per year
Maybe you’re in the right profession, after all. Rachel Zupek, a researcher and writer for U.S. jobs site CareerBuilder.com, estimated in a July (2009) article that the number of jobs in emergency management (EM) in the USA would grow 7 to 13 percent in “coming years”. She listed EM among seven (7) “emerging” jobs that included patient advocate, health informatics technician, simulation developer, “green jobs”, “home stager” and (CareerBuilder is an employment web site, after all) career counsellor.

She puts an EM salary at USD $48,386 per year, but there was no source listed to support that number. It’s explicitly only for U.S. jobs. But most anyone in public sector disaster response in Asia would be delighted to have a job at that salary, I imagine.

H2O BCP
An International Water Management Institute (IWMI) report says that food shortages in Asia are “inevitable” in the next 40 years because of lack of agricultural irrigation water  Food shortages won’t just affect Asia’s Third World countries. Starvation may hit them first, but shortages will affect all of us who live here. Follow IWMI on Twitter or have a look at IWMI on YouTube.

I’ve concluded that water will be the business continuity issue of the future, in Asia. I keep thinking about the business impact of a restricted supply of potable water on employees, at work and at home, and the business impact of a reduced supply of non-potable water for industrial and agricultural use. I expect employees to look to companies to provide for them when their governments cannot. Companies provide group health insurance; how about ‘group thirst insurance’? Yes, it sounds like a beer commercial…

Can’t imagine your employees coming to work thirsty (or hungry)? You would if you lived or worked in Asia. Don’t believe me? Stay tuned: I just bought www.waterbcp.com and plan to use it.

Pacific Wisdom
Pacific Disaster Net (PDN) – “the virtual centre of excellence for disaster risk management in the Pacific” - offers data and links for government agencies, regional bodies, non-government organizations (NGO’s) and international agencies. One I didn’t know: Australian-Pacific Centre for Emergency and Disaster Information (APCEDI) run by Australia Foundation for the Peoples of Asia and the Pacific. Comprehensive list of alert sites for the Pacific; click the Links tab. The “Traditional Knowledge” section is fascinating.

News and GoogleEarth images on the home page provide real-time alerts about earthquakes. The site uses a bizarre semi-transparent overlay for navigation, making it difficult to share links to some sections of the site. PDN partners are Red Cross/Red Crescent, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), UN Development Programme Pacific Center and Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission. Story credit to the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre, a partner of the International Association of Emergency Managers in Asia.

Bollywood BCP
Mumbai Prepared aims to prepare the private sector for “any large-scale emergency, natural disaster or terrorist attack”. If you’re looking for startling photos of the November 2008 terrorist attacks, there’s a Powerpoint presentation with 30 of them. A business continuity section of web site seems a bit thin at the moment, an effort to persuade Mumbai doubters about importance of preparing. There’s a list of items to put in an “office emergency bag” (scroll down the page).

Launched after the attacks, Mumbai Prepared joins a mushrooming number of public-private partnerships for emergency preparedness around the world, like ChicagoFIRST! (“a crisis is no time to exchange business cards”), the U.S. FBI’s InfraGard and the Corporate Emergency Access System (CEAS). Mumbai Prepared is supported by Citizen Corps (USA), India’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Indian Institute of Public Administration, Maharashtra University of Health Sciences and the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM).

Which way to run in a tunnel
What would you do if your car got stuck in a tunnel? How would you know which end to walk toward? Would you lock your car? Would you leave your car keys in it?

This EuroTest site, operated by EuroTest, trains and tests drivers’ knowledge of tunnels and roadway rules, based on inspections and tests of roadways in 16 European countries. It is hosted by ADAC, the German Automobile Club, home of the Yellow Angels. EuroTest is a consortium of automobile clubs. They take driving much more seriously in Europe than in Asia or the United States.

In a road tunnel flooding exercise in Singapore recently, people chose to stay with their vehicles as long as possible, even as the water rose so high they had to swim. When they finally abandoned their vehicles, they locked them and took the keys. Emergency responders would have had to break in and ‘hot wire’ the vehicles to move them if they were locked, slowing recovery.

A simple idea: paint the number of meters to each end of tunnel at intervals – say, every fifty (50) meters - along interior walls, so you could decide which way to walk if you had to abandon your vehicle.