Although I worked on disaster response for years, sometimes notional, sometimes actual, one in particular stayed with me. In the course of doing my mortuary affairs course then internship we had to run a practical exercise wherein loss of human life overcame global capacity.

We had to plan out everything - from time to inside vs national/ state directives, UN response, several nation's capabilities, the risk of secondary & tertiary deaths, lack of resources, lack of leadership, as well as legitimately - how much space available for interred remains.

Religious & cultural considerations, chain of command, inter & intra agency coordination, amount of labor, skilled & unskilled, cost, barriers, constraints of all kinds.

In one model of time and planning before becoming a global system overload, it was a mere 14 hrs before everything went to shit, worldwide. And America was left looking like the assholes.

I've never forgotten that.

In the many years since there's been movies, even some games, video & tabletop demonstrating similar. But I've never forgotten that practical exercise and how sobering it's been since.

Utilizing real world data, it was not the happy ending that Hollywood has so often made it out to be.