So we develop ideas aimed at improving the quality of leadership in blog posts (below) and in books like, Humane Leadership.
To put ideas into action, we develop thinking tools called Wisdom Jigs, advise clients, offer training, and lead community projects.
I look forward to hearing your ideas,
If disaster may come your way, get out early.
Not everyone can do that, but the more people who get out early, the better for everyone, both people who really need help and first responders trying to keep people safe.
If you have somewhere safe to go, to family or friends, go there before an official evacuation is ordered.
That seems like a good idea.
Unfortunately, it’s not simple, but it’s important to think about the option if you can.
Waiting for an official evacuation notice may be too late for you and your people.
Emergency officials have an incentive to maintain calm and order, so they may not call for evacuation until it is absolutely necessary.
Unfortunately, this caused fatal delays in both Paradise which had a good plan and experience but was quickly overrun and in Lee County Florida during a 2022 hurricane.
It’s important for each of us to try to be self responsible, a part of the solution, not another problem for first responders to handle in a crisis. Being self responsible may mean giving yourself more time by leaving at levels 1 or 2, rather than waiting for an official “Go Now!” order.
Once an official evacuation has been ordered, it’s likely best to follow the directions offered by your local emergency management staff via official alerts. Freelancing your own evacuation in the middle of an official action may cause you and your neighbors more problems than it solves. That said, do everything possible to maintain situational awareness no matter what the official notifications say.
Table of Contents of This Post
First responders cannot take care of everyone in moments of disaster, not because they don’t want to, there are just so few of them trying to serve so many of us.
The video explanation of the image above.
And an article from the New York Times about Paradise and the Lahaina fire on Maui: Little warning, few escape routes, phones knocked out: The chilling similarities between the Maui and Paradise fires
It seems obvious, but so many people choose to “risk it.” Do you want your people to be in a situation where only 10% of people are ready to be self-sufficient for the suggested 72 hours? What good could come out of being in such a desperate situation even you and your family are prepared?
If you need to evacuate at the last minute, you are putting yourself into an confused, dangerous situation. We met one woman who drove out of flaming Talent only to be turned around by police because there was fire ahead. She traveled back through the flaming town three times before someone let her through to safety.
It’s probably better to be away from the chaos of an unfolding disaster if you have the option.
If risks are high, consider moving to a safer area early if possible.
Putting distance between you and disaster is a simple formula:
D=RT
Distance from disaster = rate of travel (speed) x time traveled.
If you want to be far away from any disaster, you cannot control when your neighbors leave and create a giant traffic jam.
Here’s the road out of Paradise after the evacuation was ordered.
Photo: PBS – You Can Barely Breathe
Leaving early gives you time to travel before traffic gets heavy, before all the hotels are booked, before the danger is upon you. If you are lucky enough to have the option to leave early, you should consider doing so to make things easier for those who must stay until formal evacuation orders are given.
With this in mind, we have used the approach described on this page to make decisions for our family since we moved to the Rogue Valley in 2010.
I have heard of local families who live in particularly fire-prone areas in Southern Oregon who pack up all their valuables and fill a more fire resistant storage unit before every summer just to be safe. That’s extreme, but is based on their own experiences with fire and loss.
You will have to think through what makes sense for your own family and business so you can make timely, fully informed decisions to stay safe.
First, we must be aware of the reality of the situation not only at the moment, but how the situation may evolve over the coming hours and days. We must be aware of the possible situation all along the route we plan to travel, not just in our town.
That said, we must balance the urge to run away against the odds we’re safest at home given the effort, expense, and disruption of evacuation.
But, how to know when the danger is real and avoidable with quick action?
We use the OODA model of situational awareness and action. OODA stands for
The OODA method requires that we loop through these steps to maintain awareness of the situation as conditions change and our actions may reveal more information to feed into our decision loop.
Here’s an illustration of the OODA loop method.
OODA loops start by observing the world at the very center of the illustration and moving up to the left clockwise to Observe using our senses to collect data.
We make sense of that data by Orienting within mental models we have for understanding the world; weather patterns, road systems, evacuation plans, the behavior of humans and wildfires under certain conditions, etc.
Based on our orientation and evaluation we make a Decision and then Act.
Each action creates a reaction, opens us to new information about the situation, so we then begin a new loop (here the lower one) to observe the world again and continue to orient within our situation to see new options for decisions and actions.
Here’s how we apply this to wildfire risks relative to our family in Southern Oregon.
You can create an online document with links like the ones below to data on the potential risks in your area.
AirNow for regular AQI updates and smoke map.
Maps of
I hope this is helpful to you and your people. This approach has served us well over the years. It’s a lot, but we considered this extra bit of due diligence a fair price for living safely in our fair valley. Of course, we have professional emergency managers who are real professionals committed to our safety. Sometimes they need to balance concerns across many people while you are responsible for yourself and your people first. Sometimes that can change the timing of evacuation decisions. Given that the stakes are high for our children and parents, we tend to err on the side of caution.
By now, you may think I worry too much.
In 2021, the city of Ashland paid consultants to prepare an exhaustive evacuation plan based on lots of mathematical analysis.
You can see the evacuation modeling study here. Interestingly, this study assumes that an evacuated person simply needs to get to the edge of the city limits. You can see this in the map of bus routes on page 11-7. The assumption seems to be that everyone would be ready for pickup along the way and that they would be dropped at the city limits where they would be safe and cared for? This certainly would not have been true on the day of the Almeda fire.
According to the report, it would take a minimum 1 hour and 40 minutes to evacuate 90% of one zone (see page 92/7-7 in the report) assuming nearly every household had a vehicle of their own.
