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At the Ventura County Economic Development Association’s annual Business Outlook Conference on October 13th, “Dodging Katrina and Homeland Insecurity: Integrated Disaster Planning, Relief and Recovery for Businesses,” we will be asking you to imagine the unimaginable. Outside of specialists, who among us could have predicted a 9/11, a tsunami, SARS or the total collapse that followed last year’s hurricanes?

Here in Ventura County we know from watching our own emergency teams go about their work during firestorms, floods and earthquakes, that the best way to deal with the shock, chaos and fear of these events is preparation and training.

As business people and as citizens we have a responsibility to know what to do, when to do it and how to do it without fear when a crisis strikes. In this new era of global trade, global warming, and global terrorism, potential disasters loom ever larger and more threatening.

The underpinnings of our local economy and civic health would easily be shattered should a Northridge sized earthquake hit during fire or flood season; or a “dirty bomb” goes off at the Port; or a massive mudslide not only destroys La Conchita but also wipes out the 101 and the rail line for months, severing our only route to the north.

Contrary to what most of us learned in school, the great pre-Columbian empires of the Inca, the Mayan, the Aztec, the Algonquin and even the Amazon were rivals in size, sophistication, history, innovation, science, mathematics, culture and horticulture to those in Europe or China.

One only has to visit their ruins in Chaco Canyon, Monte Verde, Tikal, Monte Alban or Machu Picchu to witness a genius long ignored and overlooked due to cultural and historical bias.

When Columbus landed in the Caribbean, the most populous city in the world stood on what is now Mexico City. In the plateau surrounding the heart of the Aztec empire lived some 25 million people, vastly more than in London, Paris, Rome or Beijing. Within a matter of decades, Small Pox and other diseases reduced that number down to less than eight-hundred thousand. It was not European guns and weapons that conquered the New World, but viruses that found a host population without immunity.

By the time the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, the Americas were in fact, not a virgin land but a desolate and empty land. Entire civilizations had been were wiped out by disease. The survivors were reduced to bands of hunter-gathers, which is the highly incorrect picture most of us hold of Indians to this day.

Such evaluation of a people would be comparable to coming across a group of concentration camp escapees huddled, starving, penniless and half-naked in the forests of Poland at the height of the Holocaust and judging them to be representative of all Western culture.

Disasters, whether man made such as 9/11 or natural, such as Katrina, occur on such a scale and randomness that most people refuse to even think about them. They are simply too big. We fall back onto a most natural human tendency to throw up our hands in frustration.

For businesses and the communities that rely on them, playing ostrich doesn’t work. According to Gary Winuk, Chief Deputy of the State Office of Homeland Security, who visited Ventura County recently, California is a prime target for terrorists. With 85% of our infrastructure in the hands of the private sector, the state needs the help and cooperation of the business community.

Successful societies do so by paying heed to one of the oldest axioms in business: “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.”

During this year’s Business Outlook Conference, we will take on this greatest of all planning challenges.

Not only we will have speakers and panels comprised of some of the most brilliant minds in the areas of disaster planning and recovery, we will also have an audience in the room of some 300 of the top business and political leaders in the county. That’s a lot of brainpower…

One of VCEDA’s long term goals is to try to harness that resource and establish Ventura County as one of the leading national centers for disaster planning. You will hear more from us in the future on efforts to develop a new economic consortium to grapple with the issues presented at “Dodging Katrina and Homeland Insecurity.”

It’s my hope that you arrive at this year’s Conference feeling insecure about your knowledge of what to do… And that you walk out feeling even less secure… Only when we realized the depth of how unprepared we are, will we take steps to safe guard our future.

This year, the BOC will not end after the last speaker leaves the podium. Our Title Sponsor, the Gas Company, has generously offered to support smaller, ongoing workshops in the months that follow so we can focus on specific topics of concern to local business.

As always, we look forward to your participation and support. Remember if we are only as strong as our collective efforts, than each one of us stands as a vital part of the equation.