“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 18 December 1831
The Disaster Lessons Factory is a site for those in the disaster and emergency management sector.
Its aim is communication. To communicate the gems and lessons that are part of official reports but that are sometimes lost among their pages, or as time moves on.
It extracts the ‘currants’ from the ‘bun’ and puts a selection of them in front of you to sample.
It is the brainchild of Mike Shapland, a long term government servant, who has worked exclusively in the disaster management field for nearly 20 years.
His passion now is to make more widely known those things we already know.
But a challenge for the future is that past experience may not be enough.
Innovation and adaptability are key if we are collectively to meet that challenge.
The Disaster Lessons Factory looks for components from both experience and exploration.
