The incident in San Bernardino has been horrible for the whole Southern California community as well as the nation. The innocent victims, including the injured, the survivors, families of the victims, even the families of the shooters may suffer terribly the rest of their lives.
People all over the country have been reacting with fear. Getting into the fear cycle, it is possible to be incredibly creative in the ways we experience the terror. Hopefully, at some point, when we exhaust ourselves and our minds have to turn to something else, we shut down-we finally go to sleep.
Do we let the horror and the fear run us?
Forgive me for turning to math to soothe myself and you. The statisticians tell us that the probability of being in an incident like this is much smaller than the chance of being hit by lightening – which is 1 in 960,000.*
Further, there are ways to be as prepared as one could be for an emergency. We can have regular emergency response and evacuation drills at our locations. Many San Bernardino county workers followed the drills they had practiced six months ago and in doing so, they saved their lives. We can have shelter in place plans. We can have emergency contact plans. We should have them anyway for earthquakes.
It doesn’t matter what the emergency would be-fire, earthquake, workplace violence – we can prepare to respond as a team, as a community, as a family. This is how we can stop the fear.
This week, review your company–wide and location-specific emergency response plan and fill in the weak parts. Living in earthquake country, some day you may need it.
*National Weather Service
Illustration courtesy of http://blog.allstate.com