This is a summary of the book “The Devil never stops: Learning to live in an age of disasters” by Juliette Kayyem which was published in 2022. She is a specialist in crisis management, disaster response and homeland security, serves on the faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy school of Government and is Faculty Chair of the Homeland Security project. She is also a national security analyst for CNN and the author of “Security Mom: An unclassified guide to protecting our homeland and your home.”

She proposes that disasters aren’t anomalies. Planners should assume disasters will occur and people need “situational awareness” to respond effectively to disasters, especially those that repeat. As part of the preparation and response process to disasters, all leaders must be on the same page and a plan for “managed retreat” must be high up in the top choices for response. Controlling the losses, stopping the hemorrhaging are some of the options that also need to be considered. When conditions don’t remain the same over time, a static plan does not help, and the response must be dynamically modified. People tend to disregard near disasters rather than recognizing them as warning signs. History has valuable lessons especially when it comes to fatalities and response can be better articulated with this kind of insight.

There’s a wide variety of phenomena that the general public is already aware of, and these include natural calamities such as hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes as well as man-made ones such as financial meltdown, pandemic, war, and cyberattacks. Leaders of all demographics can find universal lessons to their advantage when disruptions occur so that they can ‘fail safer’. People who study disasters tend to divide their duration into two phases – before and after the disaster and the interim is often referred to as the boom. The time before the disaster is an opportunity to adopt measures that will prevent calamities. In the phase after the disaster, people attempt to recuperate from its consequences. Disasters might not be completely avoided but disaster managers can focus on what happens after a disaster to respond and rebuild effectively. In fact, the author asserts that disaster will strike. They should prepare for all hazards as a worst-case scenario.

For example, Boeing 737 max planes crashed, killing 346 people and the crashes resulted from a design error that limited the pilot’s ability to control the planes. A whistleblower cited that the flaw was brought to the attention of management who downplayed it. Even the first disaster was explained away as a rare occurrence and Boeing executives didn’t seriously consider the possibility of such disasters. The second disaster was waiting to happen. A disaster management response in the public or private sector, should include an organizing principle, such as the “Incident Command System” or a hierarchical system that extends from a Public Information Officer and Safety officer to teams for planning, planning, and finance. Some might refer to it as the war room.

As the disaster unfolds, the public must be made aware of the rollout status so that they know when and what is going on. A method for gathering real-time information is necessary. Situational awareness involves keeping a record of what happened, indexed to time, place and location. An SA template includes “perception”, “comprehension”, and “projection”. One of the recurring failures in organizational responses to disasters is how key players find it difficult to understand events as they play out in real time. Gathering a lot of details and furiously removing the noise are key activities for situational awareness. The author cites an example of better awareness as one where the San Francisco mayor notices that the members of the city’s Asian and Asian-American community who have strong ties to the epicenter of the pandemic weren’t attending Lunar New Year events in expected numbers and went ahead to institute social distancing protocol and stay at home orders long before most other mayors did.

Disaster response demands a consolidated strategy and purpose. Empowering social workers to perform at the highest possible level is an advantage. Unfortunately, many institutions approach to security architecture tends to fragment  that architecture into different, specialized silos, which impedes unified action. Poor “governance structures” rather than straightforward ignorance exacerbates disasters. The oversimplifying action to reduce safety and security to “gates, guards and guns” and focusing more on buying equipment rather than on setting up effective processes, doesn’t help. Disaster’s consequences and its negative impact can be better managed when people learn to “fail safer”.

A “managed retreat” is sometimes referred to as a backup plan.  When British Petroleum built its Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig  in the Gulf of Mexico, there were assurances that a blowout preventer would shut down the rig in the case of a spill.  In April 2010, the rig exploded,  and the blowout preventer failed resulting in one of the worst oil spills and BP did not have a backup plan. The blowout preventer was also the last line of defense.

A more systemic approach enables us to mitigate negative consequences or in the event of a disaster, render the consequences less awful. There is a literal example for this.  The American military began encountering “improvised explosive devices” in Afghanistan and Iraq and the main threat to mortality was that the victims bleed to death. The response included minimizing damage with amputated limbs, transfers to better hospitals, training every soldier as a field medic, developing better tourniquets and blood clotting foam. One Pentagon study found that this response saved the soldiers and their limbs some 90% of the time.

The author asserts that disasters are simply no longer random and rare and that’s where the adage, the devil never sleeps, comes from. Since conditions deteriorate over time, responses must also be dynamic and not remain locked in static plans. In June 2021, a condominium tower in Surfside in South Florida, collapsed suddenly killing 100 residents. A consulting firm had warned about structural conditions several years earlier, but the responses were put off for want of budget. Safety and security systems are designed based on conditions that existed when the structure is built but conditions don’t remain constant.

Even big companies such as Apple fail to read the near misses such as when iPhone 4 was launched in 2010, it dropped calls and interrupted people’s messages. Steve Jobs and Apple absurdly blamed the customers, and no one complained. This kind of “normalizing deviance” can be quite dangerous.

History teaches valuable lessons and one of the lessons that stands out is that a perfectly managed crisis is an oxymoron. A dozen hurricanes made landfall in the United States in 2020 and the response to Hurricane Laura in Louisiana resulted in only 28 deaths who mostly died from carbon monoxide poisoning because of unsafe generators when the electrical grid went down.

Crisis managers must pay attention to what happened and prepare for the next disaster accordingly.