Preparedness Is an Investment Before It Is a Cost “I don’t care where you rank. I don’t care if you’re an intern or my secondhand man. I want to hear your opinion on what we’re doing, because you may have a better way to do something that I may not have thought of.” One of the hardest challenges in emergency planning is convincing organizations to invest before anything has gone wrong. Gizzi hears the same phrase repeatedly after disasters: “We never thought it would happen here.” That, he says, is exactly the problem. “Anything could happen at any time.”
A hurricane changes direction. A tropical storm reaches a place that never expected one. A facility faces an active threat. A team encounters a medical emergency it has never rehearsed. The question is not whether every scenario is likely. It is whether the organization is ready for the one that does happen. Gizzi often returns to a familiar training principle: “We don’t rise to our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.” That is the business case for preparedness. The value does not begin after an incident. It begins in the decisions made before one.
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2026 DISASTERS & RESILIENT CITY EXPO HOUSTON EDITION
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