Conduct of the Second Day; Water/Climate Security Tabletop Exercise
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Conduct of the Second Day; Water/Climate Security Tabletop Exercise I. Exercise introduction There are four parts to the exercise, the first an hour and a half, the second an hour and a quarter, the third and fourth (after lunch) both one hour in length. The overall subject is national environmental risk management using water security planning as an example through a facilitated roundtable discussion among assembled experts and agency representatives. The emphasis is on decreasing vulnerability through better adaptation to the realities of the threat. The ultimate objective is to help local and national agencies take more effective actions, improve their distribution of labor, eliminate duplication, and cooperate more fully, both in preparing for national disaster and in responding once a crisis occurs. In this exercise we are focused on the front end of the process, that is preparation, early warning, and first response to (in this case) widespread and serious flooding. The CMDR Center of Excellence is concerned with exploring/understanding the chain of command, who exactly is in charge among the various agencies with roles and responsibilities in CM/DR, to include issues of cross-border and international cooperation. Our purpose in this exercise is not to teach disaster response per se, but to help critical agencies improve their communications, C2, interoperability, cooperation, and coordination for disaster preparedness and relief. At some point during the introduction if it has not already been done we want to review the players and understand just who is in attendance. This will likely be done on the first day during introductions and in the presentations. We can talk about seating and if we want to make name/agency place cards so everyone around the table knows who represents which agency. This should include both Bulgarian national agencies and representatives from the UN and NATO and if present the EU/EC. Attendees from other countries can be observers except that if there are representatives from the government of Greece or Turkey we might want to have them at the table since the scenario depicts cross-border flooding from Bulgaria into these countries. We begin the introduction with a discussion of ‘first principles’ just so we all understand what our objectives are and where we are operating in the disaster response spectrum. We need to understand the threat; just what it is we are dealing with, in this case severe and destructive flooding resulting from overflowing rivers. Next, we need to understand the system in place to deal with the threat. This includes the agencies with roles in preparation for and response to disasters, including agencies at the national and international level, and at regional, and local levels. This includes understanding how the various agencies are related, the difference between C2 and coordination, who is supported and who is supporting. It also includes the assets, knowing what everyone brings to the table in terms of both preparation and response. It is important that cooperation extend to all governmental levels including agriculture, transportation, and urban development. We want to look at Bulgaria from a standpoint of its national crisis management system, meaning how consolidated and 1 coordinated is it? Are existing subsystems simply allocated to different ministries giving them an ad hoc approach by definition; and most important, how harmonized is the engagement of civil- military capabilities? We need to understand where we are at any given time on the continuum. Government agencies have very different tasks, responsibilities, roles and missions to “the left or right of the boom” to take a phrase from JIEDDO. Each agency needs to understand just what it is responsible for at a given point on the continuum, where it fits in the scheme, who the agency responds to, what it owes and what it can count on being provided. Well to the left in this case is recognizing the extent of the threat, where are flood plains historically located, which rivers are most likely to overflow, when in the year does this normally happen. Then move to what can be done to lessen the severity of the threat, including measures that can be taken ahead of time, now. We need to understand that disaster risk for any particular community or population is the nexus of the hazard itself, cyclones, storms, excessive rainfall, etc., and the particular vulnerability of a community. Vulnerability can change because of changes in the hazard – climate change, rising sea levels, precipitation pattern changes – and changes in the community such as urbanization altering drainage patterns, poverty, population growth, deforestation and so forth. Logic tells you many things could be done well in advance of an occurrence. Building reinforced houses or houses on stilts in flood plains, planting trees with good root structure in landslide areas, building water catchment and detention systems, protecting wetlands, strengthening and raising retaining walls and dikes, designing excess capacity into reservoirs, and so forth. It is important for agencies to understand that measures such as these, and others, should cover an entire river basin, which of course requires coordination among levels of government, sometimes at a multinational level, and some form of central management. Defense measures must be comprehensive to an entire catchment area, regardless of borders. When we think of cross-border threats we should think of strategies in three stages – first retain excess water locally where possible, then make provisions to store it, and only lastly discharge excess into the watercourse. Clearly this is not always the norm. It is important to understand that flood events are part of nature and in some form will always exist. Our objective should be minimizing the risk, managing the consequences, and ameliorating the severity. We need to keep in mind that structural measures (walls, barricades) are never absolute and when breached can intensify the consequences. In terms of how the day might go, if the introduction and the description of the scenario take the first period, we would see the second hour covering preparation measures and warning, the third covering Bulgarian national responses, and the fourth bringing in international cooperation and supranational organizations such as the UN, the EU/EC, and NATO. This will include cross- border issues and measures to be taken when a disaster spreads from one country into another. 2 Next we move to a description of the scenario that we will use to guide the inter-agency discussion. This can be done as part of the first part, or at the outset of the second segment. For our scenario we will use primarily the Marista and the Tundzha river basins, as well as the Arda to a lesser extent. The Maritsa is the longest river basin in Bulgaria at 480 Km and with a flood plain of more than 34,000 square km. Together with the Tundezha river to the north and east these two rivers flow through Bulgaria’s East Aegean River Basin District. There are actually four distinct river basin districts in Bulgaria. To the west of the East Aegean is the West Aegean Region Basin District comprising the flood plains of the Sturm and Mesta rivers primarily, both of which flow south into Greece. The Danube River Basin District comprises most of the northern half of Bulgaria which drains into the long Danube running west to east along the border with Romania. On the coast on the east side of the country is the Black Sea Basin. There are climatic and geographical characteristics of the two river basins in the East Aegean district, the Maritsa and the Tundzha, which can lead to excessive runoff conditions leading to flood conditions downstream. These characteristics include frequent flash floods, significant variability of precipitation year-to-year, and heavy soil erosion which reduces the reservoirs' capacities through sedimentation. In the spring melting snow and torrential rainfall cause these rivers to rise beyond the protective barriers designed to contain the overflow. Floods in all of these three river sub-basins inside Bulgaria can cause severe flooding in neighboring Turkey, and Greece. Among the most disastrous were the cyclone-fed floods in 2005 which were severe enough to be characterized hundred year floods if not worse. Flooding in these basins was also severe in 2006, and November 2007. The destructive forces of rainstorms, severe thunderstorms, intensive snowmelt, floods and droughts, appear to have increased in this region of central Europe during recent years. Another important factor is that in the final decades of the last century the region saw only minor flood activity which led to less investment for barriers, dikes, and other flood mitigation measures, increasing the threats today as the climate pattern changes. There is no question but that the severity and frequency of natural disasters globally has risen steadily over the past decades. This is partly due to climate change, but also to demographic changes, and the harmful effects on the environment of increasing populations. An analysis of national risk assessment studies showed floods to be the most common risk addressed by European Union member countries. Floods in Europe occur as a result of a wide range of meteorological conditions such as storms with heavy and prolonged precipitation, as well as rapid and widespread melting of snow. In the run-up to a flood disaster situation there is generally some form of severe weather, including heavy rainfall, winds and hail in the water shed regions of affected rivers. A first order result of these storms is often localized flash flooding and smaller stream overflows. Measures of rainfall in the 70 mm and over of rainfall in a 24 hour period are sufficient to raise water levels to the danger point in most streams and 3 rivers.