[LINK] home emergencies

[Danny Yee]

Birch, Jim wrote:
> Untrained people can't do risk assessment on low frequency events very
> well.  They tend to get carried along with a narrative and either
> totally overestimate the risk, eg sharks, or imagine that it can't
> happen, as we've just seen in the global economic crisis and, of course,
> the fires.
 
A good read on this is Taleb's _The Black Swan_, which I've just
reviewed at http://dannyreviews.com/h/Black_Swan.html

> The solutions that I see are education, regulation, and, unfortunately,
> expecting failures.  

For emergency response, flexibility and "defence in depth" are vital.
We should do the best we can at prediction and modelling of threats,
but even with well-studied events that recur, such as bushfires,
we can't accurately predict where and when they are going to happen
or how severe they are going to be.  And there are many events where
our ability to evaluate either the probabilities or the effects are
much much worse.

So we need both preparation and response capabilities that are
flexible, and general-purpose fallbacks in case the original plan
doesn't work.

Danny.