Vulnerability & Risk

Welcome to the module on Vulnerability Assessments.

No Area Assessment is complete without assessing your vulnerabilities.

These are the factors that make you susceptible to risk. And we covered Risk Factors in Module 5, so go back if you need a refresher.

I see levels of Risk as the result of threats and hazards versus your preparedness or capabilities to deal with them.

In other words, the less you’re prepared to deal with a threat or hazard, and the greater that threat or hazard is, then the greater your risk.

So, for instance, a house fire could be a major risk to a family who doesn’t have any fire extinguishers, or they have family members who aren’t trained in how to put out a fire, or maybe they have small children, or a fireplace.

Or maybe this family lives in an apartment complex, and so they’ll always be vulnerable due to the carelessness of others.

These are all vulnerabilities that increase risk.

And our job in this module is to identify these vulnerabilities because they lead to the risk that we need to mitigate.

We’re going to do this through the Risk Assessment process, which has six steps.

1:

We have already done the first three steps in the Risk Assessment process.

Step 1: Identify your critical threats and hazards.

Step 2: Identify routine threats and hazards.

Step 3: Assess those threats and hazards.

So we’ll start now with Step 4: Assess our vulnerabilities to each threat or hazard.

A vulnerability is any factors that makes us susceptible to risk.

So, for instance, in a previous example, I pointed out that if you live in an apartment, you are vulnerable to others in your building being careless with fires, firearms, chemicals, faucets or washing machines that flood or pipes that burst — all sort of other things that could become a hazard for you.

These things make you susceptible to risk.

So let’s look at another example: a wildfire.

I live in Central Texas. It’s dry for most of the year. That’s a vulnerability.

We can have high winds that can push a wildfire in any direction.

The grass is dry or there may be deadfall, or fuel for a wildfire.

We have power lines that could ignite a forest fire, like that big PG&E fire in California.

We could have careless neighbors shooting off fireworks or having a bonfire during a multi-year drought.

Can you think of any other vulnerabilities here?

Another example is a protracted loss of power or Grid Down event.

I am dependent on energy from a utility company after two weeks (because my generator will run out of fuel). That’s a vulnerability that I have.

Most parts of the U.S. power grids are not defensible.

There are active threats to the grids — both cyber and physical.

Natural disasters are unpredictable. We could lose power for a long time after the destruction of a natural disaster while utility companies are trying to reconnect everything.

We could also have a coronal mass ejection that causes sustained power outages. That can’t be stopped. Maybe we get targeted with an electromagnetic pulse, a high altitude nuclear weapon. Maybe we can’t defend against that. That’s a potential vulnerability.

Can you think of any others?

So one of my critical threats is a Golden Horde scenario. Mass refugees coming into my area due to my proximity to Austin, Dallas, and Houston. That’s a vulnerability for my area. We have limited resources, a relatively small law enforcement presence, those things make me susceptible to this scenario.

If you haven’t already, go through your list of threats and hazards and identify the factors that make you susceptible.

After we identify vulnerabilities, we assess the risk posed by each threat or hazard.

We identify and assess risk for two reasons.

First, we need to understand it. Our risk is the consequence to us if this particular thing actually does happen.

And second, if we haven’t identified our risk, and we haven’t understood it, then we’re not preparing for it.

And risk is the stuff you prepare for.

So, a Golden Horde scenario is not particularly likely, but the likelihood is higher for me, someone who lives in a proximity to Austin, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and Houston — with a combined population of 5 million people — than it is for someone who lives in West Texas, several hours away.

It poses a high risk to me due to its impact.

Also because, we have substantial vulnerabilities in this scenario.

That’s a whole lot of people we’re just not prepared for because they’ll overwhelm our resources.

Obviously, violence is one of those risks. We run the risk of being overrun, or suffering a home invasion, mobs and looters potentially rampaging. I don’t know. It’s a difficult scenario for me to imagine — the human behavior part.

But I know that with a lot of needy people comes violence, health risks because we’re talking about a lot of waste and trash, and those humans are vectors for disease. Loss of resources is another — squatters, people being evicted from their homes by armed intruders possibly, then loss of food and agriculture.

And that lands us on Step 6. Implement controls and countermeasures.

So let’s go back to this Golden Horde theory. Maybe there’s a grid down event and lots of people are leaving the cities to the pastures and prairies where there’s clean water and abundant food.

I’ve already established I’m vulnerable to this event.

And I just pointed out a handful of risks – violence, displacement, disease and illness, resource depletion. If I thought this were a likely scenario, then these are the thing I need to be planning for.

How do I stop violence?

How do I prevent displacement?

How do I protect myself and my family from disease?

How do I protect my ranch and broader area from resource depletion?

Make sense?

These are the questions to answer in your preparedness and security planning.

Intelligence has just delivered to us on a silver platter all the ways we’re going to be negatively affected in this scenario, and then that’s what we plan for.

Lastly here, somewhere around 100% of your material preparedness journey should focus on these nine factors.

These come to us by way of my friend Charley Hogwood, who does the All-Hazards training sessions over at the Early Warning Network.

This is a list he identified, and it has my full endorsement.

Those areas are water, food, shelter, health and safety, security, energy, communication, transportation, intelligence — obviously not in that order.

Obviously, intelligence, if at all possible comes first in a preparedness scenario. Otherwise, it’s Water and Security, followed by Shelter and Food, and I’ll let other people debate from there.

But all this is to say that we need to assess our personal and household vulnerabilities according to this list.

So where are our vulnerabilities for water?

Here are some questions you’ll want to answer for each of the nine critical areas.

1. What’s our supply chain look like? What’s my primary source? Do we have a secondary source? What about alternative or emergency sources?

2. What’s the most likely to break in the months or years ahead, among these nine critical areas? And then what is your vulnerability and risk?

3. Next is what can we replace through local sources?

4. What are our dependencies? Which of these nine areas am I wholly or partially dependent on someone else or some other system?

These are the risks to identify and prepare for.

Thus endeth the lesson on vulnerability and risk. In the next module, we’re moving onto Intelligence Production.