by Anthony L. Kimery    
'The weakest part of our homeland security is the citizen'
The intro to the immensely popular BBC sci-fi television series, “Torchwood,” ends with the prescient phrase, “the Twenty-First Century is when it all changes. And you’ve gotta be ready.”
And indeed we do. To wit: Although the threat of Armageddon seemed over as the Cold War literally came crashing down, within a decade it’d become clear that that notion was a gross misunderstanding. No sooner had the 21st Century began had it become evident that the risk of nuclear conflict was closer than it’d ever been. Concurrent with that realization was the more chilling realization that a virulent manmade or natural pathogen could push humanity to the brink of extinction – certainly back into the Stone Age.
Meanwhile, advancements in the understanding of earth sciences disclosed that contemporaneous unprecedented cataclysmic natural events could provoke destruction on a scale that also could put humanity at risk, as could certain cosmological events which not long ago a great many scientists had dismissed as sci-fi fantasies.
Yet, despite the small-scale terrorist attack and the disastrous regional hurricane that struck the US, governments at all levels remain unprepared for dealing with catastrophic and mass casualty events. Globally, many more governments are even less prepared for such disasters.
HSToday.us revealed in a two-part series that federal and state governments aren’t paying nearly enough attention to the steady deterioration of emergency medical care across the nation – the very medical care that will be needed in the event of a mass casualty catastrophe.
But if governments are lax in their preparedness, and equally as remiss in stressing the imperative that citizens be prepared, how can the citizenry be expected to be geared up?
It should be no surprise then that preparedness authorities are increasingly alarmed about the public's across the board complacency toward preparedness, not just for catastrophic disasters, but even the most common of disasters - like hurricanes in the south.
“This creeping complacency, as many of us call it, among the public at large is quite disturbing,” said a senior federal emergency preparedness official HSToday.us frequently consults.
No doubt. Studies have shown that less than one-third of all Americans have not taken special steps to prepare for an emergency. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that “Americans are too busy, too distracted, or too frightened to plan carefully for a natural disaster, disease outbreak, or local catastrophe.”
This, CDC said, has led to “a crisis of complacency.”
A Harris poll conducted last June found only 14 percent of respondents said they are "very prepared,” and only 44 percent who are somewhat prepared.
“While majorities of Americans say they are prepared, this does not seem to be the case,” the Harris Poll said, adding, “when asked if they had done certain action items, majorities say they have not.”
Sixty-one percent had not “made a specific plan for how you and your family would leave your home if you had to evacuate in case of an emergency situation,” and 68 percent had not “put together a disaster supplies kit with water, food, medicine, and other supplies.”
“Even after Sept. 11, 2001, even after Hurricane Katrina, a Red Cross survey last year found that 93 percent of Americans aren't prepared for a major calamity — a natural disaster, a pandemic or a terrorist attack. This is troubling, because the more prepared a population is, the more effective the response to and recovery from a catastrophe will be,” wrote John D. Solomon - who is writing a book about emergency preparedness – in a Washington Post op-ed last week.
“Disaster is bearing down on all sides of late. A ravaging cyclone in Burma. A killer earthquake in China. Even the United States hasn't escaped unscathed, with tornadoes ripping across the heartland and Southeast and floods rising in the mid-Atlantic,” Solomon noted. Yet, “most Americans have been watching the devastation in Asia from relative safety and, if I had to guess, with a certain sense of complacency, a feeling that disaster on that scale isn't likely to happen to them. But it could. And if it did, our country might face the same sort of crisis as our Asian cousins. A major reason: The American public isn't prepared.”
As HSToday reported in, “The Ice Storm Cometh,” most Oklahomans and local governments were caught off guard by the vast ice sheet that descended on the state last winter, plunging more than half of its residents into darkness, some for many weeks.
No surprise there. Last summer the Harris Poll found 40 percent of those surveyed said they were not prepared for an extended power outage.
Personal preparedness for an avian influenza pandemic also has subsided following the surge of governmental emphasis on preparedness a few years ago. All along, though, the public at large generally has ignored individual pandemic preparations.
A typical attitude was expressed in a comment I found on Amazon.com toward a very practical book written for the public on how to take practical precautions to prepare for a pandemic. The commenter decried the book as an “extremely alarmist manual [that] does not offer practical suggestions, but a ritualistic rule of worry that will instill doomsday panic in anyone who tries to follow it. Shame on a practicing physician for coming up with such nonsense.”
Of course, authorities know that it's this sort of attitude that's nonsense. 
“The prudent thing to do is to prepare - even though you don't know for sure what will happen - because the consequences of not being prepared are far worse than the effort involved in getting ready to handle what might (or might not, we admit) be coming soon. Sooner or later there will be a pandemic - those who are ready will fare far better than those who are not,” another commenter rightfully pointed out.
