‘Because every year, I meet twenty people I should know.’ – David Parsons

In evaluating any conference, I think there are just three questions to ask:

• Did you learn something new?
• Did you meet someone new?
• Afterward, will you do something new?

For the World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM), my answer to all three questions has been ‘yes’ – or ‘Yes!’ – every year since 2005. I always get new insights, often from the same smart people who attend year after year. I always bring back a fistful of name cards from new people I’ve met – public sector emergency managers (EMs), private sector business continuity managers (BCMs), crisis managers (CMs), risk managers (RMs), disaster relief (DR) professionals. And I always lug home my well-travelled leather bag stuffed with new scribbles, new strategies and new quotes to try out immediately.

Those are the KPI’s of a worthwhile conference, in my opinion. And for a guy who lives on the sweltering equator, Toronto weather in June is wonderful.

Some unofficial WCDM history

At its peak five years ago, WCDM drew 1,800 people to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (MTCC) for three (3) days. It seemed to be the only truly “international” resilience conference in the world; flags from 20+ countries accurately represented the origins of the attendees. Its organizer, the Canadian Center for Emergency Preparedness (CCEP), was able to operate for a full year on its revenue from WCDM.  Read more... (3176 words, 0 images, estimated 12:42 mins reading time)

Most industrial parks don’t include SCUBA divers in their recovery plans. But car companies and a shoe maker in Thailand – but nowhere near the ocean – had to hire divers to retrieve hard-to-replace moulds from submerged factories in November. “No one thought about such a worst-case scenario”, said one company president. “In future we will need to reconsider the flood risk.”

They sure will. Three (3) major rivers – the Chao Phraya, Lopburi and Pa Sak – converge around the industrial estates in Ayutthaya. But companies obviously decided that tax incentives and the proximity of suppliers outweighed the risks of catastrophic flooding. Or maybe they just skipped a risk assessment entirely.

Supply chain resilience strategy: don’t build a shoe-, car- or disk drive factory in a floodplain. Some companies may even avoid Thailand. Impact: if one Japanese multinational were to choose, say, Vietnam or Myanmar for its next factory, others would follow, beginning a chain of falling dominoes for Thailand – eventually. Prime Minister Shinawatra’s crisis management effort is just beginning.

• In addition to flooding and storms, risks in Asia include volcanoes, earthquakes and volcanoes with earthquakes – not generally worries in Europe or North America.

The International Disaster Conference and Exposition (IDCE2012), to be held January 17-19, 2012, at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, will bring together emergency management, homeland security and disaster industry professionals from the public and private sectors around the world to share lessons learned and forward thinking regarding the policies, procedures and best practices shaping disaster preparation, response and recovery, loss mitigation, business continuity and more. Conference speakers, exhibitors and attendees will share the latest knowledge, technologies and techniques toward the common goal of minimizing the loss of life and property in future catastrophic events.

Industry professionals can review the entire IDCE2012 program and register to attend at the IDCE website: www.internationaldisasterconference.com. To receive news on the latest developments with IDCE2012 via email, click on the “Keep up . . . join the IDCE mailing list” button on the website’s home page.

So this is what passes for thought leadership in business continuity management (BCM) these days.

The Business Continuity Institute (BCI), a U.K. professional association with global ambitions and under-exploited footholds in the growth markets of Asia, Middle East and South America, goes looking for a partner in North America. After thoughtful deliberation about the future of BCM in the 21^st century, and with all the time in the world to make a choice, they select…the Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ), a 24-year old, American, family-owned magazine publisher and conference producer that must be the only BCM business in the world still calling it “disaster recovery,” the most-resented term in BCM profession.

BCI’s announcement says the alliance “aims to align thought leadership between [the] two organizations,” while DRJ’s press release says the alliance will “broaden and deepen discussions in…business continuity and related professions.”

That “thought leadership” bit caught my eye. When I first skimmed the headline, I mistakenly thought the BCI and the American professional association formerly-known-as the Disaster Recovery Institute International – DRII – had finally decided to stop pissing on each other’s shoes. Now, that would be news.  Read more... (2676 words, 2 images, estimated 10:42 mins reading time)

Have you seen the disaster movie “2012″? A friend from Control Risks and I did, and we reluctantly concluded we wouldn’t be able to write off the cost of our tickets as a professional development expense.

Spoiler: In the movie, China saves the human race, and all the American political leaders are black people. Selected individuals from many nations climb into giant arks to float to safety when a deluge engulfs the earth. The sun comes out in the happily ever after. Who says the Bible doesn’t have something to teach emergency managers?

I even saw a press release that tried to draw “lessons” and dignified talking points out of the film’s computer-generated calamities.

Then the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that they’d found water on earth’s moon last month – certainly the most significant discovery in outer space in my lifetime – and the world seems to be sleeping in their seats. Have we become so myopic, or so jaded by advancements in technology (many of which resulted from America’s exploration of space in the 1960’s), that we have lost our sense of wonder?

