Brexit may indeed teach the British people what it
feels like to be in a real, all-enveloping crisis, but it is not the greatest
threat that we face in the UK. There are at least five other contingencies that could
have a greater impact, and they are all linked to each other.
The first is a large volcanic eruption. In 2010, when
the UK Risk Register was first published, there was no mention of such a thing,
which is logical as Britain has no active volcanoes. Within weeks, ash
emissions from the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull shut down civil aviation
over 70% of the continent for almost a week. This was barely a foretaste of
what could occur. In the 1820s, Eyjafjallajökull erupted for 13 months,
including 25 days on full blast--and it is one of the smaller Icelandic
volcanoes.
In April 2010, eight and a half million travellers
were stranded by the cessation of flights. A bigger, more sustained eruption
could lead to stop-start air transportation and prolonged airport closures for
months on end. Besides the bankruptcy of low-cost airlines, there would be
profound implications for ground and sea travel, hospitality, business, tourism
and cultural activities, even for medicine, as the April 2010 crisis delayed the
air-freighting of bone marrow for transplant.
Secondly, there is pandemic influenza. This tends to
strike on a 30-40 year cycle. It is now a century since the so-called ‘Spanish
‘flu’ pandemic that emerged at the end of the First World War, infected 500
million people and killed 3-5 per cent of the world’s population. Subsequent
pandemics have been disruptive, sometimes highly so, but not nearly as bad.
This should not lull us into thinking that modern medicine has solved the
problem: human beings have little or no natural immunity to pandemic ‘flu. A
highly lethal strain could come in waves over a two-year period, and we would
be 7-9 months into the crisis before vaccines became available to the public.
Thirdly, space weather is a phenomenon that could do
considerable damage to the lifelines and networks on which we depend for normal
life. A coronal mass ejection (CME, associated with sunspots) on the scale of
that which occurred in 1859 could be deeply disruptive. This is known as the
‘Carrington event’ after the amateur astronomer Richard Carrington who observed
and sketched the sunspots. Hours later, the CME played havoc with the
telegraph, which was the only advanced means of communication at the time. Such
were the geoelectrical currents that the CME generated that messages could be
sent without switching the telegraph apparatus on, but the operators were
liable to electric shocks from handling the equipment.
In 2012 a ‘Carrington event’ on the Sun sent waves of
plasma into space and they narrowly missed the Earth. Knowledge of what such a
phenomenon could do in the modern world is sketchy and a little speculative.
Very large electricity transformers may burn out, telecommunications would be
disrupted, satellites would be damaged and there would be interruptions and
inaccuracies in global positioning systems, which are used in everything from
driverless cars to air transportation, and even to manage rubbish collection.
One would not want to be landing at Heathrow if there were a vertical error in
GPS of more than 50 metres.
Space weather is monitored around the clock by the Met
Office, which issues a daily forecast. Currently, it is one of the great
underestimated hazards that could reveal our dependency on critical
infrastructure. This is the set of networks that are essential to daily life.
It includes energy, water sewerage, food distribution, healthcare, banking,
government and emergency services. Besides space weather, if any other agent
were to cause a widespread, prolonged loss of electricity supply, there would
be consequences for all the other forms
of critical infrastructure, as to a greater or lesser extent they all driven by
electricity.
Over the last decade, wide-area, prolonged power
outages have occurred in various parts of the world at the rate of about one a
year. The northeast USA was plunged into darkness in 2003 as a result of a grid
failure, and again in October 2012 as a result of superstorm Sandy.
British infrastructure, commerce and industry endure
millions of cyber attacks every month. In Ukraine, attackers brought down the
electricity grid in December 2015 and severely disrupted banks, airports and
railways in mid-2017. The UK power grid is well protected, but if it were to
suffer a total shut-down it would take days to be restored. Meanwhile, there is
considerable concern that many of the generators that would have to substitute
for grid electricity are liable to breakdowns and malfunctions.
Finally, there is a very small possibility that a
tsunami would be caused in the River Thames estuary by the spontaneous
explosion of a large concentration of Second World War munitions that lies in a
sunken ship off the Isle of Sheppey. Given the proximity to the Isle of Grain
LNG and petroleum storage facilities, the tsunami might carry burning fuel.
Despite this gloomy story of doom and destruction,
there are grounds for optimism. Research is underway into cascading disasters
and how to prevent or mitigate them. These are events in which impacts occur in
sequences or proliferations. For example, the sudden loss of electrical current
would affect many activities and cause many secondary problems. They can be
foreseen and prepared for. Where vulnerabilities overlap or interact,
escalation points will occur, making the impacts potentially worse than the
initial event that set them off. These too can be identified and mitigated in
advance of the crisis.
Resilience needs a combination of foresight,
adaptability and redundancy. Foresight involves building scenarios and
investigating vulnerability. Adaptability requires new ways of getting around
shortages, blockages and shocks. Redundancy may be about duplicating procedures
and equipment but it is just as much about agile thinking that finds new routes
out of a crisis.
Preparedness and crisis response need to be
democratised, and that is the great challenge of modern times. We all need to
take some responsibility for the risks we run. The only way to bring these
under control is to treat the process as participatory exercise, with community
groups flanking government and private sector planners. We need to shake off
complacency and inform people so that they can make their own choices.
One final thing that we have learned about crisis is
that it is heavily influenced by context. In Britain, the hollowing out of the
welfare state bodes ill for the next major impact. A society that is weakened
and has lost its cohesion is ill-equipped to confront crisis, which will tend,
as it always does, to pick off the most vulnerable.