But, the Almeda fire traveled 5 miles in two hours, from Ashland to the south edge of Talent. See a great blog post on how the fire traveled here.
We’re very lucky the fire started at the downwind edge of Ashland and not upwind near Emigrant lake or Oak Knoll. The fire would have burned all of Ashland before one zone evacuated.
Plus, in 2020, Highway 5 was closed and all that traffic was diverted into Ashland, so traffic was hugely backed up before an evacuation could even start.
We also have to take into account the definition of evacuation used in the report. It is essentially getting to the edge of Ashland, not away from any threat that went across the border of Ashland to Talent and Phoenix as the Almeda fire did.
Greater mathematical minds than mine did this analysis. But unfortunately, it is based on assumptions that would not have kept you and your family safe if the Almeda fire had started a mile or two further east that day.
And, sadly a fire was intentionally started further east that day. A news article on that fire. Luckily, firefighters rushing to help fight the Almeda fire routed to pass by the fire put it out quickly.
That day another fire intentionally started near Phoenix burned 15 homes.
And, according to Chris Chambers, Ashland Fire’s Division Chief – Forestry, the Almeda fire was not the “big one.” The big one may 300 times larger than the Almeda fire (3,000 acres).
It’s important to understand the reality of human and fire behavior on days of extreme fire danger. Unfortunately, there are many variables to consider when we’re responsible for the safety of our families, colleagues, and neighbors. Lightning and humans are the leading causes of fire and neither are very predictable in terms of time or place, but they are both, unfortunately, inevitable causes of ignition.
And, all of our thinking here assumes you have warning and internet service. In critical moments, you may have neither.
That was the reality for a few people’s escape from the Almeda fire, literally being rescued seconds before the flames destroyed their homes. This body cam footage of the reality of evacuation is not for the faint of heart.
My goal is to help you avoid the trauma and loss of a disaster. I hope our approach to thinking about your people’s safety is helpful.
Be well, be safe,
Thank you for your support for our work to create a people-centered post-disaster registry. Good data will make efficient and equitable recovery easier for our neighbors in any future disasters.
Luckily, we avoided any major disasters over the summer of 2023 in Southern Oregon, so our Vanguard Group didn’t have to swing into action.
It’s been a few months since our last update, so there’s a lot of good news to share.
The biggest news is that the core ideas of DLAD, that you helped us refine, have been adopted by recovery professionals in government and industry. Many are being built into standard disaster response and recovery processes via the solution provider to Oregon and Hawaii (among many other states), FuturityIT.
Given this tremendous development, we have shifted our approach from building a local solution to shaping the work of the agencies, vendors, and local organizations who will carry the effort forward.
We have been working the last few months to create content to serve communities like ours across the country:
We are happy to know that your inputs have made a difference, but we also want to be sure that any emergent needs are met in the future. To that end, we have posted all our learnings on this site so that you can build upon them to influence future refinements to the data registry and case management solutions. To explore our thinking on current and future solutions, start here.
In Southern Oregon, the JCCLTRG and RVCOAD organizations are working closely to support preparedness and recovery. Together with their local partners we will be better prepared for any future disasters.
Thank you for all of your good work,
Please reach out if you have any questions.
Humane Leadership is on the move again.
The core ideas of Humane Leadership – continuous performance innovation in the self leadership lab, internalizing and applying new mental models with Wisdom Jigs, and professional self and project leadership skills – have found there way into some fascinating places over the past few years.
One of the most exciting places is in the Local Innovation Lab, a highly impactful internship experience meeting important community needs in partnership with Southern Oregon University. To support the interns, we created a 10-week online course including live online workshops that uses project-based learning to develop student project and self leadership skills. Empowering young people with professional level skills creates the next generation of leaders who know how maximize effectiveness and humanity at once.
The program has helped city governments, local community groups, and businesses recover from the 2020 Labor Day fires in Southern Oregon while giving students valuable experiences that bridged into full time work for nearly 40% of the first cohort.
The approach of the course has been so successful SOU has formed an innovation community of leading professors to look at how the core ideas and practices of the course might be worked more deeply into courses across the university and beyond potentially as an Open Educational Resource.
From the very beginning we had three questions, we’ve answered the first two; What would humane leadership look like? Is it learnable? See the book for our answers to these questions. Now, we are on to question three, if humane leadership works and is learnable, then how might we make it that new norm?
Today, we continue to look for innovative ways to empower emergent leaders with the skills they need to empower themselves.
As all this goes on, I continue to be our lead researcher, pushing out towards the edges of self and community leadership in search of insights that will empower a more humane collective future.
Of course, we’ve also been busy sharing the power of Humane Leadership in more traditional settings, including:
Thank you for supporting our work.
Please reach out if you have any questions or ideas you’d like to discuss.
We want to make sure that everyone who wants to be involved can be, so we are publishing the notes of our initial meetings to keep you up to date.
Also, so that anyone who might benefit from our work in the coming days has access to not only the product but the process that launches a local DLAD effort.
Meeting 1 of the DLAD Vanguard Team was on 20 June 2023 at 9am via Zoom.
The meeting included representatives of
Our agenda: (And notes)
Here are links to the DLAD pages:
27 June 2023 at 9am PDT. Contact me so I can send you the invitation.
Please reach out if we can be of any assistance,
Traveling
With all its banal indignities,
Rewards my patience,
With sun splattering snow peaks,
Above misted valley homes,
The Alps at my feet,
When the seal is broken at the end of the journey,
The elevator opens on a new city,
The manifested promise of order and power,
Of our best foresight and engineering,
And of my hope of being freed from where I was,
Into the possibility of where I’m going,
Again, again, stepping, rolling, flying towards hope,
As if hope and its promises might, this time, be real.
