Although the premise seemed out of this world, a recent NASA mock asteroid exercise mentioned in our last eGUIDE led to some interesting results for emergency management and disaster recovery industry professionals.
The exercise, held at the Planetary Defense Conference in Washington last week, pitted the wits of astronomers, disaster experts and academics against a fictitious asteroid, challenging them to plan evacuations and space missions to limit the damage, according to NBC News. Over five days, the team battled the clock and a growing disaster in the form of an asteroid headed for Denver, using a kinetic impactor technique that involved spacecraft physically diverting the asteroid. (NASA plans to test this method in real life on the 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test, according to NBC News.) The bad news? The method knocked a chunk off the asteroid that obliterated Central Park with insufficient time to evacuate the 10 million people living in Manhattan.
If this scenario were to occur in real life, the exercise revealed that the current disaster response plans are insufficient.
“This is a disaster of unprecedented proportion,” said Clark Chapman, a senior scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado to NBC News. “There are evacuation plans that exist for New York City right now — but not to perhaps this scale.”
Currently, NASA and FEMA would alert residents via the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, as well as local evacuations ordered by local government and FEMA support.
The good news is that, given time to prepare and study, this scenario may be avoidable.
“By the time you’re in response and recovery, you’ve kind of already missed the boat,” disaster expert Mika McKinnon told NBC News. “It’s one of the very few natural disasters that is completely preventable if we’re just willing to spend the resources on it.”
Sources:
https://gizmodo.com/nasa-accidentally-destroys-nyc-in-attempt-to-save-denve-1834614030
