Juno News - January 26, 2020This is what politicians should really be talking about
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Summary
The Wuhan Virus, the Amber Alert, and the nuclear crisis in Ontario have got me thinking about how fragile our increasingly complex civilization is and how at risk everything could become of suddenly crumbling away at some point, falling apart if we don t take our emergency management seriously.
Transcript
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There have been a few things happening of late that have got me thinking about just how fragile
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our increasingly complex civilization is and just how at risk everything could become of
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suddenly crumbling away at some point, falling apart if we don't take our emergency management
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seriously, if we don't talk about those very unsexy things like managing critical infrastructure.
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That our politicians do sometimes talk about trying to do reports on, but it doesn't always generate all that much interest.
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The big story in the news right now, of course, the Wuhan virus.
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And we've got a lot of experts out there saying, okay, no need to be alarmist,
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but then you look at the things that are happening in China, how quickly it's spreading,
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and how leading public health officials have said that it's really just a numbers game of inevitability
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until one or two cases crop up here in Canada, and it starts to get you worried.
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Several years ago, I played a very small character in the television series, The Strain,
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which is about an infectious disease coming to the United States and a wild outbreak,
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and it becomes a big science fiction narrative and so forth.
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But it gets you thinking about how these things, they can turn at a moment's notice
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and turn into something very different that if you're not prepared for it, who knows what direction you will head.
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Now, public health officials, they've upped their game in recent years, they're very serious about it all.
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But that is not the only front where we are at risk, where we are an increasingly fragile civilization.
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Just the other week, people in Ontario received an Amber Alert notice to their phones, a text message.
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I shouldn't call it an Amber Alert. I think that's exclusively what's used to describe missing children.
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But it was the same system that sends those out, and it was an emergency alert.
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It was sent out at 7 a.m. on a Sunday that said there's been a problem at the Pickering nuclear plant.
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Wow! And a lot of people, particularly living in the east end of Toronto and the GTA near that power plant,
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I went on social media like everybody else, and all I saw was people freaking out.
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Now, the alert did say there's not actually anything dangerous right now to worry about,
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but there's a situation, there's a problem, and we're monitoring it.
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Now, that was at a time when public officials weren't really awake, or media weren't awake,
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You know, 7 a.m. on a Sunday, a lot of people were still in bed.
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And that was a time when, really, we would have been caught off guard, and there could have been havoc.
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Both if a real incident had happened, and here, more worrisomely, if some sort of bad actor out there,
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some person in China or Iran or Russia or some non-state actor, decided, you know what?
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And instead of sending out this message saying, well, there's a problem, but stay tuned,
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maybe we said, there's a problem at the Pickering plant.
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There wouldn't have been enough people awake, enough officials to get the message out to say, stand down.
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There would have been accidents at intersections.
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People would have gone into grocery stores and fought over things and so forth.
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These things could really happen, which is why I think Ontario does actually need to investigate
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why that accident went out, that message was wrongly sent out, how that all happened,
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You know, we live day by day in this really great society,
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better than really any time or place in human history.
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And we enjoy all of these luxuries, but again, there is the fragility of the system.
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I thought about this a lot and wrote about it a lot when I wrote my book a couple years ago,
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Pulse Attack, the real story about the secret weapon that could destroy North America,
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a book that looks at separating the fact and fiction behind electromagnetic pulse attacks
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and the possibility of taking down the electricity grid for several days, several weeks,
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And what happens when you suddenly lose something like electricity that we all rely on
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All this is just to say when we're looking at the Wuhan virus
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or looking at this emergency alert coming on our phones,
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the next time you hear that there's some need to look into critical infrastructure
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or they want to do a report on emergency planning,
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Give it just as much attention as you'd give any other news story
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or any other emotion or thing a politician is working on,
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because these, these things happening behind the scenes
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that require, yes, some of our tax dollars to back them up and fund them,
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others just rolling up our sleeves and getting to work and sweat and effort,
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these are actually the real things that, at the end of the day, may end up saving our lives.