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Lawfare Archive: Juliette Kayyem on the Baltimore Bridge Collapse and Crisis Management
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Podcast Host
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Mary Ford
Wait, that's the actual fire alarm.
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Juliet Kayem
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Out here, we feel things the sore calves that lead to epic views, the cool waterfall mist during a hot hike, and the breeze that hits just right at the summit. But hey, don't just listen to us experience it for yourself. Alltrails makes it easy to discover the best of the outdoors with more than 450,000 trails around the world, points of interest along the trail, and offline maps for always on navigation. Download the free app today and find your next outdoor adventure. Foreign I'm Mary Ford, intern at Lawfare, with an episode for the Lawfare archive for July 12, 2025 Floods in Texas this week have caused devastating damage after heavy rainfall, the Guadalupe river in Kerr County, Texas, rose to 26ft in just under an hour. As of Friday morning, more than 100 people were confirmed dead and scores of others remained missing. Local officials reportedly did not use FEMA's integrated public alert and Warning System to send safety instructions and other critical information to residents as the area began flooding. For today's archive episode, I selected an episode from April 9, 2024, in which Lawfare Research Fellow Matt Gluck sat down with Juliet Kayam, a professor of international security at the Harvard Kennedy School, to talk about a different crisis the collapse of Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge. Gluck and Cayenne discussed how authorities responded to the collapse, what actions the government should take to prevent these crises, and what all of this means for crisis.
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Matt Gluck
Matt I'm Matt Gluck, research fellow at Lawfair, and this is The Lawfair Podcast. April 9, 2024 in the early morning on March 26, a Singapore flagged cargo ship crashed into Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge collapsed, resulting in the death of six of the eight individuals conducting maintenance on the bridge. The incident has disrupted commuter traffic and the transport of hazardous materials, and it has halted shipping traffic at the Port of Baltimore, among other effects. I discussed the bridge's Collapse, how authorities responded to it and what it all means for the resilience of US Critical infrastructure and the state of crisis response. With Juliette Kayem, a professor of international security at the Harvard Kennedy School, who recently wrote a book on disaster management. Was the bridge adequately protected? How should governments and the private sector prepare to both prevent crises, but perhaps more importantly, prepared. Prepare for the aftermath when they inevitably occur? It's the Lafair podcast, April 9th. Juliette Kayem on the Baltimore bridge collapse and crisis management.
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Mary Ford
To start us off. Could you describe the tragic incident in Baltimore broadly? What happened?
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Juliet Kayem
So look, a big ship hit a bridge that never intended to be hit. I mean that's sort of the simple story. What we now know is there were preconditions in both things that caused this. The first is the electrical capacity in the Dali, which is a Singapore flagship that had Indian crew on it. And I only say that just to sort of describe to the listener how global the maritime navigation system is. This is very typical of any ship. So we know that there was one and then a second electrical sort of meltdown, that the ship became unsteerable, unnavigationable, as we say, and in between those periods. So when they knew that they did not have the ability to steer it, things were done. I'll get into that later. That really did minimize the harm. We now know, just given the TikTok that we know, it then hits a bridge that is only a couple decades old. The Baltimore Bridge, a high transit bridge with significant consequences for Baltimore, the city, because the way the city is designed, it's a port city. It brings in commercial activity, takes out things that aren't great that a city doesn't want to retain, including materials that are not allowed to go in the Baltimore Tunnel. The Baltimore Tunnel. People who know the area know if they, you know, if you, if you go on the i95 tunnel, there's lots of signs saying if you, you know, if you have any sort of materials that that would be considered noxious and there's like a broad range of what that would be. They you have to go over, over this bridge or it has to be shipped out under the bridge. So what we know is that there was a direct hit on one of essentially the pylons that was unprotected. That direct hit led to the thing that everyone saw, which was it look know little domino falling apart and half a dozen construction workers who were on it perished. More would have but for the fact that there was that gap and that essentially SOS protocols were, were put in place. The design of the bridge is not atypical for a variety of reasons, just the design of, of certain bridges. I think the destruction of it was shocking and how, how easily it went down. And I'll just end with this. I, you know, I've been in this space a long time. I was on a train on 911 and you started to hear when people said the World Trade Centers collapse. And you have no idea how to conceptualize it because you're like, that can't possibly be true, right? And then you see it and you see how something collapses. I work for CNN. I'm a senior national security analyst for them. So I get the 4:30am Wake up call and the producer says the Baltimore Bridge, which I know the Baltimore Bridge collapsed. It got hit by boat, a ship and collapsed. And you actually, it was a very similar phenomenon personally, of like you actually can't conceive of what, that, how bizarre it is until you actually see the images and see how it went down. I just want to make one notion, one comment about the emergency management protocols. Lots of things are in place already for these cities and these port towns in terms of protections, including training, notifications, emergency notifications. What we now know, and I just put a caveat because obviously initial reporting can sometimes be off as we learn more. What we now know is given the circumstances, the ship's crew and leadership, including you know, basically a, essentially a harbor master, someone who's on the boat, who sort of represents Baltimore, did not panic and got alerts out to all the right state agencies so that, and people can see this if they take the long view of the bridge. You, you did see cars being stopped from going over the bridge as impact was coming. That is only because people kept their heads. And as you know, Matt, you know, like you don't, you know, bad things happen and then, you know, you realize worse things could have happened. Right.
