Today is the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks which destroyed the world trade centers. The blogosphere is filled with tributes and remembrances. I don’t have anything worthy of adding to what’s already been said on that front, so instead I would like to focus on what we’ve done in the seven years since the destruction of the WTC.

We’ve lost our freakin minds!

I’m not even going to start on TSA and airplanes (security theater), the war in Iraq, the fact that the best intelligence service in the world can’t catch Bin-Laden, the fact that we’ve given up our civil liberties for a warm cozy feeling, the PATRIOT act, torture, Guantanamo bay, changes in immigration laws, the war on photographers, the fact that everyone and their dog has added the phrase “terrorism” to slander their opponents in an attempt to gain attention and grant money, or even the fact that it became unpatriotic to be a Democrat for about 5 years. Nope. Instead I’m going to rant about fire hydrants. Yup, you heard me correctly – fire hydrants. Those small ubiquitous metal things that take up parking spaces and serve as targets for our dogs to pee on. We all assume that in the event of a fire, the gallant fire department will be spurned into action and arrive on the scene with their fire trucks and personnel, ready to save us. They will spring into action, unfurl their hoses, and connect to the nearest fire hydrant (which had better not be blocked by a parked car), and preserve our lives, family pets, and worldly possessions. Apparently this Rockwellian image has gone the way of…. Norman Rockwell. Why? Because in the name of terrorism, it is now common practice in many counties to turn off fire hydrants.

When the fire began, firefighters from around Rockwall County responded quickly.

But when they went to hook hose to hydrant, there was no water.

 

[....] He explains all the district’s hydrants, including those in Alexander Ranch, have had their water turned off since just after 9/11 – something a trade association spokesman tells us is common practice for rural systems.

“These hydrants need to be cut off in a way to prevent vandalism or any kind of terrorist activity, including something in the water lines,” Hodges said.

Un-freakin-believeable. As someone manages and mitigates risk for a living, I can tell that no proper risk assessment was ever done on this policy. There are two factors to consider when trying to quantify a risk – the single loss expectancy and the annualized rate of occurrence. (Officially the formula is ALE = SLE x ARO). This is pretty much the first thing you learn to do when doing anything even remotely related to risk management. It is in the first 2 pages of every book I’ve ever seen on the subject, and is second nature to everyone even tangentially related to risk management. Using the numbers from DHS, the cost of all fires combined in 2006 was about 11 billion. (In addition to lives lost). The cost of the terrorist attacks on September 11 was 23 billion. (I have no idea how they got that number, but it’s the only one I have for now). Terrorist attacks have occurred exactly once on US soil since the end of WWII, (the beginning of what can be defined as the “modern era” – I know it’s arbitrary but it really doesn’t matter in the long run). The ARO therefore is about .02, while the SLE is 23 billion. This yields an ALE of $460 million. Fires on the other hand have an ALE of about $11 billion. In other words, we have about 20 times as much to fear from fires as we do from terrorists, yet some moronic bureaucrat has decided to turn off the hydrants. Brilliant.

Side note: I know this was a very crappy risk assessment – it’s meant to prove a point not give exact numbers. For one thing terrorism’s SLE is far less than 23 billion right now as we’ve added a lot of mitigating controls since 2001. Also the ARO is fairly arbitrary since I could have picked almost anything as a starting point to sample from. Additionally since there have been zero attempts at using fire hydrants for terrorism to date the ARO could be calculated to zero, but past events are also no guarantee of future results. I’m also probably using bad numbers for the fires since that includes things like wildfires which are not affected by fire hydrants. I know that my numbers are way off, but I’m convinced my underlying point would be held out by a strict mathematically based risk analysis – that the person who made this decision has actually endangered us all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 1:37 pm by Ari and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.