我们必须做好灾难应急计划
After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, many New York companies, fearing another air assault, put their back-up generators in the basement — which is how they came to be flooded when Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012.
Where should they have put their generators? “In the middle of the building,” says Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. That is where Ikea’s Red Hook, Brooklyn store had its generator. The store was also built on stilts, with its car park below. “They were hit very hard,” Ms Rodin says. But unlike other businesses, Ikea was up and running in a few days. “The benefit for them was that they not only recovered quickly but they became a community centre for recovery.”
它们本应把发电机放在哪里？洛克菲勒基金会(Rockefeller Foundation)的总裁朱迪思•罗丁(Judith Rodin)表示：“放在建筑物的中间。”设在布鲁克林区Red Hook的宜家(Ikea)门店当时就是这么做的。该门店还是架空的，下面是它的停车场。罗丁表示：“它们当时受到的破坏非常严重。”但是与其他企业不同，宜家在几天时间里就恢复了正常营业。“这些发电机的好处在于，它们不仅迅速重新启动，而且还成为了恢复营业的活动中心”。The New York generator issue demonstrates a problem with disaster planning. Too many companies and cities agonise over how they should have confronted their last disaster.
纽约发电机问题展示出灾难应对规划的问题。太多的公司和城市对它们理应如何应对上次灾难感到苦闷不已。
“But if you look around the world, almost weekly there’s something. A cyber attack, a terrorist attack, a violent storm, a hurricane or an earthquake, a tsunami,” Ms Rodin says. Companies and cities need to be “prepared for anything, not just the last thing”.
罗丁表示：“但如果你环顾世界，几乎每周都会发生一些状况。一场网络攻击、一场恐怖袭击、一场暴风雪、一场飓风或地震，以及一场海啸。”公司和城市有必要“准备好应对一切，而不仅仅是它们上次遭遇的灾难”。Resilience, the ability to plan for and spring back from setbacks, is a growing preoccupation of corporate and city leaders. The most forward-thinking are working together and looking, for example, at how transport and electricity systems would withstand a natural disaster, cyber or terrorist attack.
应变力是指制定灾难应对计划并从中恢复的能力，它日益成为企业和城市领导人的当务之急。例如，最具前瞻性的想法是双方紧密协作，研究交通和电力系统将如何抵御一场自然灾害、网络攻击或恐怖袭击活动。Headquartered in New York, the 102-year old Rockefeller Foundation, which claims to be America’s first global foundation, has made resilience a central theme with its 100 Resilient Cities project. This aims to help urban centres cope not only with disasters, but with day-to-day problems, such as violence or food and water shortages. Ms Rodin, the foundation’s head for 10 years, has written a book, The Resilience Dividend , on how companies and cities can deal with the threats that she calls “regrettably, the new normal”. After Sandy, Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, asked her to co-chair a commission to help prepare the city for future shocks.
总部位于纽约的洛克菲勒基金会拥有102年历史，号称是美国第一家全球基金会。该基金会推出了评选“100座最具弹性城市”(100 Resilient Cities)的项目，并让应变力成为该项目的主题。该项目的主旨是帮助城市中心不仅能应对灾难，而且还能应对日常问题，比如暴力活动或者食品和水短缺问题。十年来一直担任洛克菲勒基金会总裁的罗丁撰写了一本名为《应变力的红利》(The Resilience Dividend)的书，讲述公司和城市如何应对被其称为“令人遗憾的新常态”的威胁。在飓风“桑迪”过后，纽约州州长安德鲁•库默(Andrew Cuomo)邀请罗丁担任一家委员会的联合主席，来帮助纽约市应对未来的灾难。A tragic example of what can happen when cities have not planned for the worst was Oslo in 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik bombed a government building in the city and then went on a killing spree on the island of Utøya. The Norwegian authorities were horribly unprepared. “The Delta Force which was sent out from Oslo to the island couldn’t find it in their GPS,” says Ms Rodin. There had been no discussions about how the various police forces should co-operate.
彰显城市没有灾难应对规划后果的一个悲剧性例子是2011年的奥斯陆，当时安德斯•贝林•布雷维克(Anders Behring Breivik)在该市的一栋政府办公楼里引爆了炸弹，随后在于特岛(Utøya)对着人群疯狂射击。挪威当局明显措手不及。罗丁表示：“从奥斯陆派往于特岛的‘三角洲’特种部队在他们的GPS中都找不到这个小岛。”当时也没有人讨论不同警察部门之间应该如何合作。The city that set a better example was Boston, says Ms Rodin. Its government and transport authorities, hospitals and voluntary organisations had discussed and practised how to deal with a disaster, wherever it came from. When the Boston Marathon was attacked in 2013, everyone knew what role to play. “They had already decided the governor was going to be the major communicator. They had already decided that, no matter what, the FBI was going to lead the police response. They knew which hospitals would be called upon to do what if people were hurt.
罗丁表示，树立了较好榜样的城市是波士顿。波士顿市政府和交通管理部门、医院以及志愿者组织讨论并实践了如何应对灾难，无论灾难来自何处。当2013年波士顿马拉松比赛遭受恐怖袭击时，所有人都知道各司其责。“他们已经决定，市长将会主要负责沟通。他们已经决定，无论出现什么情况，美国联邦调查局(FBI)将会领导警方采取对策。他们知道，如果有人受伤，可以送到哪家医院。”“And — this is important — they used every event in which there were large crowds to practise. So if a sports team won a national title or [during] a big Independence Day parade they rehearsed all of this,” she adds.