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Mary Ford
So what's been, I know that this is a heavily trafficked bridge for commuters and for, as you mentioned, it has some very important transport functions. So what's been the nature of the disruption since the collapse?
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Juliet Kayem
It's significant. So, so first is the maritime disruption. I don't want to focus on that because I know people's lives are really inconven. But I think the most significant monetary issue is going to be cleaning the waterways significantly enough and that means basically the debris so that you can begin to get these ships, the big ships, I think smaller ones will be able to get in relatively easily sooner rather than later. There's not much contingency planning doable. So we always talking about contingency planning, emergency management because you just have essentially one waterway. So in terms of the maritime industry, they are diverting to other port cities at this stage. And then, and then think about it, think like then all the traffic that picks up the cargo is then being diverted. So this is going to put a greater burden on other port cities. Baltimore has other access points that it will also utilize, but that's like the biggest monetary. I haven't seen an exact number on it. Seeing numbers around how much it will cost the bridge. But the, the, the economic impact on Baltimore will be significant mostly because of the water navigation issues. There are going to be vehicular. There are, there are ways to get around the bridge, including the tunnels. That's not good for all cargo, but it certainly is. Is good for people who need to transfer. I guess the third thing that we're just starting to get wind of, we're just starting to. To notice is lots of small businesses around there that, you know, you cross a bridge, it shouldn't be a big deal. So if you are on one side, you know, if you're. If your customer pool is in a residential area and they just come across a bridge, that's going to be an impact. So when the governor says it's sort of immeasurable, I think he's actually quite right.
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Mary Ford
And you mentioned the hazardous materials that are transported over the bridge that can't be transported in on normal roads or through tunnels. So are those other access points that you mentioned are those being used to transport those materials now?
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Juliet Kayem
I don't think that there is going to. As of right now when we speak, there's no exception in place right now for the hazardous materials. Part of it is you don't want to create a second risk by transporting hazardous materials in a tunnel. If there's a car accident is big trouble for everyone. Right. It's just sort of impossible thing. And so that hazardous materials will be diverted, you know, either south or west to get over. You can just see like that's just, that's just a burden on a city's planning. It's just look, I mean a point A to point B was the fastest. Now you got to go, you know, A through C, D, E and F to get back to be.
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Mary Ford
I read some reporting that an inspection in Chile last June revealed some machinery issues with the dolly. But then there were subsequent inspections that didn't identify a problem. So do you have a sense of whether there was Any reason for the ship to be taken out of the water before this incident?
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Juliet Kayem
Nothing I've seen in that reporting roast the level of. You would you would, you know, basically take this, this ship out of commission? I, I work a lot, you know, with ports in this industry. Most ships will have just like any plane will have inspection reports that, that are short of take, you know, basically take it out of, out of the waters or take it out of commission. The fact that later ones gave it the A okay, I mean, suggests that it sort of was fair that it was in the water or put a different way, we're not going to find a smoking gun. I doubt regarding the Dolly, that it shouldn't have been moving.
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Mary Ford
And how about the bridge? I know that that recently cleared an inspection and Maryland Governor West Moore said it was up to code, but also I read that the bridge didn't have peer protection, which can help fend off against these kinds of incidents. So how about the safety of the bridge?
