After the Morning After

We were even luckier than I’d thought yesterday morning. Much of the surrounding area is still without power (our neighborhood was spared, but the power’s still out immediately across the street).

People here are cleaning up; people who evacuated are trying to figure how to return (without re-experiencing a mass traffic jam). (Aside: I simply do not believe published reports that 2.5 million people left. There’s no way the roads could have moved that many people in 24-36 hours. While the 2.5 million figure has been widely repeated, I’m watching for refinement.)

While cleaning up, I’m reviewing what happened (in good “knowledge management” form). The After-Action-Review process involves four simple questions: What was supposed to happen? What actually happened? Why were there differences? What will we do differently next time? AARs help isolate lessons-learned and refine “best-practice”. So far, here’s what I have…

Lessons Learned (personal):

• how much absolute, unmitigated luck played a part; I used to live by “Luck is the residue of design” (by Francois Marie Arouet). But, this time it was simple luck that saved us. If we’d been hit with even/only 100 mph winds, much of the house would have been destroyed;
• how to blog for communications (and use FLICKR);
  
• Best-Practice needs for hurricane events;
• -- supplies (tape, nails, sterno, batteries, candles, etc.)
• -- processes (how to prevent slow bathtub leaks; labeling inside doors; taping windows; filling trash cans with water)
• Shelter-in-Place (when, why, how)
• Frank Billingsley, Channel 2/KPRC news (I’m DONE with channel 13 and Marvin Zindler)
• Fear purges jet-lag (not sure about this one, but don’t really want to run confirming experiments)
  

LL (governmental):

• Mass evacuation execution (staging gasoline dumps; counter-flow highway traffic implementation)
• Costs & benefits of “Shelter-in-Place”
  

On the national level, we’ve now had Katrina and Rita. Hopefully the smart ladies at FEMA are mining these experiences for all they’re worth.

A friend commented on the blog references to prayer; maybe Voltaire should have made room for it in his observation.

If the gym's open, I'm going for a swim.