 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Hello everyone. Welcome to Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii, where we discuss the impact of change on workers, employers, and the economy. I'm your host, Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, inviting you to join in the conversation. You can call us at area code 808-374-2014 or tweet us at thinktechhi. The past few weeks have been full of all kinds of unexpected events. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria have wreaked havoc on Texas, Florida, and the Caribbean. U.S. territories, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have been especially devastated, and the news media has been full of stories of U.S. citizens waiting in vain for help to arrive from the continental U.S. Puerto Rico's government officials have made repeated pleas for help, but three weeks after the storms hit, many in Puerto Rico are still waiting for assistance in the form of food, water, and medical services. Like Puerto Rico, Hawaii is a number of islands surrounded by ocean. The average commercial flight from Miami, Florida to San Juan takes about three hours, but it takes five hours for a commercial flight from San Diego, California to Honolulu. So if it has taken so long for FEMA assistance to arrive in San Juan, we in Hawaii should not expect help from the continental U.S. In the event of a natural disaster, we should probably expect to be on our own for at least two weeks before help can arrive. Hawaii residents need to be self-sufficient for at least that long until aid can reach us. Today, we're going to talk about what our emergency survival kits should contain in order to help protect ourselves till help can arrive, and joining me in this conversation is think tech Hawaii's general manager and owner, Jay Fidel. Hi, Jay. Hi, Cheryl. We're non-profits, so there's no owner. Oh, sorry. The public owns us. Yeah, that's true. We belong to the community. Indeed. And that's why we can have these conversations on camera, because, you know, these issues are not currently being addressed in, shall we say, mainstream for-profit media, but it's a lesson to be learned that there is a need for self-sufficiency for all of us as just as members of the community, and particularly for employers, how do we protect our employees, how do we ensure we can get our businesses up and running again in the most, in the quickest and most efficacious way possible. Yeah. It's a very important topic, timely topical, and in fact, at 2 p.m. on Friday, this Friday, Carl Kim and others from the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center, which has its office right across the street on the Fort Street Mall coming over for a similar discussion about how we can repair the fabric of our community afterward. We know it's coming. Indeed. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when, and even, and we have dodged the bullet any of a number of times when there have been hurricanes or tsunamis predicted that have not risen to the level of requiring evacuation or requiring a lot of emergency assistance. So we've been dodging the bullet for a long time, but Hawaii has not been immune. Hurricane Iniki is still in the memories of some of us 25 years ago, and a month, as a matter of fact, because it was September 11, 1992, when Hurricane Iniki hit. September 11, how interesting that that day should be repeated in history. Indeed. Yeah, that's true. I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're right. Ten years later. Yeah. A hurricane of... Nine years later. Yeah. A hurricane of an entirely different kind. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, Iniki did phenomenal damage. The island of Kaua'i was more than decimated. Lives were lost. I have it written down here. I think it was six people died, and over 14,000 homes were either damaged or destroyed, and it took up to a month for power to be restored across the island of Kaua'i. So what Puerto Rico is experiencing is not unusual, but there's a lot of repair work that takes far more time than we would anticipate, and people just don't realize that until community services and infrastructure are up and running, that essentially, households are on their own. Yeah. So how do we protect ourselves? Yeah. Well, you know, the interesting point you make, in my case, my wife's parents were in Kaua'i, and the roof flew off their house. Yes. And they had to put plastic bisqueen on the roof, so that it didn't rain into the house. And that stayed there for the better part of eight months because the insurance industry wasn't paying off, and contractors were not available. So the system wasn't working very well if you expected there would be a system to repair and recreate the community that existed before. And query whether we're any better off today, whether our system is more resilient, if those roofs flew off, if those houses were flattened, such as in Puerto Rico, but we don't know why you do exactly. That's a good question. I think a lot of us, I'm a homeowner, you are, I think we both have homeowners insurance. And I think there's an expectation that the claims guy would show up, take a few pictures, disappear, and then we get a check in the mail. But that is not often the way that the claim system works, especially when there are thousands