STATES OF EMERGENCY - Patrick Lagadec

1. The weapons of crisisIt is brutal, insidious, tenacious, recurrent, and unyielding. Its onset maybe terrifying or, to the contrary, like a wolf in sheep's clothing, it maydisguise itself in an air of normalcy and slip through our lines of defense.Constantly opening up new fronts, it makes a mockery of meticulous order,wrenches apart smooth-running operations, and turns mercilessly on the heartof the system under attack. It has the means to knock its victims out quickly,but seems to prefer driving them to slow exhaustion. Breathing terror intothe leadership, it triggers the sort of paralyzed reactions on which it feeds andgrows. Some actors seem to welcome it with open arms and give it their fullsupport: does it have allies within the ramparts ? Others claim they want tofight it, but everything they do amplifies its power - whom can we trust ? Itoverwhelms us and creates chaos before we have time to recognize andunderstand it. Already when it takes the stage, its victory seems assured, andit only withdraws once it has sowed the seeds of future disorder.This is Crisis, the most widely feared complication of a technologicalaccident. But what to do ? Crisis seems to withstand all our efforts andoutstrip all our analyses. To attempt to find strategies for riposte, we mustturn with humility to past experience. But these lessons cannot be extracted soeasily. This is why it is important to begin by setting some guidelines formapping what resembles an unruly battlefield. On this basis, it will then bepossible to hear what experience has to say. We will look here at a summaryof the essentials, as illustrated by a few brief examples.