Emergency response experts have studied events like Hurricane Sally, forecast to make landfall tomorrow along the Gulf Coast, for decades. They’ve also planned for giant wildfires like those burning on the West Coast, while public health scientists pondered hypothetical pandemics similar to COVID-19.
No one ever rolled the most active hurricane season ever, a wave of apocalyptic fires and a global pestilence all into a single nightmarish scenario—until reality did, said Sandra Knight, a senior research engineer in the University of Maryland's Center for Disaster Resilience and consultant who has held senior positions at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
As climate change, rising global population and other factors make such cascading events more likely, disaster response planners need to raise the complexity of their thinking as they prepare for worst-case scenarios, she said.
“You have to imagine the impossible—the worst-case scenario and how you would deal with it,” she told Maryland Today in an interview. “I think we’re going to have to start imagining pretty hard to come up with something worse than this,” she told Maryland Today in an interview yesterday.
Continue reading at University of Maryland.
Image via NOAA via AP.