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Juliet Kayem
So this is a little bit of my work comes into play here. I mean, the first is the cities and states in particular, the states are going to live up to federal requirements. There's no federal requirements to protect a bridge. There's just not. So. So the absence. We know that they work and they work for a variety of reasons. But I'll get to the second point in a minute. And in hindsight, of course, they should have been protected. But I want to get to the second point, which is even if they were protected, it is not clear to me that a ship of this size going at the speed it was going, one anchor was down as part of the emergency protocols, which wouldn't work at this, at the speed that they were going, that the bridge wouldn't have had a catastrophic result, as we saw. And that gets to the second point I've been hinting at, which is that has to do with the global maritime industry. I've been to Suez, I've been to Panama, I've been around the world. And locally here in Boston, the ships are getting bigger. The industry is pushing the envelope. I talk about Panama. They literally widened the Panama, this huge canal, the Panama Canal, to essentially cater to the industry which was demanding larger, wider ships. I read somewhere something between 70 or 80% of all global trade is maritime because airplanes are not that big. But. And so the industry, you know, can move more things with bigger ships. Our cities were not designed for this. Some cities are being retrofitted. You've, you, there's, there's dredging in a number of port cities because they're in huge competition with each other to bring these, these ships here because there's a tax base and a commercial base and every, everything that, that a city wants in terms of a vibrant global economy. If you're a port city, you're in massive competition with other port cities. This is not to say that they're being negligent. It is just their desire means that they don't want a lot of friction. So no city was built anticipating ships like this in their waterways. So the ships are getting bigger, the bridges are not. So just, it's like the monstrosity of these ships hitting bridges that were fine or fine enough is the sort of mismatch that we're, that we're going to see. So it sort of demands that cities look at what's their maritime activity now as compared to when it was, when the bridge was made. And then the very precautions that we talked about before might be in place. But you know, new, like all the maritime experts now. Right, everyone's a maritime expert now. Like tugboats create friction and in the safety and security world we know friction, you know, friction is always expensive. Sometimes it's good friction, sometimes it's unnecessary friction, but it's always expensive. And so, you know, to demand tugs so that the ships turn off their engines and you know, first it's not guaranteed that it will work, but secondly it will create delays and those delays mean less money for the receiving port city.
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Mary Ford
Whenever this kind of incident occurs, there are always going to be certain theories floating around. It seemed that those were shut down pretty quickly and the authorities were pretty quickly able to identify what happened and distribute that information to people. So what was that process like in this context? The information sharing both among the relevant actors involved and then also with the public.
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Juliet Kayem
Yeah, so I thought, I mean, you know, we look for what work like as I was describing before, I thought the, you know, look, there's a lot of things that might have been known beforehand. I thought that my understanding of what we would call the tick tock. So when did the ship know, when did the dolly know it was in distress? And then when did things start to respond to the potential disruption which they probably at that time just thought were hitting the bridge? I mean, I can't even imagine they thought that the bridge would go down and that communication flowed through state agencies. So, so the, it's the state that owns that, the sort of emergency management apparatus. Because it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a waterway so no town would necessarily own it. And then, of course, it's a. The bridge that the state was responsible for maintaining. So that goes to the state police, the harbor police and others. Somehow notification gets to the guys that are on the bridge and you see them begin to stop. You know, both cops and others begin to stop cars from coming on. And this is what, three minutes? This is not a long period of time. And once the Dali knew that, you know, the first was a warning, it probably should have stopped right. Or not tried to, to go under the bridge at that time. They know by the time of, of, of total loss of control that, that there's, there's no option. I mean, there is, as I said, there is a dropping of. It's not going to do anything for a moving ship that, that size. I don't even know if it slowed it down. So that, that seems good. I mean, I think that the notification after, in terms of, I mean, one is there's pictures in terms of a notification to the public, and then, you know, essentially what is going to be plan B for commercial activity. And at first you're going to focus on vehicular traffic, but then later you're going to focus on maritime. I will say I, I think the head, and I'm forgetting her name, the head of the NTSB has been absolutely terrific. The National Transportation Safety Board. She has been out there talking about what the process is, right. What like, you know, basically this doesn't happen very often. And that, that communication, I think has, and that transparency has been very helpful for people. You and I probably both live in social media, you see lots of conspiracy theories about what might have happened, lots of ugliness about, you know, global ships and foreign crews and an African American mayor, none of that really matters. But in the world we live in, all of that becomes part of the dialogue, too.
