It is vital to encounter difficulties at first hand in order to circumvent them in the future

This is Apocalypse with a human focus. As the title suggests, it relates to the havoc spread worldwide by a lethal airborne virus that kills within days, and dramatises the frenetic efforts of the medical profession to find a cure and control the outbreak.

I suppose it’s all the more convincing because unlike other examples of Hollywood overkill, this plot is plausible.

We can certainly remember feeling the tremors that swept through our own ordered community not too long ago when Mexican swine flu hopped on a plane and crossed the Atlantic. Avian flu keeps scientific and medical eyes trained on the Far East, and thanks to its timely appearance in the script of Downton Abbey, TV viewers now have fictional evidence of the very real devastation wreaked by the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 which within two years wiped out upwards of 50 million people.

With any natural disaster, there is only so much you can do to limit its impact. Fire, flood, earthquake, ash clouds and pestilence by their very nature erupt unexpectedly and on a grand scale. So overwhelming, in fact, they used to be called acts of God.

Nevertheless, there is no excuse for not taking every opportunity to be prepared and make provision. It’s a delicate science, involving both expense and a degree of ‘people discomfiture’. Stocking up with precautions you may not use can lead to being damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Hindsight is an unforgiving critic.

‘A five-star exercise at a four-star venue’, was the Chief Minister’s verdict on the recent strategic exercise at the Radisson hotel involving the Island’s front-line emergency planners. So it went on into the early hours, and has evoked much tut-tutting about overnight accommodation.

Sadly, the latter conspired to divert attention away from a legitimate test of a response waiting to happen.

There are many scenarios that could be tested in relation to this Island. We are a pretty vulnerable community who – so far – have lived a relatively charmed life. Our isolation raises all manner of concerns over continuity of supply even during normal winter months, now that importers have chosen to operate a ‘just-in-time’ approach to restocking many of our necessities.

Our strategic reserve is not the larder it once was. We live close to busy shipping lanes, are criss-crossed by air routes, snuggle in the shadow of a nuclear installation, and potentially stare into the teeth of the full force of Atlantic gales.

So the decision to test one such happenstance – a possible accident involving a passenger ferry – was prudent, and, with cruel irony, highly topical. Had Condor Vitesse collided with a vessel more substantial than Les Marquises that foggy March morning, there would certainly have been many questions asked about why the ‘authorities’ hadn’t rehearsed such an eventuality.

‘Lessons will be learned’ is a well-worn phrase that regularly gets trotted out in the wake of institutional failings. It is easy to be sceptical when it trips off the tongues of politicians or civil servants desperately trying to cover their tracks. However, when it comes to safety exercises, it couldn’t be more apposite.

Take the confusion between well-meaning agencies during the Broadlands fire, or conflicting instructions revealed during a recent emergency exercise at the Airport. Embarrassing though the circumstances were at the time, you could justifiably argue that it is vital to encounter just such difficulties at first hand in order to circumvent them in future.

The more sophisticated our society becomes, the more we stand vulnerable. The fracture of IT networks could paralyse commerce, threaten life-support systems and hazard transport.

The arrival of the first snowflake of winter regularly has an increasingly disproportionate effect on local resilience, while we have seen how it only takes a careless match to ignite a headland of sun-dried bracken, threatening lives and properties in our northern and western coastal areas.

Now, the reluctance of the rain god to open his heavens on demand has forced the Waterworks department to bring the desalination plant on stream.

Short-lived electricity power cuts and petrol shortages apart, the last serious pan-island emergency to afflict us was the cruel outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 1981. Twenty years later, strict quarantine precautions kept us isolated when the UK was hit so savagely. But the prospect of ‘lockdown’ for whatever reason is indeed worrying for a community so dependent on external supply.

So the wake-up call which accompanied the threat of a swine flu pandemic in 2009 ensured that serious planning did get organised, including the stockpiling of vaccine. We now have a well-qualified emergency planning officer attached to the Chief Minister’s Office. Under his guidance, most parishes have begun to draw up detailed emergency co-ordination plans to mobilise community support and underwrite the emergency services if disaster were to strike.

It might be lucrative for the columnists of doom to predict asteroid impact, blizzard winter, food Armageddon from the demise of the honey bee, the imminent invasion of blood-poisoning hornets from France, or the prospect of inundation of our south-eastern coastline as a result of climate change.

Imagination kindles the art of the novelist or disaster movie-maker as keenly as it alerts the responses of professionals whose job it is to protect us.

As David Cameron would say, ‘We are all in this together’, so it is prudent that the phone directories delivered to every Island premises contain a table of good advice on how to prepare for emergencies.

A pity that you have to leaf through to page 23 to find it!