of policyholders that are having this situation. And if the damages and the losses are significant, the insurance industry itself may not be able to generate the cash necessary to reimburse policy owners for the face values of whatever coverage they have. Sure. And don't forget insurance companies that actually do fraud on the homeowners, their policyholders, there was a 60 minutes, more than one 60 minutes episode about this very thing where in the hurricane Sandy in the East Coast in New York, there were appraisers, engineers that were sent out to evaluate the damage. They would come to one conclusion and the insurance executives would rewrite that in order to make it seem that it was not really a problem and that the policyholder was not entitled to the same level of compensation or to entitled compensation at all. It was gross fraud, not in one case, but in many, many cases. And when an insurance company is desperate for survival of its boosted entity, you might find those kinds of things. I'm not saying it would happen in Hawaii, but I'm saying it's a logical possibility to happen anywhere. Sure. That's true. And certainly there have been similar stories for survivors of Katrina, Hurricane Andrew back in Florida in the 1990s, there were similar types of stories. And some of these were considered urban legends, but in the case of Sandy, there is documented proof and the government is actually stepping in to do some investigations. And hopefully those people will get some redress, but that doesn't put a roof over the heads of the people that have lost everything. Right. So what you're really talking about here, and I fully appreciate the importance of the subject, is that Hawaii not only must have the sort of the first responder defense against extreme weather or disaster of any other kind, but it must also have the resilience, the ability, the planned ability to recreate its infrastructure and if necessary its entire society. You can say that's a lot of trouble. A lot of people would be damaged to the point where they would leave if they could leave. And at the same time, I'd like to offer the thought that maybe it's an opportunity to actually recreate a better infrastructure, a better design. This happens when you have serious hurricanes and the like. Next time around people are more careful and they use better engineering and it's less likely to happen after they recreate their infrastructure, their society to be more resilient. I don't want that to happen, but it's one bright light, one bright possibility. That's true if the financial resources are available to be able to create a safer and less prone to damage type of infrastructure and the money may not be available. I don't think the money would be available. This is what somebody said to me at lunch. This is not a wealthy society we have here. A lot of people are living paycheck to paycheck. A lot of people cannot or can only barely afford their mortgages or their rent. A lot of people don't have money in the bank and so if they were under a kind of stress of economic stress because of one of these storms, it would be nobody to bail them out and they couldn't bail themselves out of the on the street. And if you think the homeless problem is a problem now and it is a problem now, it would be much more of a problem if that happened and they would not have options. It would be really a crisis for a lot of people. So we have problems that may not be resolvable so quickly which will have to be addressed if we have a bad storm or disaster. That means that we have to make our society, our state, our infrastructure better now in anticipation of the possibility and not only in infrastructure, not only in, you know, insurance arrangements but in everything. Yeah, you're right. I remember that there were people who lost their homes in Aniki who first refugied and they called themselves refugees. Refugied from Kaua'i to Oahu because they have no place to live there and there wasn't even available, say hotel rooms or safe places to stay just out and about on Kaua'i. Everything was pretty much flattened. So the refugee to Oahu, they stayed as long as they could and then they went to the continent to live and never came back. I was in, yeah, I was in New Orleans a couple of years ago and took a tour and there are still houses that were devastated by Katrina and literally they've been marked with the signs to say that civil defense had been in to look for people and they didn't find anyone where the people have not come back yet. And often it's because they were, they did not receive sufficient enough insurance to cover rebuilding their homes and they had, were able to find work in another location wherever it was that they had gone to and so that they were, they had decided it would just be better for them to stay where they were instead of trying to come back to Katrina. Yeah, well this suggests and you know to get to the point of your working together theme, this suggests that we need to plan, we as a community have to plan, we are very complacent right now, we think this isn't going to happen but you and I know better. We have to plan as a community, as individual families, we all have to have a plan to deal with it and the problem is that we do not recognize the reality of what will, what is likely to happen. It's not rocket science