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Mary Ford
In your Atlantic piece that you wrote after the crisis, which I recommend to people, and as you go into a lot more detail in your Devil Never Sleeps book, which I also recommend for listeners interested in disaster and crisis management, you explained that resilience has two but closely connected components. One is left of the boom, the other is right of the boom. So could you explain what those concepts mean? And we're going to get into the details, but what we've learned about the left of the boom preparations and the right of the boom preparations for this kind of incident.
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Juliet Kayem
Yeah, as I say, we're a simple people in my world, where there's a boom and the way just to give a little Bit of background on sort of disaster management policy and training, of course, is the boom. We're agnostic about the boom. So it can be terrorism, oil spill, climate event, or the most random of things like what we saw with the Dolly in Baltimore. So when you look at the potential boom, and my work is to urge leadership and those in power in the private sector, public sector, whatever, to not focus on the specific threat, but to just think, okay, well, what sort of policies do we have in place and what we would call left a boom and right a boom. Left a boom. It just simply means how do you stop the bad thing from happening? Those are the prevention and protection issues that we've been talking about. You know, what kind of certification went in for the bridge, what was the maintenance history of the Dolly? Should protective measures have been put over it? And those would have been considered sort of left to boom precautions. You're anticipating something bad happening and you're trying to stop that bad thing from happening. Once the boom happens, though, then you're right of boom. We generally divide it into three phases. Response, recovery, resiliency. We talked a little bit about both response and recovery responses. Those, you know, what you would. What basically I would call the response from the hit to when the Coast Guard suspended its search and rescue mission. So that was less than 36 hours. Right. Because maybe someone had survived. It's probably unlikely, but maybe they had. And then you're getting into. So that's a response. And you get into recovery, which is how do you think about two things? One is, what's our alternative for the short term? To get this city back up and running, to get the communities back up and running, if you have any alternatives. And then the second part is, how do you rebuild the bridge? And that's going to take a long time, because in this country it takes a long time to build a bridge. And the last phase in this infinite loop, as I say, of disaster, so that you're thinking about resiliency, is preparing you for the next boom. So rather than thinking of it linearly, you think about it as sort of an infinite loop, is how should we measure resiliency in systems where there are single points of failure, essentially something goes down and you don't have many options. I will tell you, in my work, in the work I do sort of mega event planning or safety and security planning, we try to avoid single points of failure. So you are constantly wanting redundancies. Think about. The easiest way to think about is a hospital with a backup generator. Right? You're constantly Thinking about redundancies. But, but you know, we live in a society in which you can't have two bridges. Like that would be absurd. Right. One goes down, then the other one is available. So part of my argument was in a world in which we're going to measure success often by less bad. Right. That's my standard. Is it less bad than it would have been? But for, you know, the investment in crisis and disaster management, one of them may be, you know, the sort of focusing on resilience, planning that it imagines these single points of failure going down and how do you get back to recovery as quickly as possible? I'm not in love with this idea and certainly understand the anger and the frustration and the desire to have more security measures. We just have to be realistic as well about the, the way our structures are built, the way the industry is putting pressures on the, on those structures. You know, because you read the book, you know, basically I believe in human agency and I believe we can learn to fail safer. As I say, you know, you could just, you know, you're not going to, you know, I can't promise bad things won't happen, but maybe the measure of success is if we can learn to fail safer. And one of those measurements isn't simply the response which, you know, to the bad thing happening, which probably went as well as one could hope given what happened, but also the, the capacity to recover and to have plans for recovery quicker. You know, I'm talking to you just a few days after the Taiwan earthquake. We have the capacity to live through bad things pretty successfully. We do.
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Juliet Kayem
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Juliet Kayem
So.
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Mary Ford
One concept that you're getting at now that you discuss in your book is this, this last line of defense crutch, which was interesting and I guess I had thought about it broadly, but didn't understand it as clearly until I read it in your book. So what did we learn about the Maryland government's last line of defense crutch here? Are there other redundancies that could have been in place that weren't?
