Trying to Understand the Tragedy of Sandy Hurricane

In this podcast, Ricardo discusses the effects of Hurricane Sandy, that caused tremendous destruction on the east coast of the United States, from the point of view of Risk Management.

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome to the five minutes PM podcast today. I like to discuss the Tragedy facts around the hurricane, Sandy, that reach at the Eastern coast of United States a couple of days ago, doing a crazy damage in the Caribbean and mostly in Haiti. And like, just trying to understand that she was watching the, on the news, all the damages and the people in a lot, a lot of people are asking questions, learns about how we can avoid this, what would be wrong?

And they like just to return some basic risk management concepts here and also make in some of my stuff, statements around us. The first thing I want just 12 hours is that I'm very thoughtful when we are praying for the people that lost their homes and for those who lost their lives on this Tragedy. And I one, just reframe this in the more technical approach, trying to understand what we can do and how we can handle with this kind of situation.

Every time that we look and to analyze risk, there is something that is very important. It's in predictable. So what we try to model what we try to do modeling. We try to do deep risk assessment, but this will not reduce to zero our uncertainty. It's very important to understand that we cannot cover all risks as and all aspects because it's so chaotic the way that the word is structures itself, that we can not control all the variables to do that.

And it's very important that we did a lot of progress. For example, I would like to invite you to, we think about this Hurricane without any previous information, let's suppose that we do not have the national hurricane center, that we do not have satellites, that we do not have any, and then you wake up in the morning to go to work. And then in your corner is Hurricane Sandy, I'm almost sure that the damage will be far, far, much dramatic that it was, this will be really devastating if this happens without this.

So we did a lot of things improvements, and we need to understand that this is a continuous process. I was listen from 100 than eight years since the opening of the New York subway does is the highest dam and this cruise show transport service. So just to give you some ideas, so we need to understand that most of the time in this kind of catastrophic event, we cannot Hello Dan in the perfect way, because we can not handle the probabilities T aspect.

We can just handling, try to minimize the impact, but some of them are so big that we can not Handel like earthquakes we can mitigate, but we cannot avoid this kind of Risk response doesn't exist. And when a Risk becomes true, we have the problems and this is what is happening right now with this Hurricane. So now we don't have a Risk anymore.

We have a problem. We have a fact, a lot of homes destroyed people missing damages in the infrastructure of the cities. So we need to handle this and we need to be extremely powerful in project management to do this disaster recover as soon as we can to recover the normality. And we need to understand that, imagine that the hurricane Sandy turn right and did not reach the Eastern part of us and maybe dissipate in the ocean, this would be a risk, but that did not become true.

But right now, what we need to do, we need to develop knowledge and we need to implement projects quickly, as quick as we can, to be affective on the recovery in order to move forward. So look, this is the aspect. There are some aspects that we cannot control it's out of our hands. And of course, this is very stressing for it, everybody, because we would love to have control of what do you think, but real life is different.

Please. I don't want to avoid recognizing those who lost their lives on this, but in a very pragmatic approach, we need to learn and we need to move forward in respect of those who lost their homes and who are struggling Harley. And I'd like them to accept my condolences. And now also a massive trough, hope that with good project management, we can make this happen. We can make this recovery is super quick and we can learn, like we learn it in the past a hundred years.

I'm sure that if this Hurricane Richard, the Eastern coast without any notice, this will be a global Tragedy. It's something that we cannot even compare with the tsunami, or if the worst week in, in Heidi, it will be just a completely destruction of all the Eastern coast up to the North in us. So just to give you this and to be positive that we need right now as project management, to find ways of making some kind of help to this people, to address the problem right now and not just

Speaker 1 (6m 12s): To discuss why this happens. It's climate change of this. This is a great time

Speaker 0 (6m 16s): Discussion for us to make in two months. But right now we need to put the subway to work. We need to clean up the streets and we need to move forward. So this is the message that I want to make. All of you aware does WIC. So next week, let's talk about the future and another stuff in the five minutes PM. Podcast.

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