Floods and Government Risk Management

The floods across the country are terrible, and I would like to express my support for everyone affected. I cannot even imagine the damage done to ordinary people and their families. For now, the priority is to resolve urgent issues quickly and then draw the right conclusions from all of this.

The threat of flooding arises every year, and it is important to establish afterwards whether this was negligence or, to a greater extent, a natural factor, since the level of risk always differs and depends on many variables. This year, because of sudden snowmelt and heavy precipitation, the floods exceeded all expectations.

There are many questions that people reasonably put to officials, but it is important to separate the wheat from the chaff.

As I see it, recurring risks should be managed systematically, without improvisation or ad hoc decisions. I assume every senior manager has taken a course in risk management.

A risk can be avoided, minimized, accepted or transferred. A management system is built according to the type of risk and its materiality.

I am sure there is a whole document on preparing for the spring floods, setting out the measures that akimats and other state bodies must carry out every year. I have not seen this document, so it is hard for me to assess its quality.

But I know for certain that these measures must be carried out without fail and reviewed every year as new inputs and accumulated data become available.

The minimum set of measures for each region of the country should be approved centrally. If akimats fail to carry out these measures, carry them out poorly or alter them, then officials should be held accountable for negligence.

And if everything was done in accordance with a properly approved plan but the flood happened anyway, then the plan needs to be changed.

I have a feeling that plans are written anew each year by each region on its own, without applying best practices, and that many measures are carried out merely for show. Hence the result.

I am not a specialist in this field and will not speculate, but from my own standpoint I would like to know, for example, whether the plan includes property insurance, even if only for state property, against natural disasters. Or whether the plan includes a monitoring and forecasting system, and what indicators have been set for activating one plan or another.

Furthermore, at the level of force majeure management there should be a separate response plan that lays out all actions depending on the outcome.

The tragedies at combined heat and power plants, the forest fires, the ammunition depot explosions, the earthquakes and the floods suggest that such response plans most likely do not exist, and if they do, they need to be refined and reworked to fit reality.

Natural disasters happen everywhere in the world. What matters is the ability to minimize them as far as possible and to know what to do when a disaster proves unpredictable. I hope that one day we will respond proactively rather than reactively. For that, a risk management system must be built at the level of all ministries and akimats.