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Juliet Kayem
Yes. I mean, I think now, looking back, I wouldn't say like, you know, everyone should have known this could happen. It's just hard to know. And one thing that I think the NTSB review will say, review is like, were there a lot of near misses? Right. Were there. Was this just so likely to happen that, that someone should have been on alert and therefore wanted to protect the bridge? You know, from, from, from my work and what I write about, you know, there's this concept coming out of the space shuttle disaster called the normalization of deviance, right. That we in disaster management planning, or what we learn in disaster studies, is a lot of these systems are deviating at various times, right? So this is what I want to know. Was there, were there concerns about near misses before? Was there too much traffic then? And people have been warning for 10 years, we got to slow down the ships or whatever. Were those deviances normalized in a way that then made the system not recognize the flashing red lights? And I am still open to that possibility because almost every disaster that we study, you're going to see this normalization of deviance. But the last line of defense crutch, and the way I write and think about it is one of the challenges for, let me say, one of the fallacies that we often see in very, very tight systems. Cyber is a perfect example, is industry or the owner of this thing or whether it's government saying, well, this is our last line of defense. So you think, okay, and the example I use in the book is the BP oil spill, right? So BP had something called a blowout preventer that they promised was the last line of defense. And then when you look back, it's just like it's a tremendous amount of pressure on that last line of defense, and it failed in the BP oil spawn. We see this time and time again, right? And it's, you know, in this world of AI, it's actually one of the reasons why, you know, there's, there's a movement in safety and security that you would still want the human touch, right? Because, you know, you, you know, you, you, you don't want to unleash weaponry without at least some judgment, human judgment, saying, you know, that's, that's not a terrorist group, it's a family. Right? And so what we try to do now in terms of complex system planning is look at that last line of defense, make sure that it's ready, but also have multiple last line of defenses. And that's how you're starting to see structures begin to be made that you want, what's called layered defenses. So you just want lots of things minimizing the risk. In my world, I don't talk about safe. I mean, these are, these are highly mobile industries moving at speeds that make my ability to buy eclipse glasses yesterday at 8pm and they've already arrived. Like, you know, I mean, like, I'm, you know, Amazon prime is my favorite club, right. Like, but, you know, I'm not, we're not recognizing like, all the things that have gone, gone into, into these complex systems. And so I think that the more pressure and the more threats that are coming for these complex systems, the most, the most typical one is, of course, climate is. We do have to think through multiple last lines of defense or they wouldn't even be called that, but lines of defense and layer defenses. So if I was rethinking the design, right, so one would be, of course, protecting the bridge itself, itself. You, you could imagine rules that for ships of certain size that you actually have to have the tugboat, maybe not all ships because there's that, that that waterway is incredibly busy with ships of all sizes and whatever, but maybe of a, of a certain capacity, you would want to demand tugs. Maybe you have rules that, you know, if, if, you know, the boat has shown, if the ship has shown sort of any signs of, of, of not being able to navigate, it's got to stop. Rather than trying to get to port, you'd rather it, you'd rather it just drift into, Even if it had been drifting into the bridge, the bridge would have survived. So you can think of like, you know, eight or nine things if I, if I, if I understood ships better and bridges better, that could do that. And that's just, that's going to be multiple lessons away. Right? Let me just think. I always think, you know, people talk about resiliency. They have no idea to get there. And my less than happy line is we'll get to resiliency through a thousand disasters, right? I mean, that's how we're going to learn and that these things will be viewed as not only unacceptable morally, but also monetarily.
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Mary Ford
And so obviously here we have the bridge that's run by the Maryland government and then we have the ship that's run by a private company. So how do you say, see the public, so the federal government and state governments on the one hand, and then the private sector on the other hand, trying to adapt as we are in a threat environment where disasters are always present. How do you see the government and these companies trying to prepare themselves? Are there recent steps that each is taking to become more resilient or are there certain lessons that just aren't being integrated?
