RPRS – The next trendy professional career

Many people are pleasing wondered by the way Peru’s President Martín Vizcarra is managing the crisis caused by Covid-19, the new corona-virus’ strain, at the point that everything seems to be under control. Seems. Well, the fact is all the decisions and protocols are not Vizcarra’s creation, not Ministers Board’s, not the prospective team’s, not advisors’, not shamans’, not gurus’.

The Law 29664 was passed in 2012, that instructs how to manage and to prevent the risky scenarios nationwide. Also, it creates the National Center for Prevention, Estimation, and Reduction of Disasters Risk, Cenepred ias in Spanish, that depends on the Prime Minister’s Office, PCM as in Spanish, that also manages the National Institute of Civile Defense, Indeci as in Spanish. Those three organizations have contingence plans, stores full of relief, and money coming from different social programmes, that was saved for emergency cases.

It’s not about I’m undeserving Vizcarra. Unlike, we are lucky about Peru has already warned to design an action plan, and what the President is doing now is to follow it up. In simple words, that’s called forecast, the action to fast forward the facts, skill we are not made ours, judging our reckless attitude at the time to measure future risks, attitude that becomes bothering beggar when we realize to be amid them.

“Peru comes preparing for different types of disaster 8 years ago,” one of my followers underlined while explaining this fact. The issue, and here it comes the apparent sensation of disorder and annoyance, is that Cenepred activates even provided the regional or local governments request it. My source assured me that none of them has staten nor consulted how to perform it as the crisis has happened. And when I’m talking of performing, I’m not meaning to perform like a costumed soldier even, when I were a mayor )a civile authority).

That would explain why everybody has the impression that Vizcarra and his crew are the action heroes, while our nearbiest authorities are appearing as the most uncapable never chosen. Well, they do, don’t they? Talking on a posible reason for the regional and local governments have not claimed to Cenepred, my source said the answer is simple – they mostly ignore it. I confess I’m also dismissed this detail, but… I’m not an authority.

Each quake, a new institution

Just to make history, Cenepred was created after the fiasco meant by the Fund for the South Reconstruction, the controversial Forsur as in Spanish, founded after the Pisco’s Earthquake, August 15^th, 2007, that left 550 casualties. And it seems somebody has to shake us the soil for we to shake our brain. If not, let’s get back a little more.

May 30th, 1970 – A terrible earthquake erased Yungay, Áncash, out of the map, left around 70,000 casualties according to the official toll. As a consequence, the military government  created Indeci (then, the National System of Civile Defense), and since that time, a doctrine was established – the top local officer, or state’s (regions today), or nation’s turns into the chief of every civile defense system, according to the geographic extension of the emergency. That was in 1972.

And as every rule has an exception, the South Vulcanological Observatory, OVS as in Spanish, depending on the Geophysical Institute of Peru, is a management example that would be worthy to study and reply. It has pages after pages with risk maps, action protocols in case of some volcano between Arequipa and Tacna decides to erupt. The most active ones are under 24/7 surveillance (that can be followed real- time on an open-access website), and it constantly moves local authorities through simulations and contingence plans that currently are used in the eruptive processes of Sabancaya and Ubinas Mounts.

In this point, I dreamed this week of an El Niño Warning Center located in Paita, Piura, like the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii Islands, or the Hurricane Warning Center in Florida, both in the U.S. The first entity is the reference for the Asia-Pacific Rim when a 7-magnitude or larger quake breaks and can cause troubles in our shores, while the second one is the mandatory information source every summer across the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Our warning center could be worldwide because El Niño impacts around the planet, and the reason why Paita is because two large water flows of our enormous ocean, warm and cold, meet very near there. I hope that comes true. Let’s continue.

Then, if our frame-protocol gathers almost half a century old and the most specific one is going to be a decade old, why do the mayors and regional governors suffer from nervous collapse and subsequent rigor morbidus every time they have to manage a disaster to prevent or to mitigate? Short answer: a lot of ego, a few neurone.

More than guessing, it’s about forecasting

And that is the ethernal Peruvian error – a mostly reactive instead of proactive system because it doesn’t know to read the past at the point it becomes to convince it will never happen anymore, but it also doesn’t know to fast forward the future and the multiple choices it represents, even the weirdest. Look at the crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic: we have usually live next to in-progress diseases, but any strucked us fully as a country, discounting to hold us inside our homes for a month and a half.

But as every crisis means and opportunity, this is the time a career I don’t know if exists, and if not we can create it here, should raise bonds – Response Planning for Risk Scenarios, or RPRS, what its name says, it’s in charge of think pretty detailed how we mitigate, avoid, and manage every bad it could happen because of measurable or unmeasureable contending situations .

The RPRS Officer has to be a person with a pretty wide vision but also a teaching ability to explain easily everybody, especially the authorities, about what could happen if nobody acts and how to act for it happens the less or null damage as possible. It’s not the person who avoids a black cat or eludes to pass under stairs, but it’s capable to anticipate how the cat will react and has got available stairs just in case of going to rescue it.

But nota all remains in vision and teaching, it has to be a person whom gets not boring to research in the reality of territory to serve (yes, knowledge on geography, history, statistics, sociology, and psychology are just part of the profile) and write everything down in a compulsively sequential way. Definetly, if you never learned to make flow diagrams, you won’t work on this career.

And the better of RPRS comes here – it will not be only a key career in public management, which the authority’s decisions –theoretically—influence on the life of thousands or millions of people. It also will be required by the private sector, non-profit or commercial, to guarantee if any investment faces unseen potential peril as well as to evaluate if the development projects are actually going to develop something or they will be another money waste just for granting a job to a hand of people.

And still beyond, taking the New Peruvian’s paradigm launched by President Vizcarra, it has to be a person with much empathy and creativity to promote the solidarian spirit among pairs and dispairs. Yes, it has to be a leader with a wide recognizement among the community, but also to be anyone else amid all the persons.

If you see your profile fits this one I describe, go preparing because you’re going to be required in the short-term. If you’re reading me from an university, an institute, a school, or similar, go considering to launch this course, that mixes humanism and science, hard work and pedagogics, communicability and reflection capability.

As I said to a colleague, the future of many proffessions, the mine one included, is they are going to upgrade new setups what are not that we used to know, and that’s a signal of times. Everything changes, and this crisis is underlining it and marking light yellow to us every hour, every minute, every second, and it demands an answer from us. Not asking it would be committing suicide… or another genocide.

And talking about colleagues, I leave you my tutorial for covering news during natural disasters that you can adapt to this crisis for good. Meet me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn for continuing to talk about.