Whether it’s a crime, a meteor shower, a dam breach or a major hack attack, how can
security directors, managers (and even individuals) plan for the extremely rare threat event?

Even with the challenges of global warmings and changing patterns in society, and, apparently, in space, it’s still possible to anticipate and prepare for the outlier events.

You start with the known elements, for example, lately, some residential developers have been building in established flood plains, because, hey , there hasn’t been a flood in over 50 years.  But there are 100-year flood plains, 50-year flood plains and 200-year flood plains.  If your home, or facility, is located in a 50-year flood plain, and it’s been 48 years since the last flood, you can correctly infer that the next five years, you have an increased flood risk!

How to find out about flood risk?  If you live in the USA, you can go to www.floodsmart.gov, put in your zip code, and find out whether or not you are located in a flood plain, or flood prone area.  If you find out that you are, then you can add some additional preparation to make sure this threat is not going to materialize, or if it does, you’re ready!

Another example,  if your house/facility is in a high risk flood area, that means that there is a 1 in 4 chance (25% chance) that the property will experience a flood during the next 30 years.

If we look at chance of being hit by a meteor shower, we might find that a meteor hits the earth, with an impact, once every hundred years.   And so we take that 1 in 100 number and factor in the global surface, say divide it into 50 regions.  So that reduces that 1 in 100 number down to a much lesser number, maybe one in 100,000.

While the rare events are shocking when they occur, you can plan for them, by analyzing your risk, and putting in the proper controls so that if or when it happens, you’re ready and can continue to operate with the minimal of disruption!

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