Manuals vs Muscle Memory: Why Your Contingency Plan Won't Save You

Yeah, so from the first days that I started to deal with the emergency management, I always found the gap between the plan and what actually happened in the field.

Once you respond to the event, you're full with adrenaline.

Things are happening very fast.

It's not that you are walking somewhere with your EM or BCP binder and you're checking every page that you are doing exactly what you planned six months ago when you were sitting in the air condition and the sun was shining.

But it hit me hard.

when I was part of a big event in a big wildfire in Israel.

It's called the Mount Carmel fire.

And to make a long story short, we had a big fire coming to the municipality I was in called Tirat HaKarmel, which in Hebrew means the castle of the Carmel mountain.

Yeah.

And we saw the flames coming.

We started to feel the smoke.

The big challenge, by the way, in fire, big fires is not the flames.

It's the smoke usually that usually creates the baseline and the need for evacuation.

And we immediately over there, all the responders, we walk together and we understood that.

that we are supposed to evacuate one third of the town.

I'm talking about something like 10,000 people.

It's a big evacuation.

And then at that point, what happened is chaos.

And I was working with that municipality for years.

I knew everyone by name.

And I remember that we did an evacuation drill four weeks before the fire.

So a different event.

But we did an evacuation drill.

We have everything written.

Yet when we took a decision that we need to evacuate, everyone started to run.