to figure out, well what happened, we can learn from these other storms, what happens to a given community. So one of the things that's going to happen in the show on Friday was the national disaster prepared as training centers to be prepared for the Puerto Rico experience or the Houston experience and I think Hawaii has to do that, Hawaii has not done that, we have been complacent about it. So it's not only civil defense and we had a show yesterday with the American Red Cross and it's not only the American Red Cross, it's the whole community, it's government, it's business, it's the nonprofits, it's the schools, you name it, everybody has to have a plan and I think part of the plan and this is really your watch, part of the plan is how do we recreate the economy, that means the jobs, because people aren't, they won't have the ability to get to work, the workplace will not have electricity, even if they got there they couldn't do much and what role does that company play in the economy which is dead anyway, there won't be any tourism, and without money in the bank, in fact without access to whatever money you do have in the bank, how do you live, how much water do you need, how do you survive and what do you do when the community is coming apart and people are roaming the streets looking for water and food and what not, so anyway I'd like to hear your thoughts actually. Okay and we'll do that right after we come back from the break, gosh time is flying, so we'll take a 60 second break and then when we come back we can start talking about how individuals and families can prepare themselves in the event that something emergent is happening, so we'll be back in 60 seconds, this is working together on Think Tech Hawaii. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm Ethan Allen, host of likeable science on Think Tech Hawaii, every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. I hope you'll join me for likeable science, we'll dig into science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and delight of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science, and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great, it's all entertaining, it's all educational, so I hope you'll join me for likeable science. You know the big one. Hi, welcome back to Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii, I'm Cheryl Crozier-Garcia and Jay Fidel and I are discussing how to recover from an emergency natural disaster type situation. Yeah, so let's pass the you know the emergency kit, let's go beyond that. Okay. We know we have to you know stock up on water and food and and fuel and what have you and everybody should have a little supply of those things, but let's go to knitting the community back together again. So one of the things the American Red Cross talked about yesterday, currently Marioshi, was that you need in your home and for that matter your business a rendezvous plan. Yes. You have to be able to get out of where you are and that could be a problem and you know if but if you're where you are it's falling apart and get to a place where you rendezvous with your family. Well the same kind of plan would exist for a business. So all the all the employees and staff with rendezvous on certain events to a place where they could again start collaborating and making economic activity. What are your thoughts on that? Well I did actually work for a company that had done that at one time and it was shortly after the Iniki situation. This particular company was a construction-based company that had six million square feet of warehouse space under roof and so the president of the company had laid in a huge supply of water, food, emergency rations, blankets, cots, the whole thing and employees were told that in the event of emergency get back to the warehouse with your family as quickly as you can. We have supplies here and we can begin rebuilding. That's very that's very what's the word nutritious. Yes. In the sense that then the family doesn't have to worry about stocking up its own supply and the employer was making points. He would make points with me for sure. He offered me a supply and all I had to do was get to that rendezvous place. Right. So we did that and it was arranged. He also had laid in a huge generator that was sufficient enough power according to the folks who bought it from to create about two to three weeks of electricity that would get our computers up and running so that we could continue to solicit jobs from people who desperately needed to have rebuilding done to clear roads and things like that. You know what? This is what I'm going to tell you right after the break and that is that in 9-11 the companies in the Twin Towers that that were able to recreate themselves were the ones who had backup data somewhere else. So really all they had to do was find computers to connect up with those servers elsewhere and they could start business again. So you know your hypothetical or real company would do much better off if they had backup data somewhere, if they are operating in a sort of one-tier approach and they don't have any backup data, they may not be able to do anything. No, they did. They had off-site storage. They would back up every Friday to bring all of those backup files up to date and then the I don't know, USB ports or storage units went