Countering Urban Terrorism in Russia and the United States Proceedings of a Workshop (2006) / Chapter Skim
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Safety and Security in Megacities
Safety and Security in Megacities
Pages 106-115
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From page 106... ...
Beijing: Chinese Academy of Sciences. 2I am grateful to the Russian delegates to the National Academies-Russian Academy of Sciences conference for this facile adjective to describe system failures resulting from either poor technical design, poor management, or human error.
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From page 107... ...
Megacities do enjoy concentrations of valuable human and physical resources, but while natural disaster response capability is extensive in many megacities, it is often not sufficient to prevent wide-scale destruction and loss of life. In some megacities neither resources nor political will are sufficient to make megacities significantly less vulnerable.
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From page 108... ...
Most nations with large cities fail to give adequate attention to the interdependence of the critical infrastructure services on which the city depends. In addition, governments have generally failed to address the realities of human behavior in response to severe disruption of those services and the panic, sickness, injury, and death that may occur on a large scale if more than one of the critical infrastructures fail.
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From page 109... ...
to fire, communicable disease, toxic gases, loss of shelter, and panic from terror weapons such as radiation dispersal devices Each of these threats represents a catastrophic failure in one or more of the city's critical infrastructures. In natural disasters (such as earthquakes)
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From page 110... ...
Table 1 illustrates the growth of the list of critical infrastructures in the United States from seven in a Congressional Budget Office study in 1983 to 13 in a 2002 White House strategy document. Examination of studies of critical infrastructure suggests that the economies of large, densely populated urban areas are characterized by a combination of independent enterprises, connected in networks of services on which they depend for their ability to deliver goods and services in a highly competitive way.
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From page 111... ...
The responsibility for protecting critical facilities and infrastructure is distributed among private and government owners, and on the government side, among national, regional, and municipal authorities. A large source of vulnerability of civil society arises from the very efficiency of a competitive economic system.
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From page 112... ...
· inducing the reinsurance industry to set a sliding scale of rates for terrorismloss insurance, reflecting the extent to which client firms have invested in measures to reduce vulnerability to disasters CENTRALIZATION VERSUS DECENTRALIZATION As previously noted, the organization of critical infrastructure defenses is made complex by the need for government and private business to collaborate in strategy and response to disasters. In the United States there is an additional element of complexity: the presence in most metropolitan areas of multiple political jurisdictions, often quite independent of one another.
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From page 113... ...
To make matters worse, the DCEMA has a very modest budget and operates out of a modest space in a glass-walled building in the northern part of the city.11 The people who run this facility appear to have done a remarkably effective job, given these constraints, but lacking line authority over the resources required for emergencies, they preside over a highly decentralized structure for disaster response. This raises an interesting question: What are the relative merits of centralized versus decentralized structures for responding to disasters in megacities?
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From page 114... ...
One of the major advantages of a well-structured, centrally commanded emergency operations authority is the potential to provide uniform, credible information to the public. This would in theory be provided by the DCEMA, but in a major terrorist disaster, political officials such as the president, two governors, and secretaries (ministers)
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From page 115... ...
The technical strategy must attempt to maximize dual benefits to economy and security through the development of appropriate technologies and procedures. To the extent that costs of vulnerability reduction can be reduced or offset by improved quality of infrastructure services, the public will be more willing to support investments to mitigate very unlikely but high-consequence events.
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