So this is a blog, huh?

So, this is a blog! After thinking about it for years, I‘ve decided to purchase my own bit of turf in the world wide web and build something on it. This something happens to be a blog.

As you might already have discovered, my name is Bernhard and I work as a disaster/crisis management professional for the Red Cross in Austria. I spend my days thinking about bad things that could happen and what one could do to make them go away again (preferably quickly and without causing too much trouble). The area my function covers is Austria’s largest province, Lower Austria. It’s 19,186 square kilometres (Google says that’s 7,407.8 square miles) wide and hosts almost 1.7 million people. Thanks to airports, heavy industry, the river Danube, or the east end of the alps we have to handle a very diverse risk landscape. Floods, traffic accidents, fires, heavy snowfall or even an earthquake prone region in the south never let things get boring.

Now what is it that I do exactly? Whenever I meet new people, I know that question will come up sooner or later and I will try to formulate an answer. Most people never heard of my profession.

Long story short: I regularly think about events that can harm people and try to find ways to control them. I‘m not in the business of preventing emergencies, I concentrate on response. In my world there is this model called the Disaster Management Cycle. It describes the phases disaster management goes through and I think it helps to understand my work.

Whenever there is a disaster, a Response Phase will follow in order to save lives and property. At some point, sooner or later, people will try to find back to normality (e.g., by rebuilding damaged structures or seeking long-term psychological aid), which is called the Recovery Phase. Awareness will be raised after the disaster and the community will try to stop such incidents from happening again (e.g., establishing new building codes, passing new legislation for the storage of hazardous materials or crowd safety measures). This is known as the Prevention or Mitigation Phase. And since there always will be a certain level of remaining risk, it is necessary to prepare for future emergencies (e.g., writing emergency plans, training and exercising with emergency responders, or buying new response equipment) throughout a, you guessed it, Preparedness Phase, before the next disaster strikes.

As I mentioned above, my work mostly lies in the area of preparedness and response. Mitigation and recovery projects are rare for me, although a few weeks ago I was asked to help setting up a system to guide victims of a severe thunderstorm through applications for aid funding.

Surely, focus should lie on prevention whenever possible. However, that‘s not my job. Politicians, engineers, business owners, and in fact every person is responsible for creating an environment that is as safe as possible. I examine this environment and try to find safety gaps. When I find any, I will design solutions to fill them. With my colleagues I develop standard operation procedures and manage projects to test new equipment like medical units or power generators. We create training sessions and emergency exercises, so our staff can respond safely and with the right know-how. Whenever disasters occur, I am involved in coordinating the relief operations and see if all the previously mentioned plans and gear really were sufficient.

Over the last years I was given opportunities to gain experience in all kinds of harmful events. Six years ago, I assisted refugees in the process to receive medical aid and shelter, after they fled to Austria in search for protection. Recently I coordinated county-wide testing efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. In between I lead volunteers during floods and heavy snowfall, and worked on concepts and exercises to quickly rescue victims of malicious attacks.

The Disaster Management Cycle

Despite having to handle so many disciplines, disaster responders are rarely experienced. This is why sharing knowledge is critical. Having other people's knowledge available means, we can use it and learn from it. We don‘t need to make mistakes ourselves, when other people make them for us and tell us about the outcome. We can be prepared for when we find us in stressful situations. It adds to our competence and our resilience.

This is something I would like to achieve with this blog. I‘m not here to tell you how it‘s done. But I can share my experiences and let you in on the mistakes I already made, so you don‘t have to make them.

It’s why I choose to write texts about my work and post them on social media. Obviously, I thought one or two people would find them interesting or entertaining. But even more because there is an incredible range of disciplines that emergency managers must master, to get the job done. We are project managers, cartographers, secretaries, researchers, diplomats, psychologists, data analysts and first but foremost we are solution engineers. Throughout my career so far, I had many chances to try out different things, to pick up skills and stumble (as well as fall) over one or another mistake I made. In return many of my skills from my personal life, I can use at work. This webpage alone is a fantastic example! By building my own website I gained knowledge on how to present information on the internet. In my world that means I just acquired skills on how to warn and inform members of the public (about let’s say evacuation routes or hygiene measures) in a way that can be shared and spread on social media. I wouldn’t need technical experts for that anymore, or at least would be able to communicate with them on a whole new level.

To achieve this knowledge transfer I thought a blog is a nice way to reach out to like-minded people and communicate my experiences and my perspective. I’m offering my stories, while hoping to deliver knowledge that might be beneficial to one or two of you. On top of that, it gives me the chance to reflect on the things I do every day. In reverse I love to meet new people who share their stories with me and help me to develop further as well. I strongly believe in personal development and am always grateful to be taught new skills. Regularly I try to find sources for this sort of emergency management related knowledge and regularly my search is unsuccessful.

I’m currently working on my master thesis, which revolves around the question of how to make emergency medical services more resilient. (Sooner or later the essence of this is going to be squeezed into a blog post as well) Therefore, I might not be able to upload new posts regularly. However, my goal is to upload new content at least bi-weekly and I’m already looking forward to writing my next post.

Would you like to get in touch? Please find the contact form here! Feedback is always appreciated and of course I’m curious to find out if anybody actually reads my posts! If so, I very much hope you enjoyed it and I am already looking forward to the next one!

Regards

Bernhard