她补充称：“而且——这非常重要——他们利用每一个有人群聚集的活动进行演练。因此，如果有体育队赢得全国比赛的冠军，或者在独立日大型游行活动期间，他们全都进行了行动预演。”Defining roles in advance of a disaster is one aspect of resilience. Another is building redundancy into transport and supply systems. Sandy demonstrated how vulnerable New York’s infrastructure was. “We don’t have a robust and diversified transit system and so when the subways flooded that was a problem. We have a very brittle — we learnt — electric grid, and so the whole lower half of Manhattan got taken out.”
在灾难来临前定义角色是应变力的一个方面。另一个是增加交通和供应系统的冗余能力。飓风“桑迪”展现出纽约的基础设施是多么的脆弱。“我们没有健全和多样化的交通系统，因此当地铁被淹没的时候，这就成了一个问题。我们的电力网络非常脆弱——我们早就知道——因此整个曼哈顿下城区停电了。”Back-up is important for companies too, as became clear in the case of Lululemon Athletica, the Canadian leisure fashion group whose yoga pants proved to be more see-through than their wearers had bargained for. Lululemon found it hard to react, Ms Rodin says, because it had not prepared for disruptions in delivery of its materials. It had only one supplier for this particular fabric, which prolonged the time it took to deal with its embarrassment. Companies need alternatives when things go awry.
对公司来说，应急准备也非常重要，加拿大休闲时尚集团Lululemon Athletica遇到的问题体现了这一点——事实证明，该公司生产的瑜伽裤的透明度超出了穿衣者的初衷。罗丁表示，Lululemon发现很难对此作出反应，因为它没有对原料供应中断做好准备。该公司的这种特殊布料只有一家供应商，这延误了它处理这种尴尬事件的时间。当事情出错时，公司需要有其他选择。For cities, demonstrating the resilience of their infrastructure can help attract corporate investment. When Deutsche Bank was looking for a site for its new Indian operations centre, it chose Pune. The city, Ms Rodin says, “had built a lot of redundant energy, they had invested in communications technology, new transit and the like”.
对城市来说，展示它们基础设施的适应能力，可能有助于吸引企业投资。当德意志银行(Deutsche Bank)为其新的印度运营中心选址时，它选中了浦那。罗丁表示，该市“建造了大量的冗余能源，他们对通讯技术、新的交通设施以及诸如此类的东西进行了投资”。Co-operation between companies and urban leaders is not enough, she says, if the city is badly divided. Disasters require neighbours to help one another. Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans knew that its flood defences were vulnerable. It had thought about how to cope with the consequences. “New Orleans had loads of plans,” she says. But the city’s decades-old social and economic divides meant that social breakdown came quickly.
她说，如果这座城市分歧严重的话，公司和城市领导人之间合作得不够充分。灾难需要邻居彼此帮助。在卡特里娜飓风 (Hurricane Katrina)来临之前，新奥尔良知道其防洪设施非常脆弱。它曾考虑过如何应对灾难来临后的影响。罗丁表示：“新奥尔良有一堆计划。”但该市数十年的社会和经济分歧意味着，灾难发生后社会迅速出现崩溃。Since Katrina, she says, the city and businesses have worked at healing the divide. The economy is more diverse. The schools have improved: “It’s a work in progress — it’s only 10 years — but they really have revitalised. And they have had bad hurricanes since then, but they are doing significantly better.”
她说，自卡特里娜飓风爆发以来，新奥尔良和企业致力于修复分歧。现在该市经济更加多样化。学校有所改善：“情况正在改善——现在才过去了十年时间——但它们真的已经恢复了活力。自那以后，它们也遭遇了恶劣的飓风，但它们的表现好多了。”Companies should not always wait for cities to act. If necessary, they should lead the process. When SABMiller, the brewer, discovered that the water bills at its bottling plant in Bogotá were rising alarmingly, it could have pulled out of the area, which would have devastated the local economy. Instead, the company proposed to the water utility that they investigate together.
企业不应总是等待城市采取行动。如果必要的话，它们应该带头行动。当啤酒酿造商SABMiller发现其位于波哥大的灌装厂的水费大幅上升的时候，它本可以退出该地区，可那么做就毁了当地经济。相反，该公司向当地自来水公司提议一起展开调查。“They found that the problem was way upstream. The cattle ranchers were clearing more and more land for grazing and they were destroying the ecosystem, the sediment was going into the watershed and it was washing down,” Ms Rodin says. Working with the Nature Conservancy, the US non-profit organisation, SAB talked to the ranchers about how to graze more efficiently and helped to restore the watershed.
罗丁表示：“它们发现，问题出在上游。养牛牧场主人清理出越来越多的土地来放牧，他们在破坏生态系统，沉积物进入分水岭，而且还在往下流。”SABMiller与美国非盈利组织大自然保护协会(Nature Conservancy)合作，还与牧场主人商量如何更有效地放牧，并帮助恢复分水岭。”“Their costs came down. The water utility passed that saving on to them. The ranchers became much more committed to the ecosystem. A complete win. The resilience dividend for all of them,” she says.
“它们的成本下降了。自来水公司相应降低了水价。牧场主人更加致力于保护生态系统，这是一个全赢的局面。所有人都得到了应变力红利，”她说。
