A human resources manager in Singapore told me during an exercise she planned to notify next-of-kin of  injured or deceased employees by text message (SMS). I was stunned. If there were a worse way to receive sensitive, painful information, I can’t imagine what it could be.

The rules for ‘breaking bad news’ are:
1. in person: never by phone, email or text
2. in time: anxious relatives want news – good or bad – as quickly as possible
3. in pairs whenever possible: a man and a woman are the best combination
4. in plain language: the facts, frankly and clearly
5. with compassion: as you would want your doctor would tell you.

Here is a page of tips for breaking bad news from Counsellor Suzanne Anderson MSW at SACAC in Singapore. You can learn more about death notification and practice doing it in Suzanne’s Crisis Communications & Crisis Intervention course in March 2013 in Singapore.

Published in the Singapore Business Review, 5 December 2011 http://bit.ly/vIPCg0

I believe Singapore will eventually experience a severe earthquake. I’m not a pessimist; I’m a realist. You can’t live 400 hundred kilometers from a major earthquake fault and say there is no risk of earthquake.

The kitchen drawers in my 23rd floor Singapore home rolled open by themselves in the “tremor” from Sumatra in February 2008. That was a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. What happens after one that’s 8.0? Or 9.0, like Fukushima?

You understand that 9.0 is one hundred times stronger than 7.0, right?

As an organizational resilience professional, I imagine these consequences in Singapore:
• Civil Defense focused on high-priority locations. Ambulances simply unavailable
• Damaged office towers too risky to re-enter, and BCA inspectors overwhelmed
• Hundreds of employees and customers injured by falling glass
• Broken telecom lines and jammed mobile circuits
• Collapsed or buried segments of MRT track, and impassable road surfaces
• Damaged water, sewer and electric power lines
• Thousands of people trying to acquire drinking water
• Toilets that flush once but don’t refill
• Panic cash withdrawals from ATMs, only some of which will be functioning  Read more... (673 words, 1 image, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)

Can a communication service called “Twitter” that limits messages to 140 characters – about 25 English language words – possibly have a serious official use in emergencies? No, not in my opinion – at least not without a lot of advance preparation that just won’t take place any time soon in Asia.

But in emergency management, yes, possibly.

If you don’t already know how Twitter works, there’s a description at the end of this article. Here’s a video about how Twitter works (3 minutes), and here’s Twitter founder Evan Williams explaining how the idea for a mobile microblogging service started.

Here are some imaginary “tweets” (Twitter messages) that could have been sent during recent emergency events in Asia.  I’ve hyperlinked some of the text in case you don’t remember the events.  Read more... (3207 words, 0 images, estimated 12:50 mins reading time)

• In Manila (Philippines, 2006): @PenHotelMgr: “Rebel soldiers hv taken over Peninsula Hotel in Makati. Large Army tank in our lobby. Guests should remain in their rooms. Room service temporarily unavailable.”  (136 characters, 25 words)

• In Jakarta (Indonesia, 2003 and 2009): @MarriottRewards “Explosions @ Jakarta Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels. Several dead, many injured.  Ambulances needed urgently.  Guests shd evacuate to grassy field next to hotel. “(138 characters, 24 words)

Many hospitals are unprepared to deal with large numbers of dead bodies – a mass fatality incident, or MFI – that would result from an earthquake or flu pandemic. A ‘mortality surge’ would overwhelm morgue capacity, as it did in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, for example.

U.S. hospitals are required to develop MFI plans by August, 2009, and the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency has published “Mass Fatality Incident Management: Guidance for Hospitals and Other Healthcare Entities”, available on the Los Angeles County Health Services web site.

The checklists, action plans, flow charts, organizational charts and fact sheets can also help private-sector contingency planners, unaccustomed to planning for human consequences, foresee “bottlenecks” (page 20) in an MFI in which a company’s employees are killed: identifying decedents and their next-of-kin, preserving decedents’ property and evidence, and processing death certificates (required to claim insurance benefits).

These are sensitive topics that I’ve never seen in a Human Resources department business continuity plan, but it’s obvious how important these matters would be to an employee’s next-of-kin. It will be a big challenge to get HR professionals in Asia to engage in effective planning for them, as it will be very difficult to persuade company executives that these concerns are righfully the responsibility of any company.

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)

In addition to the event location and magnitude information described in my previous post, subsequent PTWC bulletins for a particular event also list actual or predicted time and location of impact, and wave heights at specific locations.This is the potentially life-saving information everyone near a coast wants to know after a tsunami warning has been issued: will it hit me, and when?

Locations listed in PTWC bulletins for the southern Sumatra undersea earthquakes last week, for example, include both places (“Padang, Indonesia” in the table below) and ocean monitoring buoys in the region (“DART 23401″ in the table below).

GAUGE LOCATION LAT LON TIME AMPL PER
PADANG IDA 0.9S 100.4E 1348Z 0.98M / 3.2FT 34MIN
DART 23401 8.9S 88.5E 1421Z 0.02M / 0.1FT 15MIN

You can enter or cut-and-paste the latitude and longitude for a place or buoy into Google Earth‘s “Fly To” box. The coordinates “8.9 N 88.5 E” are the location of Deep-Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) buoy 23401, maintained by the Thailand Meteorological Department in the Indian Ocean. This is a global list of buoys.

Indonesia is still struggling to acquire, deploy and maintain buoys off its seismically-active west coast, as this map of current DART buoys regrettably shows. The Asean Earthquake Information Center in Jakarta is a regional information-sharing network that partially compensates for Indonesia’s handicap.  Read more... (285 words, 0 images, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)

I receive email warnings from the U.S. National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center about earthquakes that might cause tsunami events in the Pacific Rim. The service is fast, free and helpful to emergency response authorities.

Just since late July I’ve received alerts for several earthquakes: two in the South Pacific, two in the Aleutian Islands (Alaska), the big one off the coast of Peru. The PTWC warnings are text-based so they can be received on the lowest common technology denominator, I suppose. The alerts contain no HTML links to the PTWC web site where you could see maps showing the locations of earthquakes.

So I can find it hard to place an event’s latitude and longitude in my mind – “2.7 NORTH 127.5 EAST”, for example. Most people can picture “the coast of Peru,” but I must admit I’m a bit hazy about “North Moluccan Sea.”

Where is that, anyway?

You can find out quickly and simply, and in stunning detail, in Google Earth. Download and install Google Earth (15 megabytes) onto your computer. It’s free. And sign up to receive the PTWC alerts by email. They’re free. too. Then wait for an alert message to show up in your mailbox.

Inside each alert you’ll find data for these parameters:  Read more... (479 words, 0 images, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)

Playing a Russian submarine lieutenant in the 1966 film “The Russians Are Coming“,  actor Alan Arkin repeatedly mispronounces the word “emergency” as “Egermency! Egermency!” to hilarious and memorable effect.

The real challenges of communicating in an emergency – when those involved don’t share the same first language – are illustrated effectively (and humorously) in this video commercial on YouTube for Berlitz language schools, featuring an imaginary German Coast Guard operator misunderstanding a distress call.

The commercial drew laughs in a presentation at July’s World Conference on Disaster Management in Toronto, Canada.

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)

Relief Information System for Earthquakes: Pakistan is a collaborative village-by-village database of needs and conditions in hard-to-reach placeswhat is a “tehsil”?) after the October 2005 earthquake. The key to recovery: restoring the markets people depend on for food, medicine, tin sheeting and clothes.