If I were seriously considering the consequences of flooding the entire planet, I’d definitely be looking for a recovery site. I wouldn’t have considered the moon at any time in the last thousand years because it was purportedly unfit for human habitation. Discovery of water on the surface changes all that.  Read more... (2737 words, 1 image, estimated 10:57 mins reading time)

If you made up this scenario for a tabletop exercise, you’d be laughed out of the room:

At 08:00 on Wednesday morning January 30, two ships 2,500 kilometers (1,600 miles) apart in the Mediterranean drop their anchors in stormy weather off Alexandria, Egypt and Marseilles, France at the same time. They both manage to drop their anchors directly onto two (2) separate undersea cables buried fifty (50) centimeters in the sand, each roughly the diameter of your wrist.

The two cables carry seventy-five (75%) percent of network traffic in the Middle East and south Asia. Your business in India or Egypt loses over half its international data and voice network capacity.

Two days later on Friday morning, February 1, a third cable is severed by an abandoned anchor embedded in the sea floor off the coast of Dubai, also 2,500 kilometers (1600 miles) from Alexandria, but in a different direction. That cable is owned by the Indian company that also owns one of the cables broken earlier. It is not clear how an abandoned anchor could sever a stationary cable.

Your voice and data networks are now crawling at just 25% of capacity. A spokesman for your business in India or Egypt calls it a “national disaster.”  Read more... (829 words, 0 images, estimated 3:19 mins reading time)

The online and in-house securities trading systems of Phillip Securities in Singapore crashed on Tuesday, Jan. 15. The online system used by customers is Phillip’s On-line Electronic Mart System (POEMS), the “Web site most-visited by Singapore users in [market research company Hitwise's] Business and Finance Stocks and Shares category”, according to the company. Phillip Securities was an “eBroker of the Year” in 2000.

The in-house system used by the firm’s traders also failed, so customers had no recourse to execute transactions from their Phillip Securities accounts while the systems were down.

Phillip Securities posted this apology on its home page: “An electrical power fault at our company’s data center…resulted in a sudden power cut to all the hardware hosting our trading applications. We would like to express our sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused.”

One reaction from “Goggle”, presumably a customer: “They are lousy. I am seriously considering changing broking firm.” The president of the Securities Investors Association of Singapore even publicly suggested a recovery plan to Phillip Securities customers: open accounts with Phillip’s competitors.

I’ll bet that’s not the recovery strategy that Phillip Securities would choose.

I imagine the directors of parent company PhillipCapital will have plenty of opportunities to explain to clients–and to the Singapore Exchange–how they could have let this happen. Contingency planning is the firm’s directors’ responsibility, not the IT department’s.  Read more... (512 words, 0 images, estimated 2:03 mins reading time)

Would you invite the one person in the world most associated with incompetent flood preparedness and response to be the chairman of a conference on flood preparedness and response? Me, neither.

Here’s the program agenda for a “Flood Fighters” conference that started today in the U.K. It’s a “forum for all agencies to plan and work together,” according to its web site. There’s a concurrent Flood Fighters workshop, targeted at “individuals who will manage teams of responders and rescuers at water and flood incidents.”

The conference chairman is Michael D. Brown, former head of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during hurricane Katrina.

You probably remember Mr. Brown and FEMA’s under-funded, uncoordinated, incredibly slow response to the flooding of New Orleans. U.S. President Bush mistakenly – but memorably – said of Brown’s performance: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” That Michael Brown.

Mr. Brown had no emergency management experience prior to joining FEMA as General Counsel in 2001. He had been a lawyer, teacher, legislative staffer and the Judges and Stewards Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. He resigned from FEMA in ignominy after hurricane Katrina. He is now an advisor to a company selling data analysis systems for homeland security.  Read more... (677 words, 1 image, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)

I think it disgraceful that a nation that spends USD $275 million per day on rebuilding Iraq cannot clean and paint a dozen, life-saving fire stations in New Orleans in the year-and-a-half since Hurricane Katrina.

So in April I volunteered with Continuity Cares to assist for a day in repair and rehabilitation in America’s home of gumbo, jazz, Fat Tuesday – and oil refining.

Continuity Cares is the public-spirit inspiration of Bob Nakao of Continuity Insights – a controlled-circulation magazine and a genuinely-useful annual BCP conference that I attended a few days earlier – with the sponsorship of French bank BNP Paribas North America and the Sheraton New Orleans hotel.

With about 20 other people, I spent an afternoon at the District 4 firehouse in the Read Boulevard East neighborhood.  Here’s a short slide show (17 photos).

We scraped, sanded and painted the entire inside of the building, helping its firefighters whose “station” has been a trailer since August, 2005. Many of them have been living in trailers, too, because their homes were destroyed.

The firefighter in this picture shows how high the flood waters rose outside the firehouse. Inside, the water was eighteen inches (45 cm) deep – for days.

This is only the twelfth (12^th) of New Orleans’ twenty-five (25) fire stations to be repaired. Half of the city’s stations are still unusable.  Read more... (564 words, 1 image, estimated 2:15 mins reading time)

Thailand’s Foreign Bankers’ Association offers this English version of the Bank of Thailand (BoT) July 2006 Circular 896-2549 proposing guidelines for BCM. The guidelines will apply to all commercial banks, which will have one year to comply. That will probably put the compliance target date in 4Q 2007. To track BoT bulletins on all subjects, bookmark this link.