Aftermath - Helpful or Annoying

 As in all things in life, when I first started out my working life I just did what I was told to do. But as time went on I ended up with increasing responsibility and eventually I was the one doing the telling - and the one accountable.

That last word, accountable, can really sneak up on a person in a big way and I'm not a fan of most surprises!

Which is why, in my professional life I was trained in, and heavily used, risk assessment, risk mitigation, and event postmortem, and this, for better or or worse, has carried over to my private life as well.

Risk assessment is pretty straightforward. You use a matrix to plot out how impactful an event might be in the overall scheme of things. Low impact to very high impact.

Risk assessment matrices come in 3X3 all the way up to 10X10,  I have found that the 3X3's are so simplistic people don't take them seriously and they're often not comprehensive enough to fully cover a situation, and the 10X10's are way too complicated, so I prefer a 5X5. Enough detail to make it meaningful but not so much it becomes mind-numbing.

When using a risk assessment matrix one axis, the 'likelihood' axis, remains constant regardless of what you are assessing. The event being tested is probably not going to happen, is going to happen, or falls somewhere in-between.

The other axis, the 'consequences' axis, needs to be adjusted for the nature of the event. Though both scenarios deserve analysis, the consequences of a fire in a densely populated apartment building are far different from the consequences of missing a project deadline.

Once the level of impact has been identified then a strategy for dealing with the risk can be developed.

In some cases, where the probability and consequence is low, the sensible approach, in terms of time, effort and expense, to mitigating the risk is to not bother, but when you get out of that category the cost of mitigation is often justified by the potential consequences.

Regardless of how chicken-shit it sounds, (Make Mikey do it instead!) in our professional and private lives transferring the risk is something we do all the time and usually means something like buying insurance. Most of us don't get into auto-wrecks, but if we do the financial consequences can be serious, so we buy auto insurance to mitigate that risk by transferring it to someone else.

And for most of us reducing the likelihood a a high probability-high consequence event means - well - just don't do that. In other words, instead of buying a bunch of crash-pads and stacking them on the deck, along with keeping an ambulance standing by, in case you miss, just stop jumping off the roof into the pool while drunk!

But in our private lives reducing the impact of a low-probability, low to high consequence event is where we can have the most - well impact - on the risks we face. Yet it's also where we often do nothing then whine and moan about the living with the consequences when it does happen.

We've all heard about go-bags. An emergency kit ready and waiting to be grabbed at a moment's notice, a relatively inexpensive form of risk mitigation, but surprisingly few of us actually have one. (In our case The Van is a giant go-bag. Always fully stocked with water, basic foods, clothes, electrical power, and fuel.)

My personal recommendation is to examine the contents of some commercial go-bags, then build a cost-effective and useful version of your own including only those items that make sense for your circumstances. But the time to do that is now! Before a wildfire is minutes from sweeping in.

Some mitigation efforts are on the more expensive side, such as us with our big generator, dedicated generator inlet wiring, and manual transfer-switch, (Although, to be fair, over the past 15 years we've paid far more for auto/RV insurance that we've used twice to replace a couple windshields than we've invested in our electrical system.) others, like the $60 we paid for sixteen 2.5 gallon freezable water containers that we keep filled and tucked into the well-house to carry us over just in case our well fails, are pretty inexpensive. (We keep the water in these jugs fresh and clean without wasting any by dumping them into the fire-tank, which looses about 8 - 10 gallons every month when we test the fire-pump, and filling them back up with fresh water.)

And that brings us to event postmortem.

I titled this post Aftermath - Helpful or Annoying because, though my work-teams were fine with participating in risk assessment, and would grudgingly participate in drills to hone our response skills and test our risk-mitigation strategies, when it came to doing a postmort in the aftermath of an actual event, something I insisted on with no exceptions, they were often openly hostile to the whole idea.

Understandable since, even though the point is not to assign blame but rather identify what worked, what could be improved, and what we didn't even think about until it happened, these after-event meetings can feel like finger-pointing sessions. It doesn't help that far too many managers let these meetings devolve into finger-pointing bashes. (Take for example Texas legislators that have wasted time and money, but gained a lot of TV time, looking for a scapegoat they could bitch-slap after the power and water debacle of our February storm rather than trying to identify the underlying factors in order to address them.)  

Yet I believe, done right, post-morts can be the most valuable part of the process. After-all, we can sit around and imagine things 'till we're blue in the face, but unless and until it actually happens we don't really know. This is a sometimes rare opportunity to examine an event and our response, as well as our level of preparedness, in real-world conditions.

A few of you may remember that here in Texas we recently (Mid February) had a record-breaking series of winter storms that left many without electricity for days and without water for weeks. Though I'm sorry to say that, as I type this two weeks after the last icicle melted, as is human nature, far too many Texan's have apparently already forgotten the lessons so harshly imposed on us and have no real plans to prepare for the next time, trusting the clueless politicians to do that for them. Like that ever worked out in the entire history of politics!

Well that's their problem. Within days of the event The Wife and I sat down and did a complete post-mort. While we came through those storms just fine, with our existing mitigation plans leaving us dealing with only relatively minor inconveniences while others died, that doesn't mean there wasn't anything for us to learn from this experience.

As a result, despite how well our plans worked we have decided we better make a couple key changes in our mitigation strategy.

Keeping a supply of fuel on hand, mostly for the fire-pump and generator, is a balancing act between having enough, yet not so much the fuel goes stale before we get around to using it under normal circumstances.

We started out 15 years ago with 60 gallons of storage capacity plus a full 2 gallon can (much easier to carry up from the tractor-barn where we store the fuel and dump into the fire-pump than a 5 gallon can) and another 15 gallons in the pump and generator. (Part of the monthly testing routine for the generator and fire-pump is to top up the tanks afterwards so they are always full and ready to go.) That turned out to be too much fuel. We use a stabilizer but it still took too many years to get through all of our reserves, so we cut back on how much of that storage capacity we actually used.

It also used to be that our most likely season for losing power and needing to rely on the generator, our largest consumer of fuel, was summer-early fall, during hurricane season. So we would let our reduced fuel supply dwindle until late spring and then stock back up for the upcoming storm season.

Well time has passed, climate change has snuck in, and in all probability, in addition to more severe hurricanes, record-challenging winter storms are also going to be a regular part of our future, and both have the potential for creating extended electrical blackouts, so we need to keep our reserve fuel supply topped up year-round now.

Oh, and we clearly cut back on our fuel reserves by too much! We still had several days of fuel on hand by the time this last series of storms blew on through, but I was certainly keeping more than a casual eye on levels and rate-of-consumption.

So after the dust, or rather snow, settled we revised our fuel strategy. We are now keeping 25 - 30 gallons of stored fuel on hand at all times, (30 gallons is the capacity our supply of 5 gallon cans) year round, refilling a can as soon as it empties rather than waiting for several empty cans to collect before making a spring resupply run.

In addition, upon first news of an approaching storm (given the advances in forecasting, usually a week before it actually arrives and days before the general population starts paying attention) we will dump those cans into our 30 gallons worth of larger storage tanks and refill the cans to boost our reserves up to 55 - 60 gallons. Afterwards, to keep any unused fuel from going stale on us (We set a limit of 2 years for stabilized fuel) we will use our excess reserves to refill the car until we get back down to our baseline 30 gallons again.

Lessons learned, supplies restocked, revised mitigation plan in place, and the only one pointing blaming fingers at me is me.

Oh yeah, and for winter storms I also need to move the rainwater collection bucket into the barn, otherwise the dang thing will split wide open when it freezes - - -