"There is continued need for pandemic preparation in local communities," said Dr. John T. Carlo, Medical Director of Dallas County Health and Human Services. Cautioning against public complacency, he stressed that "ordinary citizens must educate themselves and stockpile necessary items at home."
"The weakest part of our homeland security is the citizen," 9/11 Commission chairman Thomas H. Kean told Solomon. "Addressing that is very, very, very important. Ultimately, it's as likely that a terrorist attack here will be stopped by the CIA or FBI as by someone who sees something suspicious and, instead of just going home for dinner, decides to tell his or her local police."
“… I've … learned that my family's safety and the ability of my community and my nation to respond to major disasters might depend on my fellow citizens' preparedness,” Solomon wrote. “It may sound a little dramatic, but if even 93 Americans — let alone 93 percent of us — aren't informed and engaged, then none of us fully is.”
"It keeps me awake at night," said John R. Gibb, New York State’s emergency management director who has openly acknowledged concern over the public's complacency toward preparedness.
“There is a culture of complacency when we need to have a culture of preparedness," agreed Lorin Mock, emergency preparedness chief for the Jacksonville, Florida Fire and Rescue Department referring to locals’ lack of concern, or belief, that Jacksonville could be slammed by a hurricane.
"We have to be worried and concerned about it," Mock told the Jacksonville Times-Union. "Literally everyone has to prepare and have a plan."
Yet, although hurricane season is almost here and national weather experts predict it could be a violent one, authorities in Florida say the majority of residents surveyed haven’t bothered to put together a hurricane plan.
Preparedness “needs to be a national imperative," said Joseph F. Bruno, New York City's emergency management commissioner.
“The general public needs to take a more active role in emergency preparedness,” wrote Gina Baxter, a registered nurse with an emergency room background who is a member of the Fairfax, Virginia Medical Reserve Corps, in response to Soloman’s op-ed.
In 2003, Dennis S. O’Leary, president of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), said much of the country had already lapsed into a "comfortable complacency."
Indeed. The JCAHO report published that same year, “Health Care at the Crossroads Strategies for Creating and Sustaining Community-wide Emergency Preparedness Systems,” stated “it does not take long for complacency to settle in” following a disaster. “Eighteen months after the September 11, 2001 attacks and the subsequent, insidious, selected and deliberate dispersion of anthrax spores, there are clear signs that the focus of American attention has long since moved on. The sense of urgency to prepare has now become a wait-and-see sense.”

The report concluded: “The United States was complacent before September 11. Notwithstanding the occasional Orange alerts since then, the American mindset again appears to be steadily returning to comfortable complacency. That is a prescription for great danger, if not disaster.”
Speaking at the 22nd Annual Florida Governor's Hurricane Conference a few weeks ago, Gov. Charlie Crist said, "without our citizens, there's just no way we can help everybody. We were very fortunate last year ... but we can't count on that … Each and every individual citizen has a responsibility.”
Talking about preparedness during last year’s hurricane season, FEMA’s Paulison again raised the issue of complacency: "We need to make sure that those who are in those hurricane zones have prepared themselves for this upcoming season."
But, as the 2007 study, “Public Complacency under Repeated Emergency Threats: Some Empirical Evidence,” in the “Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory,” found, despite Florida having been struck by four major hurricanes consecutively in the summer of 2004, results of surveys indicates that the public showed signs of complacency under repeated emergency threat warnings.
The authors concluded that there is a need to manage or reduce such tendency because a complacent public is less prepared for emergencies.

Importantly, the study stated that governments play vital leadership roles in developing effective communication strategies to reduce public complacency and to enhance public preparedness in response to disasters.
“Everyone is part of the emergency management process. We must continue to develop a culture of preparedness in America in which every American takes personal responsibility for his or her own emergency preparedness,” FEMA Director David Paulison said last week.
But it’s not just the public. The 2003 report, “The Rural Implications of Emergency Preparedness Planning,” found that “rural health care providers express [this] same complacency,” and that “hospital administrators in particular express additional ambivalence about investing time and resources into emergency preparedness, when they face so many other pressures in finance, staffing, quality and regulatory compliance.
Similarly, two years ago the Montgomery [Maryland] County’s Advance Practice Center for Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response reported that emergency preparedness had been hampered by “complacency of the population regarding disasters and preparedness accompanied by the feeling that there are more pressing issues …”
Increasingly, federal and state authorities are expressing concern over public complacency toward preparedness.
But perhaps in this day and age, as the cliche phrase goes, they should be doing a better job of explaining the consequences of not being prepared?  
Original Source