What will it take to be prepared?(The Bookshelf)

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The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation By Stephen Flynn Random House 2007; 272pages

The essential message of Stephen Flynn's The Edge of Disaster. Rebuilding a Resilient Nation is that the United States has become a "brittle superpower? Lack of investment in our infrastructure and public services, Flynn says, has made the country increasingly vulnerable to both man-made and natural disasters. This vulnerability is compounded by the interconnectedness of the modern economy, where a loss in capacity in one area of the country can send shockwaves through the rest of the nation. This was amply demonstrated by the power outage that occurred in August 2003 when untrimmed trees in Ohio became entangled in three high voltage power lines and set off a chain of events that led to power plants being shut down across the northeastern United States and southern Canada, ultimately costing the economy an estimated $6 billion to $10 billion and significantly disrupting approximately 50 million lives. (1) It is not difficult to imagine similar catastrophes arising from challenges to our air travel system, water, or port systems.

This situation of malign neglect extends to many types of infrastructure: in a 2005 report, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States (including all levels of government) an average grade of "D" across a variety of infrastructure types including wastewater, transit, schools, roads, and parks/As Flynn states, "the narrative reads like a survey that might have been conducted on eve of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Roads, dams, water purification facilities, the power grid, canal locks, roads, and waste water management systems have gone from very bad to worse in the past four years." (3)

The nation's vulnerability is not limited to just infrastructure. Flynn asserts that local public safety and health functions have become dangerously under-funded to the point where they would collapse under the weight of a major disaster. Many cities today have fewer patrol officers on the street than in 2001 and those officers are ill equipped to operate in a disaster environment. (4) Public health systems are similarly frayed. For instance, hospitals in more than 40 percent of states do not have sufficient backup supplies of medical equipment to meet surge capacity needs during a pandemic flu or other major infectious disease outbreaks. (5)

Addressing these problems of deterioration and inadequate preparedness would improve the United States' ability to withstand natural disasters by creating more survivable infrastructure, putting reasonable back-ups in place, and improving the ability to respond to such disasters. It would also better protect the United States against acts of terrorism. The goal of the modern terrorist attack is to create as much damage and disruption as possible. To the extent that our infrastructure is better able to withstand an attack and that critical functions can be re-routed to back-up systems, attacks against the domestic United States becomes less attractive to terrorists.

Flynn recognizes that a major effort to address the problems he raises will not be easy Decades of taxpayer rebellion have stripped governments