home with the president every weekend so that if something were to happen he'd have immediate access and as soon as he could get to the warehouse and plug everything back in again we could begin business operations. And I remember I was working at another industrial organization that had had a fire. The plant was destroyed and it wasn't the fire that killed everything, it was the water that was used to put out the fire but we literally, I was doing, fortunately we had backups that were locked in safes, fireproof and waterproof safes and I was able, the event occurred over the weekend to go in on Monday morning and start issuing payroll because we had this off-site stuff and all I needed to do was bring in my laptop from home and I was ready to rock and roll. It's almost like a best case analysis which you described because you may be able to get your company ready to do business rapidly after the disaster by planning that out and having all these things ready, backup systems, but you still live in an intermeshed, interdependent economy so your customers have to pay you, your customers have to communicate with you and therefore you have to have a plan for outreach to deal with them maybe change your systems, change your ways of dealing, your ways of doing business and you're not sure exactly how serious it's going to be but you know that you can't assume that the economy around you is going to operate in the same intelligent fashion, maybe in fact likely not so you have to accommodate them in all kinds of ways that some of the ways you cannot anticipate is very flexible about recreating the economy or the interdependence around you. And it provides an opportunity I think for a very sort of targeted marketing approach post disaster. If we are there and we are available and we are able to be flexible in how we continue business with our market as well as to create new business based on the fact that our competitors maybe are not able to do so, we can actually realize some net gains even in the face of disaster. Oh that's true, if you're quicker at it that's right and you can achieve that connection faster, A, everybody's going to appreciate you did that that you were nimble, but B, you're going to wind up getting a greater market share because you're reaching out to people beyond your ordinary customer base. It's pretty good but let me raise two other points with you. First, there's the basic functions that the municipality will provide and they're immediate. They say the state government legislature, they run the show, but the people who provide the necessary government activities to us, the government benefits to us, that's the municipality or the county. So water, you know, you may not have water, power, you may not have power, you may not have lighting outside, you may not have traffic signals outside. I mean it calls for that additional level of flexibility where government is just simply, I mean that part of government, the part of government that provides these municipal functions is just not functioning. So if your people, for example, need to go somewhere in their vehicle, assuming they have the vehicle and the gas, they may have to face challenges in arriving at their destination. If they need, you know, some kind of city service like lighting or water or sewage, right, all that stuff, sewerage or police presence and protection, you're going to have to find a way to get around absences in those areas. What are you going to do, Cheryl? If it were me, I would do a couple of things. The first thing is be ready to reach out to folks who know that you may have resources that they don't have access to. Several years ago, you may recall right after Christmas, there was a lightning strike on one of the electrical transformer plants and the power went out across the whole island. So just to give you an example, because I have a family member who uses durable medical equipment, we have small batteries that will operate that medical equipment and we've got like four or five of them that I keep charged. And each one can provide 48 hours of electricity for that durable medical equipment. Well, my next door neighbor was an older man who had lost both legs to diabetes and was taking shots and his medications needed to be kept cold. So I dragged one of those batteries over to his house and plugged his refrigerator into it so that he was able. That was kind of you. Well, and it prevents looting. Do you know what I mean? If he had family that was so desperate, there isn't any reason why they wouldn't have, if they really needed it, kicked the door in and said, give me your stuff and taken it all. So by reaching out, it was a proactive strike to make sure that he got the help he needed for a while at least as much as I could spare. And that, you know, so we create this, this simpatico kind of relationship. But you knew him and there was a benefit in that both ways. But there may be people on the streets who are hungry, thirsty, what have you, desperate and maybe who have weapons, who knows or willing to do dastardly things to take what they need. And so, you know, police presence is important. And communication with the city authorities is important, the municipality. I think one way to help yourself is to make sure that you have access to the city authorities such as they are at that moment