- [35:20]
Juliet Kayem
Well, look, the, the mark. So the market is going to speak to these people. So the way a maritime law is super complicated. So I can't even like begin to describe sort of like who's going to be liable, which country. And there's some rules that suggest that the owners of the cargo might be liable, even though they probably didn't even know what ship the cargo was on, just given the way these things work. So, so let's start with the market. The market now is going to demand precautionary measures because you just, you know, the litigation cost of this is going to be massive. The impact on the rest of the industry is going to be massive. And so like, you know, going back, because I know the BP oil spill intimately, but like going back to that when, when the oil spill happened there was a moratorium on offshore drilling. So the other energy companies are really pissed off at bp, right? So because they're now, they can't do it. So part of it is the market and, and the board membership and, and others will, will start to demand precautionary measures. There's then going to be, so that's the first, the second, and, and, and that will work to a certain extent. The circuit second is just clearly regulations like, you know, our critical infrastructure are these industries are not heavily regulated for safety and security reasons. They're regulated for commercial reasons all the time. We know exactly what's coming in, how it's going to be taxed, where it's going, what train it's on, what's in the material, what's in the, what's in the boxes. But they're not heavily regulated on safety and security. So the question is the Secretary of Transportation going to embark on efforts to begin to better regulate the industry with all the things that we've talked about, including response capabilities and rules about navigation and stuff. The third piece to think about is, is where our money is going to be spent now. You know, there's like, you know, there's, there's. I was looking at a big engineering report from the infrastructure report card that said that there's 617,000 bridges. Right. Okay. So that looks, that seems sort of overwhelming that, that are, you know, that are, that are not up to snuff, so to speak, or that need to be looked at. Well, you know, that just isn't true. I mean, in a sense, like we've got to just be realistic that not every bridge is the same. Like, you know, if you, if you lump over 600,000 bridges or whatever the number is, you know, like together, like, it's just not right. And so one way that we should think about infrastructure funding, let alone disaster relief funding, because there's going to be a fight about that for Maryland, is we should really focus on what I call the high consequence infrastructure. So you know, you could think a dam goes down in a small community and it sucks for that community, maybe there's even deaths. But like the Hoover Dam goes down, that's like a very different story. Right. And so trying to think about infrastructure not from the perspective of well, is this piece good or bad? Right. But from if this piece goes down are the consequences super, super high, high, medium, high, moderate and oh, that kind of sucks. Right. Like, and, and we have the capacity to do this. So part of what happens after all these things, everyone has what they want to be funded and what they want people to be concerned about. But I've, I've spent a lot of time in this field and, and, and my work now basically focuses on just high consequence events. I don't care what the probability is that something happens. We, we've got to begin to look at, at our, at our investments from the perspective of if it goes down rather than, you know, all of these things are infrastructure. They are, but they, but come on, I mean, we're, we know, you know, there's a dinky little bridge by my house going over the Charles river. Maybe it's, it's, you know, maybe if even a thousand cars go over it a day, maybe like it would suck if it went down. But it's not like, that's not like of national consequence.
- [39:23]
Mary Ford
So this actually gets to a concept I really wanted to ask you about from your book. So there's a quote where you write, let's stop trying to control probability when it comes to disasters and start trying to control the consequences.
- [39:35]
Juliet Kayem
Yeah.
- [39:35]
Mary Ford
So that makes sense to me to the extent that it means that we always need to prepare for the right of the boom post disaster consequences. So that we can deal with them sensibly and effectively. But shouldn't we also be allocating more resources to something that has a 5% probability of happening than a 0.1% probability of happening? And obviously then it depends on the scale of the consequences about the resource allocation. But if our focus should be on the consequences on the right of the boom consequences, how should we pair that with our focus on the probability assessments that are to the left of the boom, Right?
- [40:16]
Juliet Kayem
So I could be, like, really, like, controversial and say we suck at risk assessments and the world is going to hell in a handbasket. And I can't predict whether it's the hurricane, the terrorist, or whatever else, but all I know is I really don't want the Baltimore Bridge to go down, right? So I, there's. Part of me wants to say that I won't say that. So, you know, obviously, this exercise I do in my class, if you have 100 pennies, right, and you're distributed them left and right of boom, right, the argument is simply, don't put everything left to boom because we will fail miserably. This is what worries me about the cyber industry. I think we saw this with Colonial Pipeline. I mean, lots of people are getting super rich convincing lots of companies that they have the gizmo that's going to start stop the breach or the ransomware or whatever, it doesn't work, and then you have the cascading losses. Columbia Pipeline people may remember was a stupid ransomware attack, and they didn't have their, their systems able to respond to the attack. And we had to bring down the gas pipe, you know, basically our gas distribution for up to a week. So part of it is just, you know, I worry more that we focus too much on threats and too little on consequences. And, and I think, I think that's proven in the private sector who I work with and the public sector I work with. I mean, we, we, we have a counterterrorism division, we have a critical infrastructure and cybersecurity division. We have, we have all these different divisions. And then, and then, and then something bad, you know, and then something bad happens, and everyone looks to FEMA or state and locals. We do this same in the private sector. People who work in the private sector know, like, you know, most big corporations will have a chief security officer who's like what we call the guns, guns, guards and gates people right here. They're like the ones who, telling you, does the, does the gate need to be 10ft or 8ft? You have the chief information Security officer, the cyber person. After Covid, a lot of them have public health or medical officers. And now because of climate change, a lot of them have, you know, maybe what they call them, resiliency officers, especially in supply chain industry. Well, that's like a lot of focus on risk where I know the consequences will all be the same. So think of a major retailer. Like, what do I care if there's like, you know, like it's. Is it a pandemic or is it a storm? Like we're, we're gonna have to figure out how to communicate, you know, how to go online, how to. What are we telling employees and stuff. So it's a great question. And part of me wants to say I've been in this world a long time and we're super bad at risk assessments. Not super bad. That's not true. But as between low and high probability events and low and high consequence events. So everyone can try to figure that out in their heads. Yes, I want to focus on the high probability high consequence events the most.
