Identifying Risk Factors

Welcome to the next module in the Area Study Workshop, which is on Risk Factors. This is a crucial part, maybe even the most important part of your Area Study because we’re identifying and assessing the things that we need to prepare for.

We do this step because we have to identify what we’re up against. In this module, we’re going to focus on the threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities we could experience during an emergency event, like a natural disaster or some catastrophic emergency.

We’re talking about emergencies, but this doesn’t mean that you don’t also have routine risks that you experience in your day to day life. For instance, you could have a flat tire on the way to work or maybe some minor flooding during heavy rains in a thunderstorm. These are routine situations but we still need to prepare for them.

So after we get done with Risk Factors, focusing on some worst case scenarios, you may find it beneficial to go back and re-start this process to focus on more routine or common events, like a house fire, a burst water pipe, or temporary power outage. I don’t want my house to burn down, along with my six years of food storage and 70 pound bug out back because I didn’t have a couple fire extinguishers handy.

What we’re going to do right now is brainstorm. Like intelligence, brainstorming is a team sport, so I do recommend that either do this with friends, family, or members of a preparedness or mutual aid group, or start this list on your own and then run it by those people in the near future.

We’re dealing with three categories of risk here: threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities.

A Threat is a person, group, or circumstance that has the capability and intent to target you. Maybe that’s intentional violence, or maybe they want to take something from you, or maybe you’re being targeted for influence, so someone is trying to shape your perspective without your consent in a nefarious way. There’s kinetic targeting, which is violent, and then non-kinetic targeting, which is emotional or psychological. We can this information warfare or psychological operations — but they are threats just the same.

As opposed to a threat, a Hazard is any source of potential damage, mostly arising from your environment. A natural disaster, like an earthquake isn’t trying to target you, it’s a hazard that exists because you live on a tectonic plate. It’s a hazard of your environment. A chemical spill because of a train derailment, an illness from the next pandemic, a hurricane, or a flood are all examples of a hazard.

And we also have Vulnerabilities, which reflect our susceptibility to harm. For instance, if you can’t live without a certain medication, then you are highly vulnerable to pharmaceutical supply chain disruptions. Or you have a physical injury that limits your mobility, then you have a vulnerability in dangerous situations that require you to move quickly on foot or over long distances.

Vulnerabilities can be individual, like we just covered. We can have group vulnerabilities, so having three small children during a worst case scenario is a vulnerability. You have to do everything for those little people.

And then vulnerabilities can also apply to your area. Your volunteer fire department just closed down, and the nearest fire station is now 30 minutes away, so you are vulnerable during a fire larger than anything you yourself can put out.

Or you live in an urban environment and your area is vulnerable to riots or other civil unrest. Or crime. Or bad politics. Or food and water because none of it is produced locally. And that list can go on and on.

Now there’s one other thing that I would include under vulnerabilities, and that is limitations or limiting factors. For instance, not having night vision is a limiting factor for nighttime operations. Having five able bodied people in your mutual aid group is a limiting factor for tasks or missions that require 10 people. Not having your preparedness group trained in Stop the Bleed or TCCC is both a vulnerability and a limiting factor for addressing potentially fatal injuries.

Threats. Hazards. Vulnerabilities.

What I want you to do now is put yourself a scenario that concerns you, or that you think is likely. Maybe it’s picking Grandma up from across town before the hurricane hits. Or maybe it’s packing up the office early and heading home because there’s a riot in your city. Or maybe it’s surviving the storm of the century, there’s a hurricane or a bomb cyclone, a polar vortex, snowmageddon like we had here in Texas in 2021, whatever that scenario is, I want you to put yourself there now.

I want you to close your eyes… Take a deep breath… And snap out of it, man, you’ve got 12 hours before this thing hits, it’s time to get prepared.

On a sheet of paper, think through the threats in this scenario and write them down. Then think through the hazards you could encounter, and write those down. And then think through your vulnerabilities in this scenario. And write those down.

Go ahead and pause the video here while you complete this step, because this module will keep going after this. So just hit pause and then come back when you’re ready.

Okay, do you remember in the previous modules where I said there are three levels of intelligence and operations — tactical, operational and strategic.

We can think about these things in two ways: time and geography.

In terms of time, the tactical level is here and now, or it’s imminent, or it’s happening within a matter of days, so let’s say less than 30 days.

The operational timeframe is anything that will happen in a couple weeks to a couple months, so maybe 30-180 days.

And then the strategic timeframe is typically six months to years to decades away.

Think back to your local area, or area of operations, and consider what your area is going to experience over these three timelines. What is happening, or could happen or will happen within the next 30 days. What threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities could you experience over the next 30 days. Write those down.

And then consider the operational level, so out to six months. What threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities could you experience. Think about how the season changes your environment, as I record this today, we have an election coming up, maybe that’s within six months of you watching this. How is that event going to affect your area? How will that affect you at the tactical level? In your neighborhood or broader community?

And then consider the long term, big picture strategic view. This is the most difficult part of this process because seeing into the future with any accurate is most often at least difficult and and mostly impossible. But we can identify trends. The goal is here is not to get married to any one particular trend, because trends change. Trends can reverse. But what we want to do is write down possible strategic developments. For instance, are you seeing an influx of new residents in your area. Is your state’s politics or you city or country’s politics changing? If so, that doesn’t happen overnight, so it’s a strategic development. Consider strategic trends in politics, security, economics and finance — so what threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities could you encounter during that next recession or financial crisis — think about social trends in your area, critical infrastructure, and so on. And then write those down.

If you need to pause this video here, go ahead and do that. This part is mission critical because this is informing us of all the things, potentially foreseeable things we need to prepare for. Pause this module here because there’s one more thing we need to do here.

After we consider the tactical, operational, and strategic timeframes, we need to consider the geography of these levels.

So you’ve already done the tactical, local level. We’re going to do the same thing for our county and state and then the national-level.

Next, move up to your county and state level. What are the threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities that exist at your county level. And then also the state level. For me, for instance, I don’t live on the border, but it’s a major state and national issue. The legislation being passed, the political battles happening in the statehouse over in Austin are a state concern. How is my state developing politically and how will it change over the next 30 days, the next six months, and the following years and decades to come?

And then move up to the national-level, and consider what’s happening in the next 30 days, the next 6 months, and then in the next year or years ahead. Write those trends down.

I have three closing points here.

Number one, this is really best done as a team or in a group setting, so the same rules apply. If you’re doing this as an army of one, then do what you can now, and strongly consider cross checking against input from other people.

Two, strategic forecasting, trends analysis, this is really the work of intelligence analysis and it’s a skill in itself. It’s kind of like long range shooting. You’re not going to be accurate at 1,000 meters if you don’t know how to shoot at 25 meters. I don’t expect anyone to hit a grand slam and predict what events are going to happen in their county or state or even the country in the next five years. But we can start identifying potential events or potential conditions now and add to them over time.

And third, one of the biggest problems you’re going to encounter are your intelligence gaps – the things that you don’t know but need to know. Anytime you encounter an intelligence gap, write it down and add it to your list. If you don’t know who’s on your county commission, write it down. If you don’t know what new regulations your mayor is considering, write down that intelligence gap. Because we can take that list of intelligence gaps and collect against it. In other words, that list of intel gaps are really just collection requirements. That list tells us exactly what we need to go out and collect.

In the next module, we’re going to dive deeper into threat identification and analysis. And I’ll see you over there.