in the crisis. So that means knowing how to reach them, how to reach them in every way possible, whatever is available. It would be more complicated if there were no internet and there might be no internet. And then there's telephones, old kind, new kind. Telephones don't work without power. But old fashioned phones, they don't need power if there's power in the headquarters. So, yeah, what kinds of issues about communication with the existing resources? But I do want to spend a moment about looting, because looting is possible in every society in the, around the world, including our society here in, in, in Hawaii. The story, in 1965, there was a great blackout in Manhattan. Some reason or another it just went all out. It was the first major blackout of a large area, a large, you know, municipal area that really ever happened. And the lights were out in the whole of Manhattan, you know, and in Manhattan millions of people live and kinds of property and, and they need to eat and all that stuff. And there's a lot of retail, a lot of shops, a lot of TVs in the front window of those shops. Okay. In 1965, the first major blackout, no looting at all. It lasted a couple of days. They turned the power back on. Everybody was happy and feeling good about the fact that, you know, society had, had held together, you know, there was no significant threat to personal security or property security. A few years later, like two or three years later, there was the second major blackout in Manhattan. Didn't work the same way, because people saw it in their, in their appreciation of it. You know, been there, done that. We've been through the good times. Now we know the parameters. We know, for example, that the police don't have an easy time in this kind of crisis. So we're going to do looting, and they did. And we're looting all over Manhattan in the second iteration. So I think it's a function of how many, how many times this has happened, how people appreciate it, and how long it lasts. You know, one day, everybody is after you, Gaston. The second day, maybe not so much. And the third day, you better be, you better be watchful. Right. And this is personal security. It's the security of your home, your business. And I don't really know what to recommend to people, do you? Well, I remember HPD at our last, during our last big blackout. They had uniformed police officers, whoever was available, go to the various supermarkets, etc. And they would stand by the door, and people would come in and get what they needed. Now, they were not letting people go out with luxury items, but if you went in and got a case of water, or food, or whatever it was, they'd look, yeah, because there was no way to pay. The electricity was out, so the cash registers were out. And, but so the cops would say, no, no, no, put the TV back. But you can take the water and the spam. It was very interesting, Hawaii style. And that's what they did, sure. There was another case, and this was the food line right around the corner from my house, where the manager could get there, but there wasn't any way to charge people. So he just said, leave whatever you think's fair. And he had a box put out by the exit door, and people would drop cash, or checks, whatever they had. They would drop them into that box, whatever they thought they had purchased. Yeah. And it worked just fine. Well, you know, I think a given business should have a plan like that. In fact, a given community should have a plan like that, to somehow make it clear to people that, you know, an honest system will benefit everybody. That's true. The problem is, you know, if you have the degradation of society, the failure of the social, of the physical, in the physical city, and then, thus, the failure of the social contract, it all goes into the state of nature. That's true. Gotta take steps to prevent that. That's true. And, you know, we're running out of time here. So let me just wrap up by saying, you know, nobody wants to go through a hurricane, or a tsunami, or any other kind of natural disaster, but they're part of island life. And since we're so isolated from the rest of the United States, or any other landmass, we've got to be able to take care of ourselves, our families, and our businesses. Advanced planning can help to alleviate some of the fear associated with natural disasters of all kinds. Being prepared isn't really a luxury, and it doesn't need to be inconvenient, uncomfortable, or expensive. Not being prepared is certainly a dicier proposition. I'm sure no one in Hawaii wants to go through the same kinds of discomfort as our brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico and throughout the Caribbean are now experiencing. We can learn from their experience and ready ourselves, not for if disaster strikes, but for when it does. We need to remember that protecting ourselves, our families, our homes, and our businesses is ultimately up to us. Relying on guardian angels from the continental U.S. to swoop in with food and water just doesn't seem to be a good idea. We don't want to gamble with our own or our family's safety. That's it for this edition of Working Together on Think Tecawaii. Thanks to our guest, Jay Fiedel. I'm Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, and we'll be back in two weeks with more ideas for working together. Bye for now.