A one-day workshop about turning risks into opportunities
with the theme “understanding future sources of human-induced disasters”
led by Nathaniel Forbes, Robert Kay and David Parsons

The Forbes Kay Parsons Charrette 2022 (FKPC) is a one-day exploration of ways to turn the risks of the next ten years into opportunities. (Get it? 2012 + 10 = 2022) FKPC  is an accelerated planning workshop focused specifically on how to get a return on your investment in organizational and community resilience planning.

The Forbes Kay Parsons Charrette 2022 is an innovative approach to resilience organized by Nathaniel Forbes (Singapore), Robert Kay (Australia) and David Parsons (Australia). As far as we know, no one’s ever organized a charrette on resilience risks and opportunities before.

What’s a charrette? It is “an intense period of design activity… organizing thoughts from experts and users in a structured medium that is unrestricted and conducive to creativity and the development of myriad scenarios.” From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charrette

FKPC 2022 will be held on Sunday, 24 June 2012, at the Ontario Bar Association in downtown Toronto, Canada. Admission to FKPC 2022 is CAD $395.00, including lunch.  Participation is limited to seventy-five (75) people selected from the public, private and non-governmental sectors.

Sunday, 24 June is the Sunday before the World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM).  Read more... (646 words, 1 image, estimated 2:35 mins reading time)

‘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.

International Humanitarian Assistance Symposium

Dave Parsons and Jason Kelly

Most industry conferences don’t have a “Survivor Reception”, but there will be one at International Humanitarian Assistance Symposium (IHAS), 7-8 June 2012 in Miami (USA). In fact, one day is just panels of disaster survivors, including 9/11 New York and Pan Am Flight 103, and TWA Flight 800. IHAS is organized by the Family Assistance Foundation (FAF); FAF board member Jeff Morgan was Manager of Emergency Response & Contingency Planning at Delta Airlines. Check out the sponsors (bottom of the home page). A whole conference on private sector humanitarian assistance in the cruise, energy, manufacturing, retail and transportation businesses is new in organizational resilience. IHAS is affordable, too: USD 350 for two days, and even less if you register now. Miami in June? Just like a Singapore monsoon . . .

I learned about IHAS from Jeff Morgan at the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) Emergency Management (EM) conference in Kuala Lumpur in September 2011.

I was on a panel at AAPA EM with Dave Parsons and Jason Kelly answering the question, Are Crisis Leaders Born or Made? Our answer: both: about1/3 born, 2/3′s made. See our slides on SlideShare. We were moderated by Cathay Pacific Airways‘ Crisis Response Manager, Carrie Shiu.

Is drought a business continuity issue? It is in Texas. If your business is raising beef cattle, running out of something to feed them is an emergency. No rain means no hay. Drought is a ‘boiling frog disaster’: it comes on gradually. You don’t know you’re in a drought until your assets – crops, animals – start dying. Recovery time is…unknowable. Prayer is a plausible recovery strategy. Texas is as affected as Timbuktu and Somalia. But in Texas, you have to watch out for fire ants.

A Singapore building warden will probably never squirt foam on an actual fire; why train wardens to use extinguishers in an office environment? So, drop the word “fire” and instead focus your wardens on their genuinely important responsibilities: evacuate, escape, assemble and account for everyone (“EEAA”). Dr. David Chew‘s ARIS Integrated Medical delivers realistic warden EEAA training: smoke, sirens, flashing lights, hollering, lots of confusion.

Check out this video of our exercise for TENET Insurance before the Singapore IWE in September 2011.

Spoiler alert: they hid a CPR dummy in a women’s toilet stall, and timed how long it took a warden to find the ‘victim’.

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.

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)

A First Aider points at you and shouts, “Find an AED right now!” Do you know what to look for? Or where? Instructing a bystander to “Find an AED!” is accepted First Aid protocol in Singapore now. I suspect fewer than 20% of people know what an AED is.

A person’s brain dies four (4) to six (6) minutes after his or her heart stops, so your window to start CPR and find an Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) is very short. Those minutes include the time it would take you to find an AED, if one were nearby.

The Singapore Heart Foundation (SHF) voluntarily keeps a list of AED locations in Singapore (photo below). I don’t think their well-intentioned list will help you much in an emergency. Imagine you’re standing in the Ang Mo Kio MRT station when someone collapses in cardiac arrest in front of you. By good luck, you have that AED Registry list on your tablet or iPhone. Have a look at it. How quickly could you find the nearest AED?

With 2 million passengers a day, train stations seem to me likely locations for someone to collapse, but I can’t find any AED’s at Singapore MRT stations. There is no requirement that public places in Singapore have AED’s. Seventeen (17) shopping centres are listed in the AED Registry but there are at least eighty (80) shopping malls in Singapore. Twenty-eight (28) hotels are listed, mostly big, expensive ones. Just eleven (11) companies and commercial buildings are listed, out of what…20,000?  Read more... (447 words, 3 images, estimated 1:47 mins reading time)

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.