Scott McPherson's Web Presence

With the exception of Indonesia and South Korea (and India too, I suppose), the bird flu front has been relatively quiet.  This has given me the opportunity to catch up on my posting on my "other" blogsite, the Web home of the computer publication Computerworld Magazine blogs.computerworld.com/mcpherson. That site, as you can imagine, deals with my profession, which is information technology.  But I serve up my observations with the same wit, or lack thereof, so feel free to drop by over there and read those blogs when you can.  they can occasionally overlap, and are a great resource for people used to dealing with calamity and catastrophe.  Emergency managers, DR/COOP/BCP planners, Republican Congressional political consultants, that sort of thing.

My Outlook task list is overflowing with blog ideas for these slow periods.  Of course, impatient one, you can also go to the Websites and blogsites that deal with avian flu on a much more dependable, daily basis.  They are all posted on the left frame of this Website, and they are all worthy of your time.

One item that I am looking forward to writing is a critique of the pandemic guide of the American Civil Liberties Union.  I suppose they will sue bird flu to death, yuk yuk.  Seriously, this topic needs to be debated.  That there will be some sort of temporary cessation, or suspension of some subset of civil liberties is all-but-assured.  The scope of that suspension cannot be determined in advance.  It has to be planned for, exercised, and chronicled.  We also need to define, legally, when that cessation of that subset of civil liberties itself ceases.  Is it when cases drop back below the epidemic threshold?  Is it when the Congress says so?  The governors?  The military?  Homeland?

I will also be turning toward the plague of Dengue Fever and DHF that is becoming endemic in the Caribbean, and how we may be only a blow away from Dengue on our own doorstep.  Hurricanes can bring the United States more than just a lot of rain, wind and property damage.  It can bring misery on a scale not seen since the late 1800s. 

I want to comment on something I read in Mike Coston's blog, Avian Flu Diary.  Dr. Mike Osterholm is a genuinely good person and, I am happy to say, a friend of mine.  Mike's stamina as regards pandemic fatigue is remarkable.  I have found that I need to "charge my batteries" from time to time, leaving the topic of bird flu for days to weeks in order to energize.  Mike Coston has the luxury of a Florida beach apartment to lounge in and recharge, curse him.  Me? I have a backyard with a pool that is forming its own ecosystem.  But thank God that Mike Osterholm is the Energizer Bunny of pandemic planning. 

Dr. Mike has given a seminal speech in his native Minnesota, speaking in front of hundreds who were treated to Vintage Osterholm.  the story is at: http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=2&a=342839

Osterholm back on the speaking circuit and getting picked up by the media is a good thing: There is no one else in the world today with the gravitas to match Dr. Mike when he speaks about supply chain disruptions, along with the upcoming potential failure of essential services such as municipal fresh water systems and electric utilities.  And Mike consistently gets it right.  He is Cassandra, but so am I.  So are we all.  And we are right and correct in our beliefs. 

I am barely qualified to carry his water when it comes to these topics.  In fact, he is where I draw much of my inspiration from when I blog about IT and the incredible vulnerability our society has if the technology fails.  Yet that is what I am expert in -- IT -- and I mean IT like IT that means the difference between life and death, good and bad, success and failure on an enterprise scale.  So when I see the train wreck that is the failure of multiple essential services like coal mining, petroleum refining and data center failures, I have been there and done that.

One of the countless things I learned while preparing the entire state of Florida for Y2K was that it is not the loss of fresh water that worries me as much as the inability to move waste.  You see, waste flows downhill as they say, and in most areas of Florida (and probably in your area too), that downhill flow has to be power-assisted.  If there are serious disruptions to the electric grid (and you can count on those in a moderate-to-severe pandemic), human waste will back up and become quite a public health problem.  Sure, there are generators that are responsible for doing their thing at transfer stations, but they, too, require energy -- in the form of petroleum products.  When that flow is disrupted, the other flow will be, too.

So add to that cascading series of probable failures, the failure to move human waste from Point A to Point B.  And that means a very real possibility of diseases such as cholera to suddenly appear as a secondary infection during a severe pandemic with accompanying disruptions to the electrical grid.

When I did the Sandy Springs radio show last week, I mentioned that a pandemic is like Y2K where the people fail, not the machines -- at least not in the beginning.  Eventually, however, machines will fail too.  Not all of them at once, but enough of them to make life pretty miserable for an extended period of time.  Machines break.  Computers break, too, because computers are machines at their core. they all require maintenance.  No maintenance, or reduced maintenance, equates to disruptions and failures.

Now factor in Nature.  Nature does not schedule its rage sequentially, in a linear timeline.  Mother Nature likes to "pile on," like some football coach running up the score on Hapless U. to get a few extra poll votes or points in a computer ranking.  So it is that over half of the influenza pandemics of the past 300 years had waves in what is known as Hurricane Season, June 1 to November 30.  Imagine the problems if a major hurricane hit the United States while a flu pandemic raged?  Can we even begin to imagine what happens when the entire veneer of a modern lifestyle is peeled back by a killer virus and then a natural cataclysm?  Anyone who thinks the infrastructure could withstand that is buying illegal substances from Mexican cartels.

Last Sunday, my wife and I were en route to our church when we noticed all the traffic signals were dormant in the mile leading to the church.  We performed the quick calculus and concluded the power would be off in the church and we thanked our God that He gave us the wisdom to dress very Summery.

Sure enough, when we entered the church, it was beginning to get pretty sticky in there.  We became grateful for the incense!  The point is that within about forty-five minutes, the church began to swelter.  That is how long it took for people to become really uncomfortable with the conditions.  Now transpose that to hours or even days.  It is not so unlikely a scenario:  A few months ago, our City of Tallahassee power was off for just shy of eight hours, caused by a mild thunderstorm.  What was maddening was that our power stayed out while the next street over had electricity within three hours.  Why our block was subjected to torture while another was quickly restored is still a mystery.

An increasingly thin veneer separates us from chaos.  That veneer is abraded today by absurdly high gas prices, unemployment, foreclosures and malaise.  It can be stripped bare by natural disasters such as tornadoes, earthquakes or hurricanes.  It can be blown to smithereens by a severe flu pandemic.  Every single thing we can do to ensure the success of the supply chain and the delivery of infrastructure, utilities, food and energy during a pandemic is important, welcomed and is absolutely essential.

My good friend Craig Fugate is the emergency manager for Florida.  He spoke yesterday at the Governor's Hurricane Conference in Ft. Lauderdale ("Ft. Liquordale" to the oldies there).   The topic was hurricane preparedness, but he also spoke indirectly to this culture of victimization and how it is a cancer upon our society.  People are not taking responsibility for their actions.  Read on::

(Florida Governor Charlie) Crist and Craig Fugate, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, urged people to stock up on food, water, gasoline and other provisions. Fugate said residents should adopt a proactive approach, instead of relying on government to ride to their rescue.

"You don't have to get ready: Somebody's going to take care of you. Your house got tore up? Blame somebody else," Fugate quipped. "Ice didn't get there today, 12 hours after a hurricane? Blame the government.

"So when did we suddenly decide that we were going to play the role of victim?" he asked.