- [43:24]
Mary Ford
So it's kind of a graph and our focus should be on the top. Right. If you think of it of probability and consequences, but then there's some variation depending on where you are on it.
- [43:33]
Juliet Kayem
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, was this a black swan event? You know, this is the terminology used as sort of like, you know, the random and unexpected. I don't know, I don't know the history. I don't know how many false alarms there are. I don't know how many near misses there were. It was certainly unexpected and not in most of our imaginations. But the consequences are the same whether it was lower high. Right. And so if we focus on the consequences, what if the Baltimore bridge went down as compared to another bridge? So less significant, less consequential bridge. That's the kind of thinking that we have to now do because we cannot rely on our left of boom measures anymore. One, we're not built that way.
- [44:16]
Mary Ford
So to finish off, if you were to give government and private sector actors a couple of salient lessons learned that they should take from this incident, what would they be?
- [44:31]
Juliet Kayem
So I would, I mean, well, it's not even if, you know, I do a lot of work with governors and mayors. So, you know, what are your five or six high consequence bridges in the state or in this? Like. And where are your infrastructure dollars going? And what multiple defenses do you have for something like this that becomes, man more manageable than, you know, some statistic about Massachusetts having 23,000 bridges that are D minus. You know, in terms of their, in, in terms of their resiliency. Honest, I could, I could write off most of those. Like, this sounds harsh to me. But just to sort of, if you're a governor, how are you going to think about prioritizing? The other thing I sort of ask leadership to do, to sort of think about good, what I call good friction. Like, in other words, are there things that you could put in place that will create a little bit of friction? But it's actually, it is, it is, you know, no harm in putting them in place, generally speaking. And they can do a lot to give you some transparency. I mean, the third is, is what we saw in Baltimore, which is what are your response protocols to minimize the harm if something were to happen? I mean, this was a tragedy. We're focused on the bridge. I mean, six men perished. More could have. So, you know, do you have, as I said, you know, do you have the mechanisms in place in terms of situational awareness, communications, all the things, you know, unity of effort, all the things that we worry about when the crisis comes to minimize the harm and make things less bad and then to recovery and resiliency? Be smart about the use of these funds. Lots and lots of money is out there. It's an exciting time for critical infrastructure. I worry sometimes we're being too democratic with a little D about it. I know different jurisdictions need things, but in a society that is very dependent, because all of Maryland's dependent on Baltimore, a society that's very dependent on protecting high consequence infrastructure, it actually is an investment in everyone to focus on that. So those would be a couple takeaways.
- [46:41]
Mary Ford
Thank you very much for those lessons and for joining us on the lawfare Podcast.
- [46:45]
Juliet Kayem
Thank you so much for having me.
- [46:51]
Matt Gluck
The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad free versions of this and other lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare Podcast material supporter through our website, lawfairmedia.org support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for other podcasts including Rational Security, Chatter, Allies and the Aftermath. Our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series on the government's response to January 6th. Check out our written work@lawfairmedia.org the podcast is edited by Jen Pacquiao and your audio engineer. This episode was Noam Ozban of Goat Rodeo. Our music is performed by Sophia Yan. As always, thanks for